You Are Not a Gadget

A Manifesto

By: Jaron Lanier

Narrated by: Rob Shapiro

Jaron Lanier, a Silicon Valley visionary since the 1980s, was among the first to predict the revolutionary changes the World Wide Web would bring to commerce and culture. Now, in his first book, written more than two decades after the web was created, Lanier offers this provocative and cautionary look at the way it is transforming our lives for better and for worse.

The current design and function of the web have become so familiar that it is easy to forget that they grew out of programming decisions made decades ago. The web’s first designers made crucial choices (such as making one’s presence anonymous) that have had enormous—and often unintended—consequences. What’s more, these designs quickly became “locked in,” a permanent part of the web’s very structure.

Lanier discusses the technical and cultural problems that can grow out of poorly considered digital design and warns that our financial markets and sites like Wikipedia, Facebook, and Twitter are elevating the “wisdom” of mobs and computer algorithms over the intelligence and judgment of individuals.

Lanier also shows:
How 1960s antigovernment paranoia influenced the design of the online world and enabled trolling and trivialization in online discourse
How file sharing is killing the artistic middle class;
How a belief in a technological “rapture” motivates some of the most influential technologists
Why a new humanistic technology is necessary.

Controversial and fascinating, You Are Not a Gadget is a deeply felt defense of the individual from an author uniquely qualified to comment on the way technology interacts with our culture.©2010 Jaron Lanier; (P)2010 Random House

A unique perspective on digital life

Lanier is one of the founders of virtual reality, who offers a thoughtful perspective on when technology serves us and when it limits us. Key to the book is the concept of 'lock in', whereby and arbitrary decision on how to code some piece of software becomes a building block for the next generation of software and then becomes incredibly difficult to change. He gives the example of MIDI, the standard for digitizing music. MIDI simpllfies music in such a way that the richness of live music cannot be fully captured, and it's possible to conceive of a better way of digitizing music that would better capture its essence. But, MIDI has become the standard and now it's extremely difficult to introduce a new one.

Lanier worries that the same is happening to aspects of human life. For example, in order for us to interact on social networks, engineers have essentially made a simplified model of human behavior online. This model omits some very necessary nuances of human interaction, but it's close enough that people use social networks to the exclusion of live person to person interaction. Lanier says if this kind of simplification of the human experience gets 'locked in', humans will accept an essentially incomplete facsimile of real human life.

The book is a really necessary perspective when so much of our lives is lived online. It's necessary to be thoughtful about what we might lose as well as what we might gain.

A very good counterpoint piece

The book is a manifesto and it not only makes that clear in the title, but the author cops to it and while taking a strong position, LEAVES ROOM and GIVES PERMISSION for the reader to think differently or disagree.
So, while a manifesto, it didn't feel myopic and it wasn't merely a "preaching to the choir" confirmation piece -- it is a thoughtful take on some modern issues that doesn't require one "join this side" nor throw the baby out with the bathwater.

Agree or disagree or something else (I found myself doing all 3, sometimes on a single issue) -- I think it's worth a listen

Interesting content, amazingly well read

I really enjoyed the pace of the reading of this book. The reader seemed interested in the content he was reading and had just the right pace for the absorption of the content.

The content of the book itself is also very good. You may not agree with everything Jaron says but there are definitely some insights that are worth thinking about and investigating for yourself. He finishes off with a personal account of his research interests which I found both enlightening and heart-warming.

Cephalopod

Interesting book, even though it was written maybe ten or fifteen years ago, it still seems very relevant to today

Incoherent, But Often Enlightening

Having gone backwards in the Lanier bibliography, I at first found this book to be much clearer in explicating complicated ideas presented in those books. Toward the end, this book does begin to feel a little incoherent and the last chapter about cephalapods and VR seemed out of place with the overall theme of the first half of the book. Overall, an interesting read/listen though as Lanier consistently seems to offer up an evolving thread of techno philosophical ideas.