What Turned Jaron Lanier Against the Web?

The digital pioneer and visionary behind virtual reality has turned against the very culture he helped create

 
Jaron Lanier
Jaron Lanier was one of the creators of our current digital reality and now he wants to subvert the web before it engulfs us all. (Robert Holmgren)

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I couldn’t help thinking of John Le Carré’s spy novels as I awaited my rendezvous with Jaron Lanier in a corner of the lobby of the stylish W Hotel just off Union Square in Manhattan. Le Carré’s espionage tales, such as The Spy Who Came In From the Cold, are haunted by the spectre of the mole, the defector, the double agent, who, from a position deep inside, turns against the ideology he once professed fealty to.

And so it is with Jaron Lanier and the ideology he helped create, Web 2.0 futurism, digital utopianism, which he now calls “digital Maoism,” indicting “internet intellectuals,” accusing giants like Facebook and Google of being “spy agencies.” Lanier was one of the creators of our current digital reality and now he wants to subvert the “hive mind,” as the web world’s been called, before it engulfs us all, destroys political discourse, economic stability, the dignity of personhood and leads to “social catastrophe.” Jaron Lanier is the spy who came in from the cold 2.0.

To understand what an important defector Lanier is, you have to know his dossier. As a pioneer and publicizer of virtual-reality technology (computer-simulated experiences) in the ’80s, he became a Silicon Valley digital-guru rock star, later renowned for his giant bushel-basket-size headful of dreadlocks and Falstaffian belly, his obsession with exotic Asian musical instruments, and even a big-label recording contract for his modernist classical music. (As he later told me, he once “opened for Dylan.” )

The colorful, prodigy-like persona of Jaron Lanier—he was in his early 20s when he helped make virtual reality a reality—was born among a small circle of first-generation Silicon Valley utopians and artificial-intelligence visionaries. Many of them gathered in, as Lanier recalls, “some run-down bungalows [I rented] by a stream in Palo Alto” in the mid-’80s, where, using capital he made from inventing the early video game hit Moondust, he’d started building virtual-reality machines. In his often provocative and astute dissenting book You Are Not a Gadget, he recalls one of the participants in those early mind-melds describing it as like being “in the most interesting room in the world.” Together, these digital futurists helped develop the intellectual concepts that would shape what is now known as Web 2.0—“information wants to be free,” “the wisdom of the crowd” and the like.

And then, shortly after the turn of the century, just when the rest of the world was turning on to Web 2.0, Lanier turned against it. With a broadside in Wired called “One-Half of a Manifesto,” he attacked the idea that “the wisdom of the crowd” would result in ever-upward enlightenment. It was just as likely, he argued, that the crowd would devolve into an online lynch mob.

Lanier became the fiercest and weightiest critic of the new digital world precisely because he came from the Inside. He was a heretic, an apostate rebelling against the ideology, the culture (and the cult) he helped found, and in effect, turning against himself.

***

And despite his apostasy, he’s still very much in the game. People want to hear his thoughts even when he’s castigating them. He’s still on the Davos to Dubai, SXSW to TED Talks conference circuit. Indeed, Lanier told me that after our rendezvous, he was off next to deliver the keynote address at the annual meeting of the Ford Foundation uptown in Manhattan. Following which he was flying to Vienna to address a convocation of museum curators, then, in an overnight turnaround, back to New York to participate in the unveiling of Microsoft’s first tablet device, the Surface.

Lanier freely admits the contradictions; he’s a kind of research scholar at Microsoft, he was on a first-name basis with “Sergey” and “Steve” (Brin, of Google, and Jobs, of Apple, respectively). But he uses his lecture circuit earnings to subsidize his obsession with those extremely arcane wind instruments. Following his Surface appearance he gave a concert downtown at a small venue in which he played some of them.

Lanier is still in the game in part because virtual reality has become, virtually, reality these days. “If you look out the window,” he says pointing to the traffic flowing around Union Square, “there’s no vehicle that wasn’t designed in a virtual-reality system first. And every vehicle of every kind built—plane, train—is first put in a virtual-reality machine and people experience driving it [as if it were real] first.”

I asked Lanier about his decision to rebel against his fellow Web 2.0 “intellectuals.”

“I think we changed the world,” he replies, “but this notion that we shouldn’t be self-critical and that we shouldn’t be hard on ourselves is irresponsible.”

For instance, he said, “I’d been an early advocate of making information free,” the mantra of the movement that said it was OK to steal, pirate and download the creative works of musicians, writers and other artists. It’s all just “information,” just 1’s and 0’s.


I couldn’t help thinking of John Le Carré’s spy novels as I awaited my rendezvous with Jaron Lanier in a corner of the lobby of the stylish W Hotel just off Union Square in Manhattan. Le Carré’s espionage tales, such as The Spy Who Came In From the Cold, are haunted by the spectre of the mole, the defector, the double agent, who, from a position deep inside, turns against the ideology he once professed fealty to.

And so it is with Jaron Lanier and the ideology he helped create, Web 2.0 futurism, digital utopianism, which he now calls “digital Maoism,” indicting “internet intellectuals,” accusing giants like Facebook and Google of being “spy agencies.” Lanier was one of the creators of our current digital reality and now he wants to subvert the “hive mind,” as the web world’s been called, before it engulfs us all, destroys political discourse, economic stability, the dignity of personhood and leads to “social catastrophe.” Jaron Lanier is the spy who came in from the cold 2.0.

To understand what an important defector Lanier is, you have to know his dossier. As a pioneer and publicizer of virtual-reality technology (computer-simulated experiences) in the ’80s, he became a Silicon Valley digital-guru rock star, later renowned for his giant bushel-basket-size headful of dreadlocks and Falstaffian belly, his obsession with exotic Asian musical instruments, and even a big-label recording contract for his modernist classical music. (As he later told me, he once “opened for Dylan.” )

The colorful, prodigy-like persona of Jaron Lanier—he was in his early 20s when he helped make virtual reality a reality—was born among a small circle of first-generation Silicon Valley utopians and artificial-intelligence visionaries. Many of them gathered in, as Lanier recalls, “some run-down bungalows [I rented] by a stream in Palo Alto” in the mid-’80s, where, using capital he made from inventing the early video game hit Moondust, he’d started building virtual-reality machines. In his often provocative and astute dissenting book You Are Not a Gadget, he recalls one of the participants in those early mind-melds describing it as like being “in the most interesting room in the world.” Together, these digital futurists helped develop the intellectual concepts that would shape what is now known as Web 2.0—“information wants to be free,” “the wisdom of the crowd” and the like.

And then, shortly after the turn of the century, just when the rest of the world was turning on to Web 2.0, Lanier turned against it. With a broadside in Wired called “One-Half of a Manifesto,” he attacked the idea that “the wisdom of the crowd” would result in ever-upward enlightenment. It was just as likely, he argued, that the crowd would devolve into an online lynch mob.

Lanier became the fiercest and weightiest critic of the new digital world precisely because he came from the Inside. He was a heretic, an apostate rebelling against the ideology, the culture (and the cult) he helped found, and in effect, turning against himself.

***

And despite his apostasy, he’s still very much in the game. People want to hear his thoughts even when he’s castigating them. He’s still on the Davos to Dubai, SXSW to TED Talks conference circuit. Indeed, Lanier told me that after our rendezvous, he was off next to deliver the keynote address at the annual meeting of the Ford Foundation uptown in Manhattan. Following which he was flying to Vienna to address a convocation of museum curators, then, in an overnight turnaround, back to New York to participate in the unveiling of Microsoft’s first tablet device, the Surface.

Lanier freely admits the contradictions; he’s a kind of research scholar at Microsoft, he was on a first-name basis with “Sergey” and “Steve” (Brin, of Google, and Jobs, of Apple, respectively). But he uses his lecture circuit earnings to subsidize his obsession with those extremely arcane wind instruments. Following his Surface appearance he gave a concert downtown at a small venue in which he played some of them.

Lanier is still in the game in part because virtual reality has become, virtually, reality these days. “If you look out the window,” he says pointing to the traffic flowing around Union Square, “there’s no vehicle that wasn’t designed in a virtual-reality system first. And every vehicle of every kind built—plane, train—is first put in a virtual-reality machine and people experience driving it [as if it were real] first.”

I asked Lanier about his decision to rebel against his fellow Web 2.0 “intellectuals.”

“I think we changed the world,” he replies, “but this notion that we shouldn’t be self-critical and that we shouldn’t be hard on ourselves is irresponsible.”

For instance, he said, “I’d been an early advocate of making information free,” the mantra of the movement that said it was OK to steal, pirate and download the creative works of musicians, writers and other artists. It’s all just “information,” just 1’s and 0’s.

Indeed, one of the foundations of Lanier’s critique of digitized culture is the very way its digital transmission at some deep level betrays the essence of what it tries to transmit. Take music.

“MIDI,” Lanier wrote, of the digitizing program that chops up music into one-zero binaries for transmission, “was conceived from a keyboard player’s point of view...digital patterns that represented keyboard events like ‘key-down’ and ‘key-up.’ That meant it could not describe the curvy, transient expressions a singer or a saxophone note could produce. It could only describe the tile mosaic world of the keyboardist, not the watercolor world of the violin.”

Quite eloquent, an aspect of Lanier that sets him apart from the HAL-speak you often hear from Web 2.0 enthusiasts (HAL was the creepy humanoid voice of the talking computer in Stanley Kubrick’s prophetic 2001: A Space Odyssey). But the objection that caused Lanier’s turnaround was not so much to what happened to the music, but to its economic foundation.

I asked him if there was a single development that gave rise to his defection.

“I’d had a career as a professional musician and what I started to see is that once we made information free, it wasn’t that we consigned all the big stars to the bread lines.” (They still had mega-concert tour profits.)

“Instead, it was the middle-class people who were consigned to the bread lines. And that was a very large body of people. And all of a sudden there was this weekly ritual, sometimes even daily: ‘Oh, we need to organize a benefit because so and so who’d been a manager of this big studio that closed its doors has cancer and doesn’t have insurance. We need to raise money so he can have his operation.’

“And I realized this was a hopeless, stupid design of society and that it was our fault. It really hit on a personal level—this isn’t working. And I think you can draw an analogy to what happened with communism, where at some point you just have to say there’s too much wrong with these experiments.”

His explanation of the way Google translator works, for instance, is a graphic example of how a giant just takes (or “appropriates without compensation”) and monetizes the work of the crowd. “One of the magic services that’s available in our age is that you can upload a passage in English to your computer from Google and you get back the Spanish translation. And there’s two ways to think about that. The most common way is that there’s some magic artificial intelligence in the sky or in the cloud or something that knows how to translate, and what a wonderful thing that this is available for free.

“But there’s another way to look at it, which is the technically true way: You gather a ton of information from real live translators who have translated phrases, just an enormous body, and then when your example comes in, you search through that to find similar passages and you create a collage of previous translations.”

“So it’s a huge, brute-force operation?” “It’s huge but very much like Facebook, it’s selling people [their advertiser-targetable personal identities, buying habits, etc.] back to themselves. [With translation] you’re producing this result that looks magical but in the meantime, the original translators aren’t paid for their work—their work was just appropriated. So by taking value off the books, you’re actually shrinking the economy.”

The way superfast computing has led to the nanosecond hedge-fund-trading stock markets? The “Flash Crash,” the “London Whale” and even the Great Recession of 2008?

“Well, that’s what my new book’s about. It’s called The Fate of Power and the Future of Dignity, and it doesn’t focus as much on free music files as it does on the world of finance—but what it suggests is that a file-sharing service and a hedge fund are essentially the same things. In both cases, there’s this idea that whoever has the biggest computer can analyze everyone else to their advantage and concentrate wealth and power. [Meanwhile], it’s shrinking the overall economy. I think it’s the mistake of our age.”

The mistake of our age? That’s a bold statement (as someone put it in Pulp Fiction). “I think it’s the reason why the rise of networking has coincided with the loss of the middle class, instead of an expansion in general wealth, which is what should happen. But if you say we’re creating the information economy, except that we’re making information free, then what we’re saying is we’re destroying the economy.”

The connection Lanier makes between techno-utopianism, the rise of the machines and the Great Recession is an audacious one. Lanier is suggesting we are outsourcing ourselves into insignificant advertising-fodder. Nanobytes of Big Data that diminish our personhood, our dignity. He may be the first Silicon populist.

“To my mind an overleveraged unsecured mortgage is exactly the same thing as a pirated music file. It’s somebody’s value that’s been copied many times to give benefit to some distant party. In the case of the music files, it’s to the benefit of an advertising spy like Google [which monetizes your search history], and in the case of the mortgage, it’s to the benefit of a fund manager somewhere. But in both cases all the risk and the cost is radiated out toward ordinary people and the middle classes—and even worse, the overall economy has shrunk in order to make a few people more.”

Lanier has another problem with the techno-utopians, though. It’s not just that they’ve crashed the economy, but that they’ve made a joke out of spirituality by creating, and worshiping, “the Singularity”—the “Nerd Rapture,” as it’s been called. The belief that increasing computer speed and processing power will shortly result in machines acquiring “artificial intelligence,” consciousness, and that we will be able to upload digital versions of ourselves into the machines and achieve immortality. Some say as early as 2020, others as late as 2045. One of its chief proponents, Ray Kurzweil, was on NPR recently talking about his plans to begin resurrecting his now dead father digitally.

Some of Lanier’s former Web 2.0 colleagues—for whom he expresses affection, not without a bit of pity—take this prediction seriously. “The first people to really articulate it did so right about the late ’70s, early ’80s and I was very much in that conversation. I think it’s a way of interpreting technology in which people forgo taking responsibility,” he says. “‘Oh, it’s the computer did it not me.’ ‘There’s no more middle class? Oh, it’s not me. The computer did it.’

“I was talking last year to Vernor Vinge, who coined the term ‘singularity,’” Lanier recalls, “and he was saying, ‘There are people around who believe it’s already happened.’ And he goes, ‘Thank God, I’m not one of those people.’”

In other words, even to one of its creators, it’s still just a thought experiment—not a reality or even a virtual-reality hot ticket to immortality. It’s a surreality.

Lanier says he’ll regard it as faith-based, “Unless of course, everybody’s suddenly killed by machines run amok.”

“Skynet!” I exclaim, referring to the evil machines in the Terminator films.

At last we come to politics, where I believe Lanier has been most farsighted—and which may be the deep source of his turning into a digital Le Carré figure. As far back as the turn of the century, he singled out one standout aspect of the new web culture—the acceptance, the welcoming of anonymous commenters on websites—as a danger to political discourse and the polity itself. At the time, this objection seemed a bit extreme. But he saw anonymity as a poison seed. The way it didn’t hide, but, in fact, brandished the ugliness of human nature beneath the anonymous screen-name masks. An enabling and foreshadowing of mob rule, not a growth of democracy, but an accretion of tribalism.

It’s taken a while for this prophecy to come true, a while for this mode of communication to replace and degrade political conversation, to drive out any ambiguity. Or departure from the binary. But it slowly is turning us into a nation of hate-filled trolls.

Surprisingly, Lanier tells me it first came to him when he recognized his own inner troll—for instance, when he’d find himself shamefully taking pleasure when someone he knew got attacked online. “I definitely noticed it happening to me,” he recalled. “We’re not as different from one another as we’d like to imagine. So when we look at this pathetic guy in Texas who was just outed as ‘Violentacrez’...I don’t know if you followed it?”

“I did.” “Violentacrez” was the screen name of a notorious troll on the popular site Reddit. He was known for posting “images of scantily clad underage girls...[and] an unending fountain of racism, porn, gore” and more, according to the Gawker.com reporter who exposed his real name, shaming him and evoking consternation among some Reddit users who felt that this use of anonymity was inseparable from freedom of speech somehow.

“So it turns out Violentacrez is this guy with a disabled wife who’s middle-aged and he’s kind of a Walter Mitty—someone who wants to be significant, wants some bit of Nietzschean spark to his life.”

Only Lanier would attribute Nie­tzschean longings to Violentacrez. “And he’s not that different from any of us. The difference is that he’s scared and possibly hurt a lot of people.”

Well, that is a difference. And he couldn’t have done it without the anonymous screen name. Or he wouldn’t have.

And here’s where Lanier says something remarkable and ominous about the potential dangers of anonymity.

“This is the thing that continues to scare me. You see in history the capacity of people to congeal—like social lasers of cruelty. That capacity is constant.”

“Social lasers of cruelty?” I repeat.

“I just made that up,” Lanier says. “Where everybody coheres into this cruelty beam....Look what we’re setting up here in the world today. We have economic fear combined with everybody joined together on these instant twitchy social networks which are designed to create mass action. What does it sound like to you? It sounds to me like the prequel to potential social catastrophe. I’d rather take the risk of being wrong than not be talking about that.”

Here he sounds less like a Le Carré mole than the American intellectual pessimist who surfaced back in the ’30s and criticized the Communist Party he left behind: someone like Whittaker Chambers.

But something he mentioned next really astonished me: “I’m sensitive to it because it murdered most of my parents’ families in two different occasions and this idea that we’re getting unified by people in these digital networks—”

“Murdered most of my parents’ families.” You heard that right. Lanier’s mother survived an Austrian concentration camp but many of her family died during the war—and many of his father’s family were slaughtered in prewar Russian pogroms, which led the survivors to flee to the United States.

It explains, I think, why his father, a delightfully eccentric student of human nature, brought up his son in the New Mexico desert—far from civilization and its lynch mob potential. We read of online bullying leading to teen suicides in the United States and, in China, there are reports of well-organized online virtual lynch mobs forming...digital Maoism.

He gives me one detail about what happened to his father’s family in Russia. “One of [my father’s] aunts was unable to speak because she had survived the pogrom by remaining absolutely mute while her sister was killed by sword in front of her [while she hid] under a bed. She was never able to speak again.”

It’s a haunting image of speechlessness. A pogrom is carried out by a “crowd,” the true horrific embodiment of the purported “wisdom of the crowd.” You could say it made Lanier even more determined not to remain mute. To speak out against the digital barbarism he regrets he helped create.


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Comments (69)

This is basically a continuation of the discussion that nobody seem to want to have: what to do about all the services and jobs that will no longer be needed ? We have really only seen to the start of the internet age, there will probably be no need for translators or many many other service occupations that can easily be automated using big data and more processing power. Big data, AI and further innovations in automation will end up making most jobs more or less obsolete in the not so far future and we have only see the start of this yet. The question here is why the people in power doesn't have any real answers or solutions to this problematic future.

Posted by PL on February 6,2013 | 11:25 AM

This article mirrors my own concern regarding to techno-utopianism, I do see how anonymity gave a lot of people a license to become hate-filled trolls of the blogging-sphere.

Posted by Janet on January 29,2013 | 02:42 PM

The trouble with speaking out against the digital barbarism is that you have to somehow offer a path towards wherever it is that you want the digital world to go. Just say a few words about how you want things to be better.

Posted by Tom on January 27,2013 | 02:41 AM

So why did this guy defect again? I agree with several other readers... WHAT IS UP with this writer?

Posted by Gal on January 27,2013 | 01:56 AM

digital piracy can be neutralized by paying musicians less and the staff and behind the scenes persons more. Musicians should not be making millions while others starve. The concept that worries me the most is the emerging crowd mind. If a crowd intellect will determine the fate of humanity we are in for a dire situation... in fact, it is already happening. Witness the subhumans creating wars and punishing whistle blowers, rewarding Wall street while Main Street is jobless.... Most of humanity has an average intellect and should not control the destiny of humanity. Lets let the 5% of the population who are geniuses yield more power than power hungry politicians who only manipulate the crowd mind.

Posted by sharyl on January 26,2013 | 11:17 AM

Prophesy and personal experience affirm that "As the shadow follows the body, as we think, so do we become," to quote the Buddha. So the first hurdle to "becoming the change you wish to see," to paraphrase Mahatma Ghandi, is to think that change is possible. Bringing such thinking into action, our volition creates a manifestation of the desired change in the collective consciousness. As an individual, one is the change for others to observe and consider. In this manner, civilization (or collective consciousness) evolves, provided the interests of the individual evolves the collective interests as well. I like the Rastafarian manner of speaking about one's self, including one's individual self, or "i" and one's membership in the one collective humanity, or "I." "i and I bring you greetings!" This recognition that one person is simultaneously an individual and the collective brings the interests of the person into line with the collective, or it's manifestation comes to naught. Therefore, thoughts that disbelieve in the evolving unity of all humanity around mutual vested collective interests is not sustainable. As free information has allowed us to see and hear one another in real time, a "me" world is becoming a "we" planet, a single race, the leaves of one tree. Our collective human evolution seems at once as miraculous as human actions must seem to the animal kingdom, and inevitable as tipping points of human consciousness experience it's own enhanced well-being.

Posted by dmbones on January 25,2013 | 08:44 PM

I don't really see the ... point of his objections. What is his alternative plan? The article doesn't even hint. So he's in the exact same intellectual position of a luddite loom-smasher. What's even more bizarre is that he seems to think he's being completely original: "hey guys, automated looms benefit factory owners, and superstar weavers still make money, but us middle-of-the-road weavers are getting screwed! We should ... do something? ... so that ... automated looms get 'de-invented' and we're economically needed again?" Where's the long term thinking? Or maybe this article just chose not to focus on it, and I should blame its author?

Posted by Jarmen on January 24,2013 | 06:12 AM

I am not a programmer but I have this C language subject this session and have to prepare for it. What all topics should be covered in it? And has anyone studied from this course http://www.wiziq.com/course/2118-learn-how-to-program-in-c-language of C tutorial online?? or tell me any other guidance... would really appreciate help

Posted by christi parks on January 21,2013 | 10:10 AM

Admittedly, I will need to reflect on Lanier's opinions longer before I have a conclusion about them. He is either treading deeply or deeply lost. As a social historian, I have been fascinated by the ways that information technology have always resulted in dramatic social change that no one could have predicted in the moment (at least not while still being taken seriously by leading scholars of the dying epoch). Movable block printing, made cheap after the Black Death, led to the Enlightenment as well as the horrors of Europe’s wars of religion in the Protestant Reformation. The advent of electronic and radio communication helped create mass culture but also became the tools of new totalitarian governments. It is not unreasonable to predict that the so-called Information Age should bring about dramatic social changes both creative and destructive. Is Lanier onto something, or simply on something? Time will tell, but most likely none of us will see what is coming until it has unfolded into fruition in our children’s lifetimes.

Posted by Robert A. on January 16,2013 | 07:09 PM

The "wisdom of crowds" is a stupid idea. I was involved in an exercise once designed to show the wisdom of crowds. It involved a scenario where a small boat gets stranded on an island. I started asking questions that someone who knows about survival might like to know, like how big the island was. Was it big enough to have a lens of fresh water on top of the salt water? The exercise planners: "I dunno." They were plainly annoyed at actually being asked for real information. It subverted their plan to show how a group would come up with better ideas than an individual.

Posted by Steve D on January 14,2013 | 08:20 PM

He should change his name to Ludd. The economy is being destroyed by Santa Claus economics, not by the massive generation of wealth that has come about through the internet and which subsidizes the welfare/warfare state. If we didn't have the internet, likely the US would resemble the Soviet Union near it's collapse burdened under a huge debt and dying economy.

Posted by KenHead on January 14,2013 | 07:24 PM

By "wisdom of the crowd" I believe you meant to say "lynch mob"...I once read that the wisdom of crowds will ultimately triumph over the lynch mob. I believe this is happening online, as trolling has diminished and enlightenment has grown. I think Lanier's ominous doom & glooming isn't quite as dreadful as he's making it out to be. Although what the elites do with technology also remains to be seen. It won't be the masses that wipe out the masses in the end.

Posted by rickmarin on January 12,2013 | 05:04 PM

There are more people making and consuming music, and music is a bigger part of the average person's everyday life, than ever before in the history of mankind. That's not a supposition; that's an indisputable fact. The loss in stature and economic livelihood on the part of musicians has nothing to do with the internet and free information: it's the ubiquity of music-making technology. To put it simply, everyone can make music now. It's as easy as downloading CakeWalk or Frootyloops. So there are a lot more people making music. So there's a lot more music out there. So music is less valuable of a commodity. So musicians themselves are less valuable. Cruel and cold, maybe, but pretty straightforward and self-evident. Supply/demand. Music has gone from being a prized commodity, to oversaturation. Hence, its value has gone down. We're seeing the same thing happen with literature and self-publishing right now. Anybody can write books now -- so everybody is writing books now. So the price of a book has gone from $40 to $3.99. The same thing sort of happened to film in the 60's and 70's, with the collapse of the Big Five system and the indie revolution -- and then kind of again in the early 2000's, with the advent of Youtube. In fact, it should even have a third wave in about 10-15 years, when the quality of film tools available to professionals and amateurs (and the cost/quality ratio) have a negligible distance between them. I say again: there are more people making and consuming music, and music is a bigger part of the average person's everyday life, than ever before in the history of mankind. Deal with it.

Posted by Brandon Carbaugh on January 11,2013 | 04:03 PM

He had me right up until he attacked anonymity on the web. To me this is the single greatest plus of the internet. While I agree it can breed a certain amount of negativity, it also allows discourse on subjects that are all but outlawed in society. Today there are grave repercussions if one has contrarian points of view on things such as race, gender relations, and so on. And no, before anyone says it, contrarian does not imply hateful. When you hear about idiot sports/news announcers saying the slightly "wrong thing" and loosing their jobs over it, you can see why anonymity is so important to honest discourse. So yea, this anonymity can certainly lead to people saying things they wouldn't normally say in polite society (or whatever), but it DOES increase the potential for conversation and therefore a broadening of horizons. Let's keep in mind that some of the greatest (at the time) contrarians in history used anonymity in order to change and create our society (Ben Franklin comes to mind). Finally, by attacking anonymity is discounts the other side of the coin: if someone really is an a** on line, no one is making you read the comments or respond to them. Man/woman up and take responsibility for your own life. Humans aren't supposed to be so fragile that simple words should carry with them so much damage. Words are powerful...but so is the choice to listen to them. Grow up.

Posted by LanceSmith on January 11,2013 | 03:30 PM

In "The Spy Who Came in from the COld 2.0", I expected to find a more erudite person. Yet, his ignorance is what stands out. For example, information is not made up of zeroes and ones any more than a statue is represented by its atoms. Zeroes and ones are just numbers. In combination, they may represent data. Organized data may represent information, analyzed information may lead to knowledge, and careful thought may lead to wisdom. All of this was lacking in Lanier's comments. His reference to the nature of MIDI is also entirely wrong. The digital pulses are not at all like a single digit representation of a piano key. A single analog note when digitally sampled provides a number of digital pulses and when transformed back to analog can provide a robust representation, often far better than analog processing equipment. This is not to be picky or just indicate a lack of nuance, but when key metaphors are mangled, the message of false and ineffectual rebellion is lost. The attempted link between the Internet and other technologies to the collapse of the American economy and class warfare is not just a stretch, but ludicrous without supporting evidence, just conjecture. It is fun to be made aware of some of these intricate and convoluted conspiracy theories. However, is this appropriate for a scientific journal? Maybe this was intended as comic relief since it was certainly written tongue-in-cheek.

Posted by Paul Tiffany on January 10,2013 | 04:18 PM

One might also note how the murder of Lanier's maternal relatives was enormously facilitated by state-of-the-art numerical-processing and sorting technology, aggressively sold to and customized for the Nazi regime by IBM's German subsidiary -- see Edwin Black's IBM and the Holocaust [www.ibmandtheholocaust.com] -- while IBM World Headquarters NY micromanaged its operations, negotiations and finances while appearing not to. This extended to anticipating business opportunities in countries Germany expected to conquer but hadn't yet invaded; began with having enabled ethnic surveys for years, down to individual details; and was why Nazis could collect, evict, transport, enslave and murder millions practically overnight. No one knew how they got their data. Thomas Watson defended Germany throughout the early phases of the Holocaust and argued he believed only in business -- as though his influence in the world was so narrow.

Posted by RobertRays on January 10,2013 | 02:54 PM

when thomas friedman and paul krugman were flogging "free trade" policy back in the 90's, we were assured that the displaced factory workers would become "knowledge workers", or information workers. some did. not enough to preserve a middle class intact. but now the information and knowledge extant in the world is free - you can just upload it. is this a further downgrade and exploitation of the middle class? Lanier has a point.

Posted by mick on January 9,2013 | 01:57 PM

A somewhat interesting read, but what was the point? If Mr. Lanier just stating that we need to consider societal consequences, is there even anyone who would disagree with something so obvious as that? The other tech visionaries he's "betrayed" are hardly a bunch of mindless zealots who refuse to hear any contrasting opinions. It seems like he is being painted as some kind of counterrevolutionary mostly for bringing up a few issues already widely acknowledged as problematic. Arguments against file sharing and the unbridled vitriol found in YouTube comments are hardly new. On the other hand, his comparisons to WWII-era atrocities are strained at best. Is he rely implying that unrestricted speech is going to bring on the world's next wave of genocide and repression? If you believe that, ask yourself whether Hitler or Stalin or Mao could have gotten away with that in today's post-Twitter society, where a protester can scarcely brush shoulders with a policy officer before there are dozens of tweets decrying brutality. Even when you limit the argument to only anonymous speech, technology is still more likely to prevent such tragedy that instigate it. The argument against Google Translate is even more baffling, given how tools like this have the potential to be such powerful forces at removing barriers to communication. I would be much more interesting in hearing his proposal to deal with this "problem"; I can get my scaremongering fix anywhere.

Posted by Austin on January 8,2013 | 04:37 PM

The middle-class in the US is shrinking, but here in Asia it is growing at an unprecedented rate. The internet has certainly speeded up the process, but if you were going to make a case that the middle-class as a whole was shrinking, you would have to present some pretty detailed figures on income levels worldwide. I'm not convinced. From where I'm standing, about half of China became middle-class overnight.

Posted by Tim Wilson on January 8,2013 | 12:03 PM

So a decade later, Lanier is still peddling his tired criticisms of the Internet - never mind that things have continued to go pretty well! Why do we care what he is saying now? Isn't there some sort of statue of limitations on punditry where if you're wrong you get ignored? At least Cliff Stoll could admit he was wrong on some parts of his own Internet contrarianism.

Posted by gwern on January 8,2013 | 11:32 AM

Bravo.

Posted by Gio Makyo on January 7,2013 | 03:46 AM

I read this article in the hardcopy magazine and don't know what the heck the point was. So me makes lots of money as a 'computer scientist' - what ever that is - then he *isses where he eats and now he makes money *ithching about the web to pay for his hobby - horrible article and the entire edition was tossed out - boring! Earth to Jaron - information that is easy to obtain is not free.

Posted by gail smith on January 6,2013 | 07:16 PM

How ironic would it be to go and share this article on a "social media" site? Or would it be exactly what Mr Lanier would expect?

Posted by Ed Butera on January 6,2013 | 08:24 AM

It's baffling that in an otherwise intelligent piece you would use a nonsensical term like "nanobyte."

Posted by JVG on January 6,2013 | 03:16 AM

And what happens when the next 3 billion people from the emerging world cultures get into the digital game? The world's underclass are getting more and better opportunities to participate in digital transformatins than they've ever had. How this plays out will be the most interesting issue to observe. The current global digital elites, like Mr. Lanier, will become of lesser interest to the digital wizards behind the curtain. How will the the diminished digital elites respond with their lesser importance in global affairs? Probably get deeper into their analog worlds.....nice!

Posted by John on January 6,2013 | 03:11 AM

I have spoken with Jaron a number of times and it is clear that he is one of the most brilliant minds of our era. I'm a technology professional (telephone switching systems engineer) and share most of his critiques of the current status quo. There are many more of us who work in relevant fields, who also agree. Most are reluctant to speak out against the prevailing "bandwagon" attitudes. The time has come for us to address the unforeseen consequences of our work, in no uncertain terms. Technology is not a god with a will of its own, to which we must submit with a devotional attitude. Technology is not a force of nature, over which we are powerless. Technology, like the economy, is our creation, and thus our responsibility to utilize in ways that are truly beneficial. The purpose of technology, as with the purpose of an economy, is not to serve itself, but to serve humanity and the common good. Where it fails to do that, humans must exercise the will to make it so.

Posted by George Gleason on January 5,2013 | 08:03 PM

Lanier starts by being troubled by virtual reality. Yes, he's right about the ubiquity of this. Virtual reality models for homes, factories and even aircraft carriers save billions of dollars by allowing corrections to be made in designs before they are realized the hard way. If we had this technology a hundred years ago the word "Titanic" would still mean gigantic and nothing more. With his new realization of the legitimacy of intellectual property, and the trade offs between its protection and its use for wider cultural advancement, he sees the Google translation method as an example of the stealing that he had advocated before he saw the light. The translation procedure that he describes is making use of previous translations, and to the degree that they are identifiable, and are in copyright, he could have case that such use should be compensated. Yet, from the article linked above there are many translations in the public domain that do not cause the "theft" he describes, " In 2005, Google improved its internal translation capabilities by using approximately 200 billion words from United Nations materials to train their system; translation accuracy improved.[4]" Lanier because he was enchanted by this new technology, is now disenchanted with the same over broad strokes. The advantages of accessible rapid, even realtime translation, unlike the utopian dreams of his early associates, is truly achievable. It reverses the barriers of disparate languages explained by biblical myth of being inflicted by God on those who dared to build a tower to reach the heights where only he resided. Jaron Lanier, in spite of my criticisms, has extended an important conversation that should engage us all for the next few centuries

Posted by Al Rodbell on January 5,2013 | 03:41 PM

Ah yes, I'm filthy rich from creating the internet, now I'd like to get even richer by speaking out against it-very noble!

Posted by Chris Lopes on January 4,2013 | 05:31 PM

Awesome article. Finally, someone else is seeing the truth and getting it out there.

Posted by Rebecca Reisner on January 4,2013 | 09:23 AM

okay, here is an interesting scenario created by tech worship and unquestioning acceptance of all the dogma. Live music is coming back and is one example of an antedote, and boy do we need one. You saying this after the fact just doesnt help much. You sure benefitted from it all. Just sayin'. Musicians are in deep trouble. Thanks.

Posted by nina on January 3,2013 | 01:59 AM

Jaron Lanier reminds me of the (what we would be considered prescient) character-hacker Bruno from The Max Headroom - 20 Minutes Into The Future series - although I do not think he would try to shut down the Internet to save us from ourselves - he will find himself and his all too few followers shaking their heads saying I told you so when the social apocalypse meltdown occurs.

Posted by KEVIN ANDREW KUNREUTHER on January 3,2013 | 12:34 AM

Are Rosenbaum and Lanier seriously comparing anonymous online commentary to genocide? That the path to this conclusion is paved with ignorance of politics and economics should have been a warning to the editors, if the actual internet = genocide part wasn't intrinsically objectionable. Whatever Lanier's discontent, the online world has the distinct advantage that it allows us to call this article what it is: brazen trollery.

Posted by Miles Townes on January 3,2013 | 02:31 PM

"Hate filled trolls" is such a polite and innocent phrase. We have become a nation and culture of psychopaths. The technology is less to blame than our leadership and those who by example and lesson have taught us to behave and think as they do - the one percent. The Web used to be as dreamed until it became a money making engine for the entrepeneur and to them, the rest of us are prey. It began with Habenero and became full blown with Java. Sytle and commerce over substance. Who really needs an animated link with a mouseover anyway? Why have a hundred lines of code to display two sentences worth of content? The web has become a con instead of a resource.

Posted by Rupert Chappelle on January 3,2013 | 10:21 AM

fealty to. ? Really? First paragraph, and it didn't ring? You lost me right there. It might be an informative or even entertaining article, but I stopped right there.

Posted by LESLIE STECHER on January 2,2013 | 08:10 PM

Fasinating.

Posted by Ryuk on January 2,2013 | 02:42 PM

Are Rosenbaum and Lanier seriously comparing anonymous online commenters to three genocidal maniacs -- Mao, Hitler, and Stalin? Surely the threat to humanity posed by the Internet is somewhat less significant than 100 million deaths. I don't know much about the magazine business, but if anybody tried to make their argument in most online communities, they'd be accused (rightly - Godwin's Law and all that) of being massive trolls. So let me be the first to say: this article is ambitious trollery.

Posted by Anonymous on January 2,2013 | 11:54 AM

I was ponedering the potential of the unwritten flip sides of several of the arguments presented in this piece. I certainly believe in the 'social lasers of good' that can come from Web2.0 applications and platforms. Certainly getting people to focus, not on fear or what can be caught up in cruelty beams, but on unlocking and unleashing potential, through the 'knowledge management' powers of ICT can bring billions of people out of poverty around the globe in the next two decades. Jaron, Focus on the potential of digital social and entrepreneurial networks to do good, and do another interview....

Posted by William on January 2,2013 | 11:09 AM

First, let me try to break at least one of the dystopic processes that Jaron Lanier describes so well. I always use my full name on my many comments to wide and varied web sites, and I'll do it here and invite anyone to google it, Al Rodbell, to find my blog to read a fuller discussion of this important article. I read this because a friend brought up statistical based translation as reflective of this article, while it is a very small part of it, where I happen to disagree with Lanier's analysis. But, he is saying much more, most of it important, some innovative and others simply the articulation of a youthful true believer who gets some maturity, as in, "Yes, I now know that stealing copyrighted music is not only illegal, but wrong." His message that the futurists who ignored the down side of this amazing computer revolution certainly is valuable, but this is not new, or even the most clearly articulated. What he provides is the value of a Jack Abramoff the uber lobbyist getting religion after serving time for his excesses. Or like the Scientologist who rids himself of the indoctrination and tells the world about it. The things is those who eschew such cults aren't that impressed as we never bought into the hype in the first place. I'm happy that he expands on the conversation, but lets not get carried away. When I would smoke weed occasionally many years ago, it was enjoyable and actually good for my soul. But, I never thought it was an answer to existence, and always knew it could be abused, or damaging. And now, even though I don't partake, I see that it has value as well as individual costs and societal dangers. And with computer revolution, neither Lanier's early enthusiasm or current broad condemnation will do. The dangers and the benefits, understatements both, must be seriously evaluated as this technology inexorably transforms our world.

Posted by Al Rodbell on January 2,2013 | 10:46 AM

"Oh, it’s not me. The computer did it." Oh, it's not me. The corporation did it.

Posted by Kevin Wilcoxon on January 1,2013 | 02:12 AM

I wonder if Lanier would admit that his insights, because they are so personal, are not universal. If he wasn't so obsessed with music, would he come to a different conclusion? Specious arguments full of bad analogies.

Posted by Nick on January 1,2013 | 07:17 PM

The economics of free information is a two way street. To take the example from the article, while the price for translation service has absolutely cratered, the availability of translation service has inversely skyrocketed. Before online translators, only those in desperate need of translation, and with means to pay for it, would hire a translator, but with online translators, every single person is suddenly passably fluent in most of the world's languages. With certain apps, you can go to any foreign country with an internet connection, record the speaker, and then play back a translation in your mother tongue. Clearly, this service creates enormous value to the world, because even in the glory days of translators (whenever that may have been), there was no such availability or skill accessible to so many people. On anonymous comments, a lack of anonymity is poor protection against harassment, and the use of 'real names' is something that is unenforceable without introducing some sort of overseeing body into the mix. The way to deal with harassment is the same way that it has always been done on the internet - through moderation - either automated or manual. A moderator needs to act to keep the discussion flowing in a positive manner and to call out attacks. Reddit in particular is a community with a lack of appropriate site wide moderation, as moderators are specific to individual subreddits, and if you create a subreddit as violentacruz did, you're the defacto mod - A problematic design, because it does not vet moderators with the larger community. That said, the site could be much worse, and in subreddits with actual moderation, the problems are not so large. Additionally, reddit can be seen as a microcosm of the larger internet. If violentacruz decided to launch his own site with NSFW gore, we may all find it objectionable, but it wouldn't be seen in the same light, as when he starts a site within the larger community of reddit.

Posted by legrandemoocow on January 1,2013 | 06:41 PM

The Google translator example makes no sense at all. The overwhelming majority of phrases were translated many times over by people who got paid and and the work is public domain anyway. Does he mean all the new words and phrases in all the new languages? It's ridiculous. All innovation shrinks some aspect of the economy, John Henry. And you still need to hire someone if you want a decent translation anyway. It's very thoughtless and silly. What's not new is that trumped-up dire predictions help sell books about social trends. It just seems cynical and sad, and the breathless fanboy tone of the article seems beneath the Smithsonian. .

Posted by Freffer on January 1,2013 | 11:16 AM

There is no such thing as a Nanobyte, as referenced at the top of page 3. A nano byte would be a billionth of a byte, which is impossible. A byte is 8 bits, and the bit is indivisible in binary. It is the smallest form of binary information. either zero or one, 0/1. a Nanobyte is a meaningless term. Poor Journalism/Writing. And look at this shameless hypocrite (Jaron) who speaks against all of this Web 2.0 nonsense whilst attending Microsoft launches, chatting up Google execs, "riding the convention circuit". He hath obviously benefitted much from what he speaks out against, so his opinion becomes morally bankrupt. Way to change the world, dude.

Posted by Will on December 31,2012 | 08:37 AM

I don't believe one can honestly conflate music file sharing with sub-prime mortgages. The trading of poorly regulated sub-prime mortgages created fractures in the global financial system that nearly destroyed the entire developed economy. Trading in music files has disrupted established pathways for economic success of artists. Surprisingly, artists and bankers have proven themselves at being very creative in preserving both their livelihoods and culture in spite of the disruptive force of the internet. I think Lanier's thoughts are poorly developed and banal. He is merely pointing out the obvious facets of human nature, which will exist with or without an internet. To me his ideas read like a first year sociology paper and over inflate the importance of the internet in the majority of peoples' lives.

Posted by TBarnston on December 29,2012 | 12:45 AM

Lanier is in need of a vacation...from himself. If there ever was a personality disorder that shaped the mind into a möbius strip, this has got to be it. It's difficult to see this as sincerity. I think most of the people commenting here have that figured out. Too many broad strokes.

Posted by Rod Stasick on December 29,2012 | 10:48 PM

"At the time, this objection seemed a bit extreme. But he saw anonymity as a poison seed. The way it didn’t hide, but, in fact, brandished the ugliness of human nature beneath the anonymous screen-name masks. An enabling and foreshadowing of mob rule, not a growth of democracy, but an accretion of tribalism. It’s taken a while for this prophecy to come true, a while for this mode of communication to replace and degrade political conversation, to drive out any ambiguity. Or departure from the binary. But it slowly is turning us into a nation of hate-filled trolls." Maybe this concept wouldn't have been so hard to grasp if more techies read Lord of the Flies instead of Lord of the Rings.

Posted by on December 29,2012 | 04:15 AM

I love the way idiots like this guy miss the obvious points, then have epiphanies I had five years ago, only because they're believed by other idiots to be smart they get to go on lecture circuits and profit (once again) saying the obvious that non-specialists like me were laughed at for saying once. They make money going in, they make money coming out. I know more than they did then, I know more than they did now, but TED's not interested because I don't have his "resume."

Posted by John on December 29,2012 | 03:57 AM

"The information economy" was and still is a mirage. We're setting up a creative / service economy. The idea of copies of recordings having inherent value seems silly to me. (I say this being a child of the 80s, for what it's worth.)

Posted by Naomi Most on December 28,2012 | 02:04 AM

Anyone else find the gratuitous anti-Communism offputting? Jaron Lanier helps develop a labor-saving technology in a Western capitalist society, and when he finally wakes up to the fact that all of the excess value is being captured by the wealthy while the middle-class declines--he likens it to being disenchanted with Communism? Wha? And then the author weirdly reinforces this non sequitur by comparing him to Whitaker Chambers? Doubling down with an immediate segue to: the specter of the gulag. Except... Lanier's relatives were killed by Tsarist forces in the pogroms and Nazis in the concentration camps, not by the Soviets. This is vintage 1980 propaganda.

Posted by Mike Ziser on December 28,2012 | 11:19 PM

This is a very important piece. As a software developer, I often do feel like a mid level official in the Soviet Union a few years before collapse. I have great faith in the party line - namely the promise of technology. And I know it blinds me to many inconvenient things that happen thanks to what I build. It is quite depressing, because I don't see Mark Zuckerberg or Larry Page talking about this (the downsides to what we build, the second and third order effects) any time soon, let alone doing anything about it. Self correction or regulation even among the smartest among us is hard, as Wall Street has recently demonstrated.

Posted by Santosh on December 28,2012 | 08:15 PM

What does the shrinking economy for artists actually accomplish? That artists have to have another way to survive, and in turn, must make art for the love of making it? In it's most extreme example (where no one pays for any kind of art and only seek out what is free) This takes some ulterior motives (money,lifestyle, etc.) out of the picture and leaves only the true artist that does what they do simply because they love to do it. Not a bad thing in my opinion. It is tragic for the people that were artists on the cusp of this revolution of information because they had relied on the sale of their passions to support their lifestyle, inasmuch as any artist can assume the popularity of their work will support them anyway, which has never been a sure bet. What about the idea that the sale of music, for instance, never really made the artist as much money as the people who run the business side of the sale and production of music? A situation where artists made serial compromises in artistic integrity, at the suggestion of the money men, in the interest of making more money? You take the money out of the equation and their is far less reason to compromise artistic integrity. Just an artist making the art they want to make, expressing the ideas they want to express.

Posted by Danny Reid on December 28,2012 | 12:36 PM

Lanier addresses the "touring and t shirts" economy in his first book, and he shows the serious problems with that. People like to think that "free" culture only hurts the artists who can't perform live, and the real talent will survive. However, the recording industry (and the movie/TV industry) supports a lot of other people. Songwriters, producers, engineers -they're not able to tour. As well, if you ask a lot of artists themselves they don't want to be on tour constantly and for the rest of their lives.

Posted by D on December 28,2012 | 09:19 AM

It was "Battlefield Earth" crashing and burning, obviously. http://newstechnica.com/2010/02/27/jaron-lanier-why-people-should-pay-more-attention-to-me-and-not-web-2-0/

Posted by David Gerard on December 27,2012 | 08:50 AM

Sour grapes.

Posted by Andrew Wood on December 26,2012 | 10:42 PM

I think this whole article is litany of complaints about - how free information has created problems .But it does not give solutions to any of these side effects . I think , free information has elevated many people from their narrow intellectual level which might not be possible without web . If there were no google many people would be in darkness of information . So i am expecting frmo this person don't just blindly oppose web 2.0 because of torrents , internet bullying and stealing of personal information by facebook but he should come up with some framework by which we can stop all these illegal activities .

Posted by Nilesh S on December 26,2012 | 07:12 AM

I think social media is making Pogroms and the like less rather than more likely

Posted by Tim on December 24,2012 | 12:16 AM

tech outpictures the collective consciousness .. THAT is what needs evolving .. the tech follows

Posted by gregorylent on December 24,2012 | 04:50 PM

Any or all technology only does two things. It compresses time and space. It has never done more than that. The only thing that changes is the speed and size of what's happening. Every time we think it has changed the essence of anything, we always find we are wrong. It is the same old things just faster and bigger. Mr. Lanier's descriptions unknowingly support this thesis. It is also true that what ever can save you can also kill you. It is how you chose to use it that makes the difference.

Posted by Joe Hagy on December 24,2012 | 04:49 PM

You lost me in the first paragraph. I came here to read a story about Jaron Lanier -- I don't want to read a story about you.

Posted by Biff on December 24,2012 | 10:25 AM

What an incredibly interesting brain to pick!

Posted by Vas on December 24,2012 | 03:27 AM

Music is returning to what it once was. Live musicians playing for a live audience. It is why the Grateful Dead encouraged tape trading. There is no way to create the "Dead" EXPERIENCE from ones and zeros. You had to be there. And quite a few of us were. Often. The ones and zeros are now just an enticement. A poster announcing the show. As I tell my friends who never "got" the Dead. "You had to be there." === The same is true of translation. If you want a rough and ready estimate of the meaning - Google is fine. If you want the nuance - get a human translator who knows the culture. I was thinking of a comment to a translation of "Gangnam Style". - The "official" translation was workable enough. Until I read a commenter who knew the culture. He opened another world not apparent from the "official" one. The translation was fine with the words. But the translator added culture. Not a negligible addition. Google will not be replacing that soon. Or maybe ever. Because people are SHAPED by experience. And that changes.

Posted by M. Simon on December 24,2012 | 03:16 AM

Absolutely fascinating article. Thank you for this.

Posted by Abraham on December 23,2012 | 02:39 AM

"“MIDI,” Lanier wrote, of the digitizing program that chops up music into one-zero binaries for transmission," No, as a quick trip to Wikipeida would have told you, that's not what MIDI is. MIDI is a simply a specification that allows electronic music devices to talk to each other, and is what the "file" of commands to reproduce a piece of music on electronic instruments is called. The process of converting and analog waveform to one-zero binaries (sic) is called "digitization" or "sampling". Again Wikipedia to the rescue: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sampling_%28signal_processing%29 Mr. Lanier (I'm assuming from the text) is probably not very much concerned with teh former, but is mostly concerned with the effects of the latter. See, if you have a MIDI file you need a pile-o-stuff to run that file against (or a relatively sophisticated piece of software). If you have a digitized file (like an mp3 or a ogg vorbis file) you need a relatively unsophisticated piece of software, or some hardware that is so cheap they charge more for the plastic packaging than they do for hte electronics. Quite frankly, if you don't understand that we can't be sure what other more subtle misunderstandings and errors there are in this. Oddly enough a lot of rather so-called intellectuals, elites and government types are opposed to anonymous commenters. Mostly because it's impossible to threaten or intimiate them into shutting up. If anonymous and pseudo-anonymous speach was good enough for the folks who founded this country, then maybe these whiny rich little buttercups ought to butch up and make their case in public, in clear, cogent text instead of expecting those of us to just shut up and follow our leaders like this was the middle ages.

Posted by William O. B'Livion on December 23,2012 | 11:49 PM

As a victim of abuse, I found this powerful: https://blog.torproject.org/blog/real-name-internet-versus-reality "There is a growing cacophony that a fully identified, real name policy for the Internet will solve all of our problems relating to crime, bullying, harassment, and everything else. This idea is furthered along by Facebook, Google, and the US White House. As just one example of how this is an over-simplified argument, it seems people are continuing to forget their childhoods. As a kid, many of you were bullied and harassed at school. You knew the kids picking on you at lunch, at recess, at morning before class, and after school. Further, you knew their parents, where they lived, and generally who they were outside of school. This bullying and harassment may have continued through High School, into College, and through your work life. Again, you knew their real names and far more about them than Google, Facebook, or the US Govt will ever hope to know. A real name world hasn't made life better, more civil, or safer for millions of kids growing up in it...."

Posted by Lynn on December 23,2012 | 09:04 PM

Thanks. Some of this I understood - some not. But I am in completer agreemnet on the anonymity on the internet and it's layers of invective. Prof Loomis (although not anonymous) is the latest notorious example. It's left me with much to think about.

Posted by tom scott on December 23,2012 | 05:44 PM

Poor fella, but the simple fact is art, like money and laws, are non-physical objects that exist only in our imagination. Unless they're tied to some physical object that only exists in limited quantities (single-edition physical recordings, cash and coin, or hardcopy "top secret" legal documents that aren't allowed on the web, respectively), they can quickly be digitized and copied everywhere on the internet, rendering them worthless instead of priceless. No matter how long it took the artists, bankers, and lawyers to learn their skills, people just will not spend their own time and the products of their own labor for something they can get for free.

Posted by Tatterdemalian on December 23,2012 | 04:34 PM

I very interesting piece. Living in the SF Bay Area from the early 80s I've seen some of the transformation that has been happening, and always enjoyed reading Lanier's perspectives on the emerging technologies of virtual reality and the digital world. I was a little taken aback by the title of this piece and its suggestion that there is a downside which is being overlooked and that failure's potential to bring about the kind of social chaos we historically have had before and which we would like to think is behind us, but the roots of it, as Lanier points out, are still with us, and perhaps part of us, and all but inevitable, though I'd like to think there is an alternative path. Somewhere between Kurzweil and Lanier the future will appear with all its uncertainty and unexpected problems...and opportunities. The bottom line, as always should be that the people, and not the mob, are talking to others with views that are different and yet similar with new approaches being explored. cheers

Posted by doug l on December 23,2012 | 08:42 AM

Jaron Lanier is definitely an interesting intellectual and thinker. He is a true genius. Ron Rosenbaum did an excellent job of weaving an interesting article from all the topics covered in his conversation with Jaron. I agree with some of Jaron's points but not all of them. Mob mentality can exist without the web, and anonymity on the web is not necessarily malicious, and it too can exist without the web. The web has the power to widely disseminate information at an incredible speed which can be dangerous or it can be life-saving. Jaron's economic arguments do ring true in my mind. Also, individual thinking and creating can be corrupted by the 'hive mind.'

Posted by Kathy on December 21,2012 | 01:53 PM

Jaron Lanier is one of the true voices of Internet culture today.

Posted by Tim Graham on December 19,2012 | 04:50 PM



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