Book Review: Jaron Lanier’s You Are Not A Gadget

Posted on 4 Feb 2010 3:12 UTC

You Are Not A Gadget is an elaboration of arguments Lanier has been making for some time about the need for a more pro-human technology development plan, and against “religious” dogmas like the Singularity. He counters a philosophy he calls “cybernetic totalism”, which requires defining humanity down so that technology seems better, smarter, and more powerful than it is (and perhaps moreso than it should be?).

According to Lanier, cybernetic totalism takes several forms; any belief that individual people are less important or valuable than a “hive” or a statistical aggregate, any belief that information technology as it is now is sentient or nearly sentient, and any belief that the needs of the hive outweigh the rights of an individual. From this viewpoint, the Singularity is simply the eschatology of the most extreme form of cybernetic totalism, of a piece with beliefs that “information wants to be free” and music “piracy” is acceptable.

In particular, the open source/free culture/Creative Commons movements come in for criticism, because they erode the viability of the artistic middle class. As the free culture hive ascends, it becomes less possible to make a living as an individual artist, musician, or presumably software developer. Lanier asserts that individual creators face not just financial loss, but a loss of context for their work: every mashup, re-appropriation, slicing, dicing, and fragmentation of a work reduces its context, and thus its meaning. Apaprently he does not buy the argument that mashups recontextualize works, but he doesn’t say why not.

I was disappointed that Lanier did not even address, let alone answer, the questions this view raises. Was there ever a viable artistic middle class? The blockbuster business model of the copyright lobby meant that a very few artists got rich and most ended up in arrears to the people who tricked the artists out of their copyrights. Might journalism be failing in business now because journalists ceased doing their jobs? I’m not sure we can blame the failures of Fox News and the New York Times on Larry Lessig! Perhaps the New York Times simply failed to do its job, people realize this, and have focused on Jon Stewart as a more reliable source. The Tribune company chose short-term profit over long-term journalistic integrity (watch the final season of The Wire again!). How is that the fault of cybernetic totalism?

Conspicuously, software development is as profitable as ever — not only in spite but because of the free culture movement. Linux has not seriously affected Microsoft’s amazingly successful business, but it has empowered Google and other developers to create profitable software products. Lanier does not explain this.

He does have a point, however, when he asserts that the free culture movement can only copy, never create anew. Linux is a mere copy of Unix. The iPhone is a beautiful innovation that makes OpenMoko look quite pathetic indeed. (Android, although very good, works on a patronage basis, and in any case is playing iPhone catch-up.) Similarly, there is a strong argument to be made that Craigslist did indeed erode the business of local newspapers (which made their money largely through classified advertising — the market Craigslist cannibalizes).

Also conspicuously absent is an explanation of why collective licensing would not work to rebuild the artistic middle class. It’s so sad — we’ve been here before, in the age of radio. Why not simply give musicians a small payment every time someone Bittorrents a work? The traditional complaint musicians have with collective licensing agencies like ASCAP and BMI, that they are inaccurate and imprecise, can be very well addressed in an internet context. In fact, the big problem in proposals to automatically meter downloads is that artists might game the meter to make more money, and so we need a way to combat click-fraud! As Google can tell you, if click-fraud is your big problem, you are rich.

The reason we don’t already enjoy this nearly ideal solution is that the artistic oligarchs — so very much not a middle class — don’t want to let the artistic peasants (i.e. artists) off the oligarchic leash. Until you tell a plausible story about why collective licensing can’t work, you can’t blame the free culture hive for the creative sector’s business problems.

Other than the threat to art and culture from the hive, there are is another reason Lanier fights cybernetic totalism: it is a worldview that leads to limiting technical architectures. The idea among too many technologists (and here I agree wholeheartedly with Lanier) is that we should downplay the human and accept whatever technical architecture is expedient. He gives the excellent example of MIDI, the digital music standard. MIDI reduces music (pitches, amplitudes, time) to low-resolution (8-bit) quantities, which is of course far inferior to what is fully possible with sound. He elaborates on this example and others (for some reason, he hates but does not define the concept of the computer file) to good effect, showing that technical architecture limits us in unfortunate and even irresponsible ways.

In fact, I wish he had discussed the irresponsibility of technologists even more deeply. Lessig covers the problems of technical architecture equating to “law” better and in more depth (see Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace), but Lanier is well-suited to discuss the artistic, ethical, and moral consequences of technical architecture. In particular, there are volumes to be written about the abject horror of our current information security posture, and how much of that is due to the ignorance and laziness of technologists. Bizarre beliefs about the Singularity pale in comparison to our more prosaic confusions.

Jaron Lanier will appear at City Lights bookstore in San Francisco on 16 Feb 2010.

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