Written by Michael Ridley

When the tech mavens have second thoughts about tech, it’s time to pay attention. I don’t have a lot of time for Luddites, but this is different. These folks have been there, done that, written the code. If something is bothering them, it should bother us too.
Jaron Lanier is probably best known as the “father of virtual reality.” His work to imagine and build virtual environments or simulations has brought this extraordinary technology into the mainstream. Innovations like Second Life and cyber-surgery can be traced to his foundational work. But he isn’t a complete cheerleader. He has concerns and his recent book, You Are Not A Gadget, is an important read.
Yes, it’s a bit of a screed, and he calls it a “manifesto” (now there’s a word that is past its best before date). And, yes, it’s not particularly well written (a bit of a surprise there). But it’s also not one of those “end of the world as we know it” diatribes that pines for the glory and innocence of bygone days. Lanier’s issues are real.
His primary focus is the technologies and behaviours around Web 2.0.
His first concern is with “lock-in.” Lock-in occurs when design choices limit flexibility, creativity or modification. It means you can only do certain things with a particular tool or service. Of course this happens all the time but Lanier sees it getting worse, and with dire consequences.
The design of restrictive software has resulted not only in technological lock-in but also the lock-in of the nature of the ideas that can be expressed through that technology. Cognitive lock-in. While Lanier doesn’t reference him, this is pure McLuhan: “First we shape our tools, thereafter our tools shape us.” Technology is not neutral. Which brings Lanier to Web 2.0: “some of the so-called web 2.0 ideas are stinkers, so we ought to reject them while we still can.”
All the blogs, wikis, tweets, posts, whatevers have not been about the democracy of expression or the liberation of our ability to interact and collaborate but rather the “atomization of thought” that occurs when bits and pieces of text, sound, image, etc. are inter-related and mashed up. Not the wisdom of the crowd, but the tyranny of the pack (for more on this see Andrew Keen’s Cult of the Amateur).
It is a loss of individual expertise and voice by preferencing the “anonymized fragments of creativity.” The result is not a rich digital tableau of ideas but simply “a mash” that is increasingly meaningless and insensitive to the people, the individuals, at the heart of human expression. “I fear that we are beginning to design ourselves to suit digital models of us, and I worry about a leaching of empathy and humanity in the process.”
Using such colourful (and awkward) terms like “cybernetic totalism”, “digital Maoism” and “computationalism,” Lanier loses me sometimes as he disappears down the rabbit hole. And having taken the blue pill he goes off into a brief but wonderful exploration of “post-symbolic communication” (a “fluid concreteness” where humans morph into the things they are trying to express) that fits nicely with my obsession with post-literacy.
However, if you ignore techno-rhetoric and peel back all and the layers of concern about individuality, knowledge, pack mentality, and all the rest, you find Lanier arguing for thoughtful design that enhances human capacity. He wants us to do cool things but consider the implications. And thinking about implications (the affects and effects) is not something the tech field is so good at; the debacle surrounding the recent release of Google Buzz demonstrates this abundantly. What on earth were they thinking?
Lanier is no wacko. His and the other voices of contrarian tech are the canaries in the digital coal mine. We may not like hearing their cautions, but we ignore them at our peril.

Michael Ridley is the Chief Information Officer (CIO) and Chief Librarian at the University of Guelph. Contact him at mridley@uoguelph.ca or www.uoguelph.ca/cio.

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