February 3, 2010
Vol: 17 No: 6

Feature

Gaining the Web but losing our souls

by: Robert Alford , Contributing Writer

Computer scientist Jaron Lanier wants people to use technology, not the other way around

Tech pioneer Jaron Lanier says the seemingly liberating new technologies of the computer age are trapping users in a cyber world “that just cheapens everybody.” Photo courtesy Alfred A. Knopf

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We are living in an age of instant access: to information, to entertainment and to each other through our computers, cell phones and the Internet. Knowledge and information are always just a click away through services like Google and Wikipedia. Our friends and colleagues are ever-present through email, Facebook and instant messaging. As we become increasingly dependent on these technologies in our everyday lives, we often fail to question their impact on the ways that we learn, communicate with each other and express ourselves creatively.

In his recently published book “You are not a Gadget: a Manifesto,” Jaron Lanier draws from his own professional experience at the forefront of computer science and digital technology, as well as his work as a musician and teacher, to provide a unique perspective into the often unforeseen effects that these rapidly developing technologies have on those who use them. He challenges many of the prevailing trends in computer science and web design as products of a philosophy that privileges machines, crowds and anonymity over individual human expression and genuine communication. Lanier recently spoke with Real Change before his Jan. 26 address at Town Hall Seattle.

When you were first working with virtual reality in the 1980s, how did you imagine that these emerging technologies would impact the future of human communication and expression?

What excited me the most was this idea that there’s this whole cognitive ocean that we’re not taking advantage of which I call body knowledge, and you can feel a little bit of it when you play the piano. If you’re used to improvising on the piano, at some point, your brain just starts making calculations about harmonic changes faster than you could otherwise, and you realize that there’s some form of intelligence that’s not verbal, that’s not dicing up the world in the same way that you’re used to when you talk about the world. It goes through your body instead, and I think there’s an enormous human potential that we have to explore there. Some of the best experiences I’ve had have been working with little kids where they can turn into triangles or molecules. When people can turn into the thing they’re studying, they learn it real fast. It’s just amazing.

Your current ideas about the relationship between humans and technology are considerably different than many of your peers in the fields of computer science and digital technology. What are some of these key differences?

I think the key point is really whether we should design computers based on the idea that people and computers are becoming the same, or whether we should design them on the basis that people and computers will be different. That’s really the key difference: I think that we should treat people as being special and some others want to blend and merge the identities of people and computers.

Some of the leading figures in the field of computer science believe that we are moving as a society toward an event that is known as the Singularity. Can you describe this idea and the impact that it has over the development of current software and web design?

Sure. It’s essentially a recreation of traditional religious ideas in a digital context. It’s a belief system that computers are becoming smart on their own, and that they’re becoming smart so rapidly that one day when we hardly expect it, they’ll take over the earth, and furthermore their capacity will be so great that they’ll be able to scoop up the contents of our brains and give us eternal life within a giant server. So, it’s a system of faith and it, to a remarkable degree, mirrors other traditional systems of faith, and that would all be fine except that it has a real influence on how software is designed. In particular, if you believe that computers are becoming smart on their own, then you have to repress the contributions from people. So people who believe in this have tended to create software that anonymizes people or mashes up or minces up the contributions of people so that there’s this illusion that somehow the computers are doing all the work. There are many designs like that: a lot of the social networking sites have that quality, as do a lot of aggregation sites and wiki-like things.

I’d like to discuss individually a few of today’s most commonly utilized websites and how they relate to some of the key concepts in your book. Let’s begin with Google.

At some point, for the well-being of mankind and our future livelihood, Google is going to have to change its business plan so that it no longer is an advertising company. This might sound like a shocking idea, since it’s doing well as an advertising company, but it’s not a direction that can be sustained in the long term.

If you make advertising the only paid form of expression, and the only contextual form of expression, and the only meaningful form of expression because of that, then you gradually leach away the value of people’s brains, and there will be less and less worth advertising, like a snake eating its own tail until there’s nothing left. It just can’t go on forever, and what I’d like to see instead is Google — along with the other big online companies — form an agreement for a universal micro-payment system so that anyone democratically can make some money from content if they want to give it a go, and no one ever has to re-enter passwords to go to a pay site, and the economics create an affordable access to communication which is just as open as free access, but empowers individuals and lets people make rent. As the machines get better we should be able to live more and more off our brains instead of less and less off our brains, and that’s the big error in this free and open stuff. There’s nothing wrong with some advertising, and I don’t think the advertising is ever really going to go away, but I do think that if you make it the center of civilization, you destroy civilization.

You write about Wikipedia as an example of privileging the crowd over the individual in web design that could have potentially harmful and unforeseen consequences.

The Wikipedia actually does work pretty well in some cases. I think it does make a pretty good pop culture concordance for instance, so I’m not saying it’s all bad, but Wikipedia creates this false idea that there can be a consensus point of view on a lot of topics where there just can’t be, and it also gives people a group identity which is just not a good thing to do with humans. Humans have this switch deep in their being which switches us between being individuals and members of a pack or mob, and I think it was good for us a long time ago because we lived in really tough circumstances and we needed to turn into a mob or a gang sometimes, but almost all of the instances in human history where people turn into a mob and lose individual character correspond to the very worst behavior in human history, and I think we’re playing with fire.

You cite the example of social networking sites such as Facebook as actually reducing our capacity for genuine communication and even our conceptions of ourselves and our potentials.

Well, I should clarify that with Facebook, there’s a generation gap, but the generation gap is really the opposite of what’s usually assumed. If you’re old enough to have a life, then when you use Facebook, it’s pretty straightforward. You use it to connect with old friends and I don’t have an issue with that. The problem is more, if you’re 16 or 17 and you’re in the process of creating yourself, you’re inventing yourself, and you get on Facebook and you have to manage your online reputation like crazy, and it makes you super conformist because you’re afraid of the evil eye of your peer group, so you have to act out of fear instead of love and then you can never forget it.

I’m painting with a broad brush here and I’m sure there are some kids who escape this, but by and large, the vast number of kids that I talk to are caught up in this thing and I don’t think it’s good. I think it’s not giving them the chance to reinvent themselves to do the kinds of forgetting you need to do in order to create a new personality as an adult, and I think it’s also making it harder for them to make some mistakes that they have to be able to make to turn into an adult. So, I think it has an infantile effect. I think it holds people back from really developing.

Can you describe the concept of technological “lock-in” and how it might relate to the future of the Internet?

Sometimes a digital design can get so embedded in software that is mutually dependent that it becomes really hard to change. In the book, I use the example of the musical note digital standard which is called MIDI, which everybody wants to change and all the musicians hate. There’s been endless consortiums and international conferences and agreements to change it, and you just can’t get rid of it because it will just not go away.

This phenomenon where you become stuck with something really does happen with digital stuff, though there are people who say it doesn’t. There are a lot of free-market ideologues who think that the market will always find a way out, but unfortunately, empirically, you can see these things do get stuck. So by extension, if there’s some way that we model people or treat people according to some digital system, we don’t want that to get stuck in place the way MIDI did if it doesn’t bring out the best in people. That’s the fundamental reason I wrote the book: I want to try and raise awareness before some of these things get locked in place.

In your book, you describe many aspects of the Internet which seem on the surface to promote democracy and equality as working in fact to consolidate wealth and power into the hands of a small, elite ruling class. How do you explain the relationship between technological development and the increasing disparity of wealth in our societies?

There’s this illusion where people say: I feel empowered because I get publicity off of Myspace and Youtube and Google rank and all this, but — show me the money. What’s happening is that there’s an incredible wealth concentration around the people who own the server, and there’s an incredible wealth drain from the people who are represented by the server. It’s exactly a mirror of what happened in our financial world, where the people who own the servers are the hedge funds, and they grabbed all the money, and they impoverished everything else.

I should say by the way that I’m speaking against my own self interest because I’m in the elite. I enjoy the benefits of being close to the server, so I’m not speaking from my own self interest here when I say this, but as a musician, I used to do much better. I keep on talking about musicians, but there’s a good reason for it because today’s musician or journalist whose career is being undermined by everything being free and open is just a foretelling of what will happen to more and more jobs as technology gets good enough that machines can do a lot of what a job is. So as machines get better and better, and there’s less and less physical labor required, we have to design a society in which we can live off of what our brains do, or else we will be creating a stupid society that doesn’t give us the liberty or the dignity that we deserve.

You advocate in your book for a new movement of digital humanism. What would this movement involve, and what steps could be taken by individuals to achieve a more human-centered relationship with technology?

I propose a variety of steps that could be taken at different levels. At an individual level, I think the thing to do is just to become more aware, not just to be a passive or obedient user of services like Facebook and Twitter: really think.

For instance, when you’re using Twitter, think for a second about whether you’re starting to believe that whatever you tweet about yourself is who you really are. Try to think: can you tweet about your internal state instead of external events? Can you tweet about how you’re feeling? That’s more work, but try to do that. Try to really be a person and if you’re going to use the tools, push against them. Push against the easy paths they give you. Try to find something deeper.

And then on another level, I think we as a society, in the technology industries and internationally between governments, we need to come up with some universal way to manage micro-payments so that it’s incredibly convenient and seductively easy for people to put up stuff and make some money from it, and also to pay for stuff incrementally, and create a world of affordable content that still has some commitment behind it instead of endless copies of stuff with no commitment that just cheapens everybody.  n

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Comments

Good article, good thoughts. Thanks for this.

b | submitted on 02/05/2010, 3:46pm

This was a good read, thank you.

I agree with your concern that, if allowed, digital technology has the potential to make those with developing minds into nothing more than digital droids. This could occur if the interaction between human and computer becomes the actual fiber of psychological development rather than a conduit to assist it. The key to preventing this, in my opinion, is for us to remember that creativity only comes from within. The ability to be creative cannot be delivered via electronic media.

We must continue to nurture the creativity of individuals within themselves, and then present technology as just one of the means to express that natural creativity.

Gary Sattler | submitted on 02/05/2010, 5:35pm

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