Guru: Jaron Lanier
Tech wizard Jaron Lanier has defriended the web. Here's why.
By David Hershkovits / Photographed by Winni Wintermeyer
Jaron Lanier is a renaissance man, credited with coining the term "Virtual Reality," and variously described as a tech-guru, artist and musician-composer with a world-class collection of instruments. He's especially giddy today, and not because his new book, You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto, is finding legs in the marketplace of ideas and commerce, but because last night, he sat in with Yoko Ono and Sean Lennon on the Oakland stop of the Plastic Ono Band revival tour!
Not that he isn't excited about his new book. Gadget expands on ideas in a seminal piece he wrote for Wired way back in 2000, and casts a dissenting eye on all that is considered holy in the world of the Internet: Web 2.0, Facebook, Twitter, the wisdom of crowds, cloud computing -- the buzzwords that have thrown media and marketing mavens into a tizzy. These new tools have dehumanized us, he asserts. Once a proponent of the "content wants to be free" mantra, he is now advocating alternative methods of compensating writers, artists,musicians, filmmakers et al. for their work. With information freely floating around the Internet, a body of thought is building around the idea that computers burrowing through massive databases can make better decisions about us than we can. Not so, says our web dissenter-in-chief. People are better than clouds.
DAVID HERSHKOVITS: You Are Not a Gadget is a scathing rebuke of all that's driving the Internet -- social networking being one of those things. And it's also a rebuke of the people who are the leaders of Web 2.0. So I was wondering, how has the web community been reacting?
JARON LANIER: I have a surprise for you: Just fine. In my world, the one thing that counts beyond anything else is geek cred, and I have irrevocable geek cred, so I don't have a problem. If I did some huge technical screw-up, that would hurt me a lot more than anything I could possibly say about this particular world. Then there's the tech fandom world, and there it's a lot more mixed.
For instance, I gave a keynote at SXSW and a lot of people said, "Oh, this one's going to be hostile. All the people who really care about the stuff you're criticizing are not going to like the stuff you have to say." And you know what, I started my talk by saying, "I want to try an experiment in consciousness. You're free to do what you want, but just during my talk, listen to it. Try just for this time we have together to not tweet, to not blog. If you wait and then you write something later, it'll mean it actually had to go through your brain and it'll really be coming from you as much as from me, and that'll be much more valuable for both you and the world. So just try it as an experiment in consciousness." And I thought I was going to get boos, but instead I got a standing ovation right at the start, and there was zero hostility. So there's a lot of sympathy from within that world, and I also get a lot of emails in the form of, "I'm an engineer within Facebook, Google, whatever, and I really agree with you and I've been waiting for someone to say this and I feel awkward with what I'm doing" -- and of course there's some snark, too.
DH: So when did things start to go wrong? In your book you occasionally refer to a "merry band of idealists in the '80s" who were originally playing around with all this stuff and all was good.
JL: There are two points when things went wrong. My guess is that if Alan Turing [the father of computer science and its moral compass], hadn't been persecuted for being gay in the UK during the postwar period, that today musicians would be paid. I really think it's that simple. The single mind that was most influential in setting the course for computation was put in a horrible position [and committed suicide in 1954]. Ultimately, the UK government is to blame for that, or homophobia. So in a sense, that was the point of failure.
The other period you could look to was right after the dot-com bust and after the fall of Enron. These were two early examples of this fallacy, that if you just sort of connect things with computers and extract money, suddenly there's productivity, when in fact there isn't.
DH: You don't have a Facebook page, right?
JL: Nope. My point is that there's good stuff on Facebook, but in the big picture, the problem is there. In my book I've tried to go over some of the reasons why I think the problem is worth talking about. Just briefly, problem number one is Facebook can make people meaner than they'd be otherwise.
Problem two is the idea that what they do with their hearts and their brains doesn't deserve pay, which gives them a peasant mentality. Number three, it promotes this idea that aggregate content, crowd-wisdom stuff, is more important than the individual, and that makes people accept nonsense. A side effect is that people separate into bubbles, and that creates a phenomenon like the political divide in the U.S. right now, which is very negative.
DH: Have you ever tried Facebook?
JL: I have a conspirator -- I won't reveal her name- - but my cat has a Facebook page and has been very generous in sharing her experiences with me.
DH: So you have a fake Facebook page.
JL: My cat is very real.
DH: And some people know that it's you and generally nobody else does?
JL: Yes.
DH: Your friends are people that you generally want to be in contact with; they know that that's your persona?
JL: No.
DH: So how could you interact with Facebook then?
JL: It's really my cat's business.
DH: I'm pressing you because I believe that you can't understand social media unless you do it.
JL: It's an interesting problem because I do think there's legitimacy there. You have to have a foot both in and out of something to have a perspective on it, and that's where I've tried to be on these things.
DH: You believe we would be better off if sites like Facebook were designed differently. In fact, you prefer MySpace.
JL: The way musicians presented themselves on MySpace gave you a bit more sense of themselves than on Facebook. I find, or at least my cat has told me, that when she uses Facebook, she finds it terribly creepy that another corporation off to the side is using her life as a product to sell to others who want to access her. It creeps her out, and she's just a cat.
DH: You've changed your position about "content wanting to be free." Now you are suggesting ways to compensate content creators. Does it feel funny to be in the same camp as someone like Rupert Murdoch, for example?
JL: Yeah, one of Rupert's papers will break some story about us being in a love nest or something. But I don't feel myself to be in the same camp as him at all. The way I see it there's a false dichotomy between the Facebook or Web 2.0 way and the Rupert Murdoch way. And I say a pox on both their houses, I think they're both dreadful. What I advocate in the book is the third way, which is [computer scientist] Ted Nelson's notion that everyone should be able to be a publisher and actually get paid, which is totally different than either of those. One thing that's a little disappointing to me is that the reason something like the iPad even exists is to create a hardware basis for a walled garden so that you can pay for content. But that whole device doesn't even need to exist. It shouldn't exist. Anyone should be able to do that on any device. It's a sign of failure that something like that has to come into existence.
DH: Since you mention the iPad, it gives me a chance to talk about your idea that computers are locked into operating in certain ways that might not be the best, but it becomes so deeply ingrained into the programming and coding which leads to file-sharing and potential for abuse.
JL: Basically, there's this very perverse ideology of file-sharing that is promoted on Boing Boing or whatever, which is actually almost identical to the ideology of Rupert Murdoch. To me, they are the same. They both say the rights of the consumer are more important than those of the producer, and they both presume there are more consumers than producers. So when the Boing Boing people say, "No, no, no we support the maker ethic where people can make stuff," that's not true. If you want a society of makers, then you have to ask, "How are they going to make their rent? How are they going to pay for food and medicine?" The file-sharing idea is, "I'm a consumer and I want to get anything I want, any time, without having to pay for it." The receptive function is primary to the productive function. That's exactly what Rupert Murdoch is saying, that you're a couch potato, and what Steve Jobs is saying, too. All of these people are the same to me. The people who are saying, "No, no, no, everything must be free" essentially forced the hand of somebody like Steve Jobs to move to the app model, where everything is contained inside this thing, because the only way to get paid then is to go for extreme closure.
DH: The book is also an implicit criticism of pop culture since the '80s, citing pop music, for example, as nothing more than derivative mashups and not "new" in the sense that hip-hop or be-bop were new.
JL: Not exactly. First of all, I like and enjoy a lot of the current pop culture and I'm not at all embarrassed to say so. I like Lady Gaga, I really do. I'm not saying that everything's crap. The notion is that if you just have a big mush where everything's connected to everything, you don't get differences and you don't get things that have a chance to get fully cooked before they get out the door.
DH: Do you feel that a mass medium like the Internet will inevitably stoop to the level of the lowest common denominator?
JL: Inevitably? Absolutely not. If that's what I thought, I wouldn't be working on it. There's a difference between a mass medium and it being the only medium; there are all kinds of formulations that could work for the future. The future that Steve Jobs seems to want is one in which 10 percent of the culture is this affluent, elite, well educated creative class in which there's paid content, and then the rest of the world is atomized by Google, and we kind of suck money out of those other people with advertisements and they all just get by somehow on drudgery.
DH: Would we have Obama without the Internet?
JL: There are two-thirds more Republican national-level politicians on Twitter than Democrats because Twitter has become so central to the Tea Party people. These designs, because they're fundamentally about aggregating people instead of genuinely giving them a voice, tend to isolate people into these bubbles that reinforce and become more and more extreme. I think Obama did use the Internet for some fundraising successfully, but I'm not going to get into that 'cause I'm not an expert in it. But by the same token, the anger against him -- you have to go back to the Civil War to find something like that. And that's definitely the Internet phenomenon.
DH: How do you feel about Google in China and China's role in the future?
JL: It's a complex web of issues there. The first thing to say is that I have tremendous sympathies for the plight of Tibetans, who are not asking for much. The vital interests of everybody could be reconciled, so it's a shame that we have such a horrible situation when it doesn't need to be.
But, having just revealed that I have a bias on that particular issue, I therefore tend to be sympathetic to anything that allows Chinese dissidents to communicate. It also has to be pointed out that there's this weird symmetry between Google and the Chinese Communist party, where they both want to be this information system that's in-between anybody connecting with anybody else and they can profit from it and collect this giant database on everybody and paint this computer model of the whole society and everything going on. The Chinese have to move to an intellectual property future in the long term or they'll be back where they started. This cheap labor thing just can't go on because of the advances in robotics, so what we need is a way for intellectual property to work internationally for mutual benefit. And that might sound like a different issue than this Google China thing, but part of intellectual property is that basically you don't hack into everybody's commercial computers. You have to treat information like somebody's house that you don't break into. You have to give people that.
Not that he isn't excited about his new book. Gadget expands on ideas in a seminal piece he wrote for Wired way back in 2000, and casts a dissenting eye on all that is considered holy in the world of the Internet: Web 2.0, Facebook, Twitter, the wisdom of crowds, cloud computing -- the buzzwords that have thrown media and marketing mavens into a tizzy. These new tools have dehumanized us, he asserts. Once a proponent of the "content wants to be free" mantra, he is now advocating alternative methods of compensating writers, artists,musicians, filmmakers et al. for their work. With information freely floating around the Internet, a body of thought is building around the idea that computers burrowing through massive databases can make better decisions about us than we can. Not so, says our web dissenter-in-chief. People are better than clouds.
DAVID HERSHKOVITS: You Are Not a Gadget is a scathing rebuke of all that's driving the Internet -- social networking being one of those things. And it's also a rebuke of the people who are the leaders of Web 2.0. So I was wondering, how has the web community been reacting?
JARON LANIER: I have a surprise for you: Just fine. In my world, the one thing that counts beyond anything else is geek cred, and I have irrevocable geek cred, so I don't have a problem. If I did some huge technical screw-up, that would hurt me a lot more than anything I could possibly say about this particular world. Then there's the tech fandom world, and there it's a lot more mixed.
For instance, I gave a keynote at SXSW and a lot of people said, "Oh, this one's going to be hostile. All the people who really care about the stuff you're criticizing are not going to like the stuff you have to say." And you know what, I started my talk by saying, "I want to try an experiment in consciousness. You're free to do what you want, but just during my talk, listen to it. Try just for this time we have together to not tweet, to not blog. If you wait and then you write something later, it'll mean it actually had to go through your brain and it'll really be coming from you as much as from me, and that'll be much more valuable for both you and the world. So just try it as an experiment in consciousness." And I thought I was going to get boos, but instead I got a standing ovation right at the start, and there was zero hostility. So there's a lot of sympathy from within that world, and I also get a lot of emails in the form of, "I'm an engineer within Facebook, Google, whatever, and I really agree with you and I've been waiting for someone to say this and I feel awkward with what I'm doing" -- and of course there's some snark, too.
DH: So when did things start to go wrong? In your book you occasionally refer to a "merry band of idealists in the '80s" who were originally playing around with all this stuff and all was good.
JL: There are two points when things went wrong. My guess is that if Alan Turing [the father of computer science and its moral compass], hadn't been persecuted for being gay in the UK during the postwar period, that today musicians would be paid. I really think it's that simple. The single mind that was most influential in setting the course for computation was put in a horrible position [and committed suicide in 1954]. Ultimately, the UK government is to blame for that, or homophobia. So in a sense, that was the point of failure.
The other period you could look to was right after the dot-com bust and after the fall of Enron. These were two early examples of this fallacy, that if you just sort of connect things with computers and extract money, suddenly there's productivity, when in fact there isn't.
DH: You don't have a Facebook page, right?
JL: Nope. My point is that there's good stuff on Facebook, but in the big picture, the problem is there. In my book I've tried to go over some of the reasons why I think the problem is worth talking about. Just briefly, problem number one is Facebook can make people meaner than they'd be otherwise.
Problem two is the idea that what they do with their hearts and their brains doesn't deserve pay, which gives them a peasant mentality. Number three, it promotes this idea that aggregate content, crowd-wisdom stuff, is more important than the individual, and that makes people accept nonsense. A side effect is that people separate into bubbles, and that creates a phenomenon like the political divide in the U.S. right now, which is very negative.
DH: Have you ever tried Facebook?
JL: I have a conspirator -- I won't reveal her name- - but my cat has a Facebook page and has been very generous in sharing her experiences with me.
DH: So you have a fake Facebook page.
JL: My cat is very real.
DH: And some people know that it's you and generally nobody else does?
JL: Yes.
DH: Your friends are people that you generally want to be in contact with; they know that that's your persona?
JL: No.
DH: So how could you interact with Facebook then?
JL: It's really my cat's business.
DH: I'm pressing you because I believe that you can't understand social media unless you do it.
JL: It's an interesting problem because I do think there's legitimacy there. You have to have a foot both in and out of something to have a perspective on it, and that's where I've tried to be on these things.
DH: You believe we would be better off if sites like Facebook were designed differently. In fact, you prefer MySpace.
JL: The way musicians presented themselves on MySpace gave you a bit more sense of themselves than on Facebook. I find, or at least my cat has told me, that when she uses Facebook, she finds it terribly creepy that another corporation off to the side is using her life as a product to sell to others who want to access her. It creeps her out, and she's just a cat.
DH: You've changed your position about "content wanting to be free." Now you are suggesting ways to compensate content creators. Does it feel funny to be in the same camp as someone like Rupert Murdoch, for example?
JL: Yeah, one of Rupert's papers will break some story about us being in a love nest or something. But I don't feel myself to be in the same camp as him at all. The way I see it there's a false dichotomy between the Facebook or Web 2.0 way and the Rupert Murdoch way. And I say a pox on both their houses, I think they're both dreadful. What I advocate in the book is the third way, which is [computer scientist] Ted Nelson's notion that everyone should be able to be a publisher and actually get paid, which is totally different than either of those. One thing that's a little disappointing to me is that the reason something like the iPad even exists is to create a hardware basis for a walled garden so that you can pay for content. But that whole device doesn't even need to exist. It shouldn't exist. Anyone should be able to do that on any device. It's a sign of failure that something like that has to come into existence.
DH: Since you mention the iPad, it gives me a chance to talk about your idea that computers are locked into operating in certain ways that might not be the best, but it becomes so deeply ingrained into the programming and coding which leads to file-sharing and potential for abuse.
JL: Basically, there's this very perverse ideology of file-sharing that is promoted on Boing Boing or whatever, which is actually almost identical to the ideology of Rupert Murdoch. To me, they are the same. They both say the rights of the consumer are more important than those of the producer, and they both presume there are more consumers than producers. So when the Boing Boing people say, "No, no, no we support the maker ethic where people can make stuff," that's not true. If you want a society of makers, then you have to ask, "How are they going to make their rent? How are they going to pay for food and medicine?" The file-sharing idea is, "I'm a consumer and I want to get anything I want, any time, without having to pay for it." The receptive function is primary to the productive function. That's exactly what Rupert Murdoch is saying, that you're a couch potato, and what Steve Jobs is saying, too. All of these people are the same to me. The people who are saying, "No, no, no, everything must be free" essentially forced the hand of somebody like Steve Jobs to move to the app model, where everything is contained inside this thing, because the only way to get paid then is to go for extreme closure.
DH: The book is also an implicit criticism of pop culture since the '80s, citing pop music, for example, as nothing more than derivative mashups and not "new" in the sense that hip-hop or be-bop were new.
JL: Not exactly. First of all, I like and enjoy a lot of the current pop culture and I'm not at all embarrassed to say so. I like Lady Gaga, I really do. I'm not saying that everything's crap. The notion is that if you just have a big mush where everything's connected to everything, you don't get differences and you don't get things that have a chance to get fully cooked before they get out the door.
DH: Do you feel that a mass medium like the Internet will inevitably stoop to the level of the lowest common denominator?
JL: Inevitably? Absolutely not. If that's what I thought, I wouldn't be working on it. There's a difference between a mass medium and it being the only medium; there are all kinds of formulations that could work for the future. The future that Steve Jobs seems to want is one in which 10 percent of the culture is this affluent, elite, well educated creative class in which there's paid content, and then the rest of the world is atomized by Google, and we kind of suck money out of those other people with advertisements and they all just get by somehow on drudgery.
DH: Would we have Obama without the Internet?
JL: There are two-thirds more Republican national-level politicians on Twitter than Democrats because Twitter has become so central to the Tea Party people. These designs, because they're fundamentally about aggregating people instead of genuinely giving them a voice, tend to isolate people into these bubbles that reinforce and become more and more extreme. I think Obama did use the Internet for some fundraising successfully, but I'm not going to get into that 'cause I'm not an expert in it. But by the same token, the anger against him -- you have to go back to the Civil War to find something like that. And that's definitely the Internet phenomenon.
DH: How do you feel about Google in China and China's role in the future?
JL: It's a complex web of issues there. The first thing to say is that I have tremendous sympathies for the plight of Tibetans, who are not asking for much. The vital interests of everybody could be reconciled, so it's a shame that we have such a horrible situation when it doesn't need to be.
But, having just revealed that I have a bias on that particular issue, I therefore tend to be sympathetic to anything that allows Chinese dissidents to communicate. It also has to be pointed out that there's this weird symmetry between Google and the Chinese Communist party, where they both want to be this information system that's in-between anybody connecting with anybody else and they can profit from it and collect this giant database on everybody and paint this computer model of the whole society and everything going on. The Chinese have to move to an intellectual property future in the long term or they'll be back where they started. This cheap labor thing just can't go on because of the advances in robotics, so what we need is a way for intellectual property to work internationally for mutual benefit. And that might sound like a different issue than this Google China thing, but part of intellectual property is that basically you don't hack into everybody's commercial computers. You have to treat information like somebody's house that you don't break into. You have to give people that.
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