My friend Justin asked me yesterday why web ads aren’t as profitable as print ads. It’s a good question, but we can thank our lucky stars that they aren’t. Rather than the opulent McDonalds and Verizon ads featured on TV, nytimes.com brings us this bargain-basement gem: You Are Not a Gadget, by Jaron Lanier, a new offering from Random House. To drum up interest, they’re giving us one free chapter, and — man, oh man.
In the intellectual tradition of Karl Marx and Valerie Solanas, Lanier describes his book as a “manifesto” in opposition to “cybernetic totalism.” What is cybernetic totalism, you might ask? He seems to describe it as
“people dying in the flesh and being uploaded into a computer and remaining conscious, or people simply being annihilated in an imperceptible instant before a new superconsciousness takes over the Earth,”
a fate coincident with “the Singularity,” a moment that is described in little more detail than “…superintelligent robots will suddenly rule the Earth” or “the whole universe becomes a brain, or something along those lines.”
Lanier considers that “there may be some truth” to the idea of the Singularity, but he wants none of it. He is worried that the apostles of the Singularity are “antihuman,” trying to make mankind obsolete and to exalt computing for computing’s sake. As a human (I assume), Lanier is opposed. Watch as he delivers their infamy:
- Web applications like Facebook and Twitter aggregate people’s information. This depersonalizes them.
- Microsoft Word suggests indentations sometimes when you don’t want them.
- Comments on blogs and video clips may have been left by people who are now dead.
In between what I can fairly call petty gripes (although those margins on Word can be tricky, can’t they?) Lanier finds space to willfully misconstrue the adage “information wants to be free, ” taking it as an insult to dedicated pro-humans like himself, rather than the illustrative metaphor it obviously is. In an adversarial stance he says that information “doesn’t deserve to be free.”
Lanier closes his disjointed discursus by telling us that information and computers (and, presumably, superintelligent robots) aren’t really really real: Berkeley-like, they need humans to perceive them, although I’m not sure his ontology will be any comfort to future Luddites as superintelligent robot armies root out their cells of resistance.
I’m dying to read the other chapters, to see if they tie these gripes and whines together into a larger theme, but until then I’ll have to wonder why Random House decided to publish online a chapter of Lanier’s book, mere undeserving information, for free. Maybe Random House is in league with the robot armies and the universal brain, or maybe it’s just me, but doesn’t that seem a little. . . antihuman?
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