Jaron Lanier Rants Against the World of Web 2.0

hao3 writes "In his new book, You Are Not A Gadget, former Wired writer Jaron Lanier bemoans what the internet has become. 'It's early in the twenty-first century, and that means that these words will mostly be read by nonpersons,' it begins. The words will be 'minced into anatomized search engine keywords,' then 'copied millions of times by some algorithm somewhere designed to send an advertisement,' and then, in a final insult, 'scanned, rehashed, and misrepresented by crowds of quick and sloppy readers.' Lanier's conclusion: 'Real human eyes will read these words in only a tiny minority of the cases.' He goes on to criticise Google, Wikipedia, Facebook, Twitter, open-source software and what he calls the 'hive mind.'"

Regarding his comments on music

[suso]

Lanier, being someone involved heavily in the music scene, should know that this isn't the first time music has stalled out. Back in the early 20th century, the classical world of music didn't know where to go, which is what led to atrocities like atonalism and serial music. I love nearly all kinds of music, but 12 tone rows really try my patience. By the late 19th century composers had exausted most of the possibilities with "academic" type of music thinking, forms like Ragtime became popular and it wasn't really until the arrival of early Jazz that it obvious where to go. Thus began an era less rooted in rules. Now we've nearly exhausted all the possibilities of this ruleless era of music and someone (Like Gershwin) will need to show us the way to another era in music. Its interesting that both musical "stallings" have happened around the same time as revolutions in technology. The first one at the height of the industrial era and this one at the height of the information era.

I only read the summary...

[erroneus]

...that was probably enough though. This guy really missed the point. In today's copyright anything and everything climate, people start coming up with some really strange ideas about content and its value. "If someone reads it, I want to get paid!!" They get needlessly bothered when machines read it and process it for search engines. It rather reminds me of some "robot fears" that people may have had.

Why not just come out and say it? "I'm afraid of things I don't understand! Let's kill it!"

Jaron Lanier gives me the creeps

[LS]

This dude was the epitome of "digerati" poser hype acting as some kind of digital prophet spouting buzzwords and hot air during the web 1.0 bubble. He's been riding the 15 minutes he got from his work on the failed VRML for way too long.

Anyone could sit back and smoke a lot of joints and come up with new ways of talking about old things, but it doesn't mean they are necessarily interesting. This dude is the poster boy for what everyone hated about the dotcom era - a lot of hype and no substance.

Worse than DRM

[jfenwick]

"He does propose a solution to the difficulty of how to compensate artists, artisans, and programmers in a digital era: a content database that would be run by some kind of government organization: "We should effectively keep only one copy of each cultural expression—as with a book or song—and pay the author of that expression a small, affordable amount whenever it's accessed." According to the article, Lanier wants a pay per use SOA, the very strategy Microsoft has been trying to implement as a strategy for years. It's the ultimate greed based mashup of DRM and cloud technology possible, all mandated by the government. I wouldn't be surprised if this happened in the near future.

Re:Regarding his comments on music

[supercrisp]

Um, so what about Gorecki? Pärt? Riley? Adams? Glass? Schnittke? Yes, there are popular forms entering into "classical" music. But the stuff that happened at the turn of the last century is still very relevant. And your post suggests that people like the Bachs weren't into music theory, which is untrue; all the way back to the Middle Ages music was approached as a logical construct that can be theorized, often because its logics had metaphysical and ontological implications. And of course many jazz artists were not only incredibly intelligent about music theory but they also composed in a fairly academic way to achieve that "ruleless" effect--which is not ruleless at all, only seeming so to someone untutored in the operating set of rules. Consider Mingus. Anyway, the description you offer is so over-simplified that all it does is convey anti-intellectual prejudices. I will counter argue that in an age when information is so readily available that the ability to synthesize and offer synoptic perspectives via intellectual work is all the more important because that's what is in short supply, relative to the glut of dumb (unspeaking) facts.

Clifford Stoll warnings weren't/aren't baseless

[Qbertino]

Clifford Stoll is an internet sceptic, not a ludite. His arguments against expensive school IT programms financed by cuts in the teaching staff of public schools have solid points. As do his warnings about the Interweb isolating people rather than bringing them together.

Some of his worries [berkeley.edu] turned out to be unwarranted, others turned out to be quite valid.

I'll take the advice and thoughts over an educated sceptic like Stoll over some permanent yay-sayer anytime.

My 2 cents.

Re:Can someone summarize this?

[marcosdumay]

Nobody did. If we could just make a bot to check if the sumary matches TFA...

Re:The New Printing Press

[TheRaven64]

Making it easier to be published is a problem, because it decreases the signal to noise ratio. For every new, insightful, witty, piece of prose you now have 100 new pieces of dross. I didn't break tradition and RTFA, so I can't say which category it falls into. There are two solutions to this. One is to make it harder to publish again. The other is to build better filtering mechanisms to let people find the one in a hundred (or thousand or million) things that they want to read. The first option looks easier, but it's likely to throw the wheat out with the chaff.

Einstein had difficulty getting published. Now he'd find it easy, but so does the Time Cube guy. Personally, I'm willing to put up with a few Time Cubes if it increases the availability of even one Einstein. People who aren't are perfectly at liberty to disconnect.

Re:Insulting the people who made him

[Anonymous Coward]

I think he meant 'your mother's technology' as in 'I interfaced with your mother's technology all night long.'

Re:The New Printing Press

[Lumpy]

No Web "2.0" is making blinky flashy animated to everyone. Writing was available with WEB 0.5Beta. There is NOTHING that Web2.0 does to enable it's all about looks and flashy. I was doing web"2.0" things back in the late 90's with that old "antiquated" tech.

CSS does make it easier to change the look of a page quickly, I do like CSS. but Javascript has gone way overboard. I'm tired of having 20X the weight in JS loading for a page than the HTML,CSS and images combined. It's making the web bloated.

Re:Clifford Stoll warnings weren't/aren't baseless

[weave]

I saw Stoll at a book signing in the mid 90s for that book. He said at the time he stopped using email totally, if you want to contact him, use the postal service.

Maybe he's mellowed since then, but he was definitely heading to luddite realm back then.

p.s., I agree that technology is no substitute for effective teaching. I work at one of those places and not too long ago a math teacher was freaking out that the Internet was down so she couldn't get the students into MyMathLab and didn't know what to do. So I replied "How about pick up some chalk?"

Yeah, I got in trouble for that remark... but really, you can't teach math without the Internet? Gimme a break.

Musical instruments

[AlpineR]

I saw him speak at the University of Michigan around 1999. I knew him only from his Wired articles and was interested to hear what this guru had to say to an auditorium full of open-minded students.

His most memorable point in that lecture was that digital music can never be as rich as analog music because whereas an analog instrument allows infinite variation in how each note is played, a digital instrument has only a finite number possible outputs. I saw several weaknesses in that argument: 1) The quantization of a digital device blurs into a continuum when the increments are small enough. 2) Analog devices operate by physics which is itself quantized. 3) Combinatorics means that even an instrument with only a dozen notes, ten amplitudes, and a hundred durations could produce immense numbers of different songs. Just look at what can be written with the few characters of ASCII. A finite vocabulary hardly limits what a language can express.

Based on that lecture and everything I've read by him since, I'd have to moderate the guy as "Not interesting", "Not informative", and "Not insightful". His role in life seems to be to take a contrarian position on some point of modern culture and then act smug and enlightened about it. It would be poetic justice if it's only the gadgets that find his book interesting and we humans just ignore it as we continue creating and communing in our digital domain.

Re:The New Printing Press

[Foolicious]

There are two solutions to this. One is to make it harder to publish again.

You're making the (incorrect, I would say) assumption that making stuff hard to publish meant that if something was published it was better. But something being published in the traditional and formal sense of the word simply means that, well, it was published. An agent liked it enough to bring it to a publisher who liked it enough to publish it. There are a millions ways that this can occur, such as a well-known author publishing a crappy work to a nobody author's dad being friends with an agent or publisher, etc.

So your filtering idea is better.

Jaron Lanier gives us clues

[wytcld]

Jaron has a real knack for heading off in the right direction. He's also good at seeing beyond the scope of conventionally-worn blinders - in a number of fields. He's got great intuition on which way the truest future lies, and little patience for those who plod along with less vision - or even desire for vision - even where they are people who count as brilliant within the confines of neuroscience, or computer science, or a single genre of music.

That said, he's also a good hand at writing for a popular audience. But he deflates a lot more bullshit than he puts out. That earns him a lot of retaliatory swipes - like the snidely negative book review that counts as the text for discussion here. Isn't there a sample chapter up somewhere we can more profitably discuss? Need we be derivative even in our criticism?

Re: a good example - mod back up!

[wytcld]

That's a good, concise, accurate overview of both the review and the pile-on "discussion" here. And it gets beaten down as a troll. What's amazing is that, if you're literate and over 30, you've read some of Jaron's stuff by now. While it's hit-and-miss, the hits are amazing. I know some top, absolutely brilliant people (separate groups in both neuroscience and music) who know him well personally, and are strongly impressed by him. If you can read, say, 10 of his essays and not be richly rewarded by 2 or 3 absolutely-original ideas embedded in them, you plainly have neither talent nor taste for ideas. Which describes the average person of any time period. Nothing to be ashamed of. Please put your blinders on, your head down, and trudge on with your life.

Re:Whining about folk-art webpages...

[CrackedButter]

I just pulled myself facebook, I got sick of all that faceless and meaningless interaction. I had nearly 300 friends and I informed everybody I would be leaving so they could give me their details and we could meet up in real life. Out of those 300 people, only 2 people gave me their details. That says a lot to me as it turns out nobody was really bothered, human interaction has become passive activity (when it should be much more important) and probably with a lot of people I was just a number.

Re:Worse than DRM

[ceoyoyo]

I was thinking more about what happens post-production. The model now is to fund a project, produce it, then flog the thing for as much money as you can possibly get. Correct me if I'm wrong, but a lot of grant funded productions follow much the same model, do they not?

A proper patron system would have the patrons contributing mostly because they wanted to see something made (which is kind of the case with grants but definitely not the case with corporations) but more importantly, the people involved with the project would make money from creating art and not from selling it afterward.

So if you wanted to see Cameron make a new movie (say that one he calls Avatar that he's been pitching on his blog), you'd donate $5 (probably to be held in escrow). If enough people donated, he'd get to go ahead with production. When the movie was finished, everyone could see it or download it for the cost of running the theatre or providing the bandwidth. No need to worry about copyright, and (good) artists still have a way to make a living.

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Re:Regarding his comments on music

[musicalmicah]

I hope this new era you're daydreaming about never comes. We live in an era where you making the craziest sounds ever still has an audience. That's diversity in art like the world has never seen before, and I'd hate to lose that to some monolithic set of rules. And remember, if you don't like it, you don't have to listen to it. I went to one atonal/serial concert and felt like clawing my ears out, but lots of artists I do like have been inspired by the dialogues that included atonal and serial music.