On the shelf: You Are Not a Gadget by Jaron Lanier

by Debra Bendis

You may or may not want to wade through this book, with its incomplete thoughts, computer jargon and frustratingly incoherent efforts to define the value of a human being. I did, and even though I left some pages unread, I found myself rereading other parts. I’m fascinated because Lanier gives me insights into the foreign language of the Web and its designers, and because his book helps me better understand where this hyperlinked world may be taking us. At least Lanier gives us plenty of clues.

Lanier is the computer scientist who coined the term “virtual reality” after being part of “a merry band of idealists” in the 80s who were thrilled to be unlocking the possibilities of Web technology. But for Lanier the glory of those golden days has faded. He’s written You Are Not a Gadget to protest the very Web 2.0 culture (the interactive world of blogging, social networking, etc.) that he helped create.

Lanier calls himself a “digital humanist” as he decries what he sees as a decrease in individual expression and creativity. Instead, he says, we now have blogs made from templates. Commenting is done anonymously, which in his view detracts from honoring the value of the individual. Instead of individual voices, we have sites like Wikipedia, where the accumulation of information and “the collective intelligence” is valued more than an individual author with personal experience and expertise. “Authorship,” he observes “—the very idea of the individual point of view—is not a priority of the new ideology.” If you want to find more nuanced human work on a particular topic, you have to dig deeper into the results listed by your search engine.

Lanier tells us that most of his colleagues will disagree with him, especially on his skepticism regarding the wonder of the Web. Some of them, especially in Silicon Valley, raise up the idea of the transfer of human information to the Web as a inspired, even religious moment. They’re supporting what’s called the Singularity, which they define as “an improved world on the horizon, one in which a supreme shared consciousness will lead us into the future.” Says Lanier in this sobering assessment of the Singularity:

The first tenet of this new culture is that all of reality, including humans, is one big information system. That doesn’t mean we are condemned to a meaningless existence. Instead there is a new kind of manifest destiny that provides us with a mission to accomplish. The meaning of life, in this view, is making the digital system we call reality function at ever-higher “levels of description.”

Perhaps Lanier is just a creative talent who’s irritable because his work has left his hands and developed a life of its own. Or perhaps his voice as a digital humanist, coming as it does from a lifetime of work, offers an insider’s prophetic warning. At the very least, I urge people of faith to reflect on the Web revolution and to remember that new computer technologies, like any new technology, should prompt us to articulate and re-articulate the values that we bring to our computer desks. The hope is that if we do, the technology will serve us more than we serve it.