Techno Rebellion: Jaron Lanier's You Are Not a Gadget

• Last Updated: March 11. 2010 9:10PM UAE / March 11. 2010 5:10PM GMT

'Lanier thinks we might be rushing to make room for technological innovations in our social and political life without fully having grasped their downsides.' Chris Jackson / Getty Images

Jaron Lanier’s timely call for a new critical approach to the digitisation of contemporary life lacks the intellectual rigour to truly analyse the implications of the internet, Evgeny Morozov writes.

Today Wikipedia is unquestionably a potent cultural force. The ubiquitous online encyclopaedia has become the first source of reference for just about anyone using a search engine – and evangelists for its collaborative, if chaotic, editing model have argued that other industries should follow in its footsteps and embrace the “crowd-sourced” production of knowledge.

But would Wikipedia even exist today if one of its founders, Jimmy Wales, had made a fortune with one of his earlier, less-successful start-ups, a web portal that included pictures of female pin-ups and used adult film stars in its advertisements?

Given that the Wiki software has been around since the mid-1990s – and that the internet has been reshaping every other field – it’s quite likely that something like Wikipedia might have eventually emerged nevertheless. But whether this alter-Wikipedia would wield such wide cultural influence is much less clear: it’s possible that the Googles and Microsofts of the world would simply have developed their own online encyclopaedias using more traditional models. In this alternative universe, we would see many fewer arguments for embracing “Wiki-philosophy” in the rest of the world; bookshops would not be filled with books touting the virtues of Wikinomics and Wiki Government.

This hypothetical scenario applies to many of the sites and firms that define the internet – which was largely shaped by randomness and chance. Google grew out of academic work that its founders did while at Stanford. Twitter – which, according to its inventors, was the product of “a day-long brainstorming session” – was initially just a fun side project for a podcasting company. Facebook was meant as a place to share photos from college parties. Wikipedia itself began with much less ambitious aims, to be something like a traditional academic encyclopaedia, but with faster editing. Even the founders of all these projects wouldn’t bet much of their own money on their success – and to a large extent, they worked despite the very long odds.

Nobody can tell the future, of course, and it’s not uncommon in any field for the biggest successes to be the most unexpected ones. But there is something eerie about it nevertheless: if all these projects work despite the strong odds, is our system of evaluating the odds simply outdated? Is our understanding of the internet still so provisional that we can barely predict what will work and what will not work?

Wikipedia insiders like to joke that their project works in practice but not in theory. Funny as it is, the joke contains a deep insight: there might be something fundamentally wrong with our theories. This is hardly surprising; in the past decade the internet has unleashed an unprecedented avalanche of innovation, from free and easy international voice communication (Skype) to cheap and widely available microloans (Kiva), or the portable e-reading devices, developed by Amazon and others, that hold thousands of books in a device barely larger than a pamphlet.

All of this happened rather fast – so fast, in fact, that there was no hope to develop and refine deeper theories about the workings of this new technology and the ways it might affect our everyday lives and the shape of the culture at large. But our general lack of understanding of the broader effects of the new technologies has not dampened the general sense of excitement about its promise. There would be no market for books like Wiki Government – written by the deputy chief technology officer of the US government – if society believed there was nothing to be learnt from the evolution of Wikipedia and the open-source software movement.

But many of the books that suggest we can improve the world by drawing on the lessons of the internet lack serious thinking about how to understand the internet in the first place. It is not too late to develop critical theories that explore the full ramifications of life in the internet era, and they are badly needed – for we can still, at this point, refuse to incorporate some of these exciting but poorly understood practices into other spheres, like politics and government; we can still exercise greater caution before allowing new technologies to erode values and traditions that we hold dear. The costs of inaction are clear: a government that anyone can edit may also be the one that would stand by as corporations and radical internet evangelists are trying to force us into believing that privacy is just a quaint and antiquated social norm.

Jaron Lanier, who spent most of the 1990s touting the benefits of “virtual reality”, thinks that we might indeed be rushing to make room for technological innovations in our social and political life without having fully grasped their downsides and limitations. In You Are Not a Gadget, his first book, Lanier makes a persuasive case that more reflection is in order, for our public discourse about the internet’s impact on society is fundamentally flawed.

Lanier gently reminds us that computers are just tools meant to be used by humans; he thinks we must prevent technology companies from reducing us to binary versions of ourselves in the form of Facebook profiles and Twitter updates. Most controversially, he attacks the dominant ideology of today’s internet – often gathered under the vague rubric of “Web 2.0” – and claims that “free culture” is killing real culture, but that we are too busy remixing and mashing up silly videos to notice the fundamental changes in the economics of cultural production.

While the internet itself has become history’s most prodigious buzzword generator, churning out hip expressions like “crowdsourcing” and “the long tail” on what seems like an hourly basis, this cornucopia of neologisms may simply be corroding our ability to view new technologies through a critical lens – especially since all these buzzwords migrate so quickly into non-technological realms. Since many of these trendy theories are produced for a reason – to sell books, to secure consulting gigs, to generate enough excitement about technology to inflate another stock market bubble – we end up in a situation where a very shallow discourse about technology enables an environment where non-technologists begin to perceive the internet as the ultimate hammer for every social nail. Technologists, on the other hand, are too busy giving talks at Davos and the TED conference and investing in new companies to explain the internet to the public.

For even on those rare occasions where technology is indeed the tool that can hit all our unhammered nails, it often comes with invisible costs: the disempowerment of the individual vis-à-vis the crowd, the proliferation of banal content at the expense of more creative endeavours, the relegation of privacy to the status of either a luxurious or a somewhat obsolete good. Where are the thinkers who can guide us through these changes?

There has never been more “criticism” of technology: but the “critical thinking” at work consists mostly of giving the thumbs-up (or thumbs-down) to the flood of new phones, netbooks, tablets and web services unveiled every single day. The mere launch of a new Apple product generates millions of reviews in a matter of hours. But how many of the rushed responses to the iPad went beyond salivating over its new functions and tried to compare it to previous technologies for producing and storing knowledge? Only a handful. We’ve never thought about technology as much as we do today – but never before has our thinking been as shallow.

Technology has penetrated our lives so deeply and so quickly that the only way to make sense of what is happening today requires not only drinking from the anecdotal fire hose that is Twitter, but also being able to contextualise these anecdotes in broader social, historical and cultural settings. But that’s not the kind of analysis that is spitting out of Silicon Valley blogs.

So who should be doing all of this thinking? Unfortunately, Lanier only tells us who should not be doing it: “Technology criticism should not be left to the Luddites”. Statements like this establish Lanier’s own bona fides – as a Silicon Valley maverick unafraid to confront the cyber-utopian establishment from the inside – but they fail to articulate any kind of vision for how to improve our way of discussing technology and its increasingly massive impact on society.

So who should be explaining this brave new world to the larger public but is failing to do so? Lanier skirts this question altogether, but the answer is that academics, who are supposed to examine and explain the world, have failed to reckon in any comprehensive way with the subject.

Outside of the field of computer science, the only other academics that have managed to exert even the barest influence on how the public regards the internet are legal scholars like Jonathan Zittrain, Yochai Benkler, and Larry Lessig, the Harvard Law professor whose arguments against excessive copyright restrictions have made him an internet hero. These scholars have produced an excellent body of popular work about the internet; most of it, however, has revolved around questions of regulation, copyright and free expression – which has succeeded in explaining the complex relationship between the internet and the law, but has so far told us very little about the internet’s multifaceted effects on culture. As fun as lawyers are, they rarely produce incisive cultural criticism. Lessig does a terrific job arguing why laws shouldn’t prevent kids from engaging with what he dubs the “remix culture”, but whether the shift to the remix culture as a primary form of cultural production would be good for society is a question that Lessig either avoids or treats only in a very cursory fashion.

The people who should be doing such cultural analysis – most of them academics in social sciences and humanities – have either neglected the internet altogether, or framed their analysis in obscure post-structuralist terms that would never be understood by the general public. Should you want answers to bigger questions – Is Google making us stupid? Is the internet destroying our culture? Will the internet eliminate the human in us and replace it with an algorithm? – you have to look beyond academia and read books by bloggers, journalists and independent scholars.

This is how we have ended up in our current situation, where people like Lanier – who may know everything about technology but very little about society – are the only ones asking extremely important questions. And these are hardly new queries: there is not a single question in Lanier’s book that was not already asked long before the internet era – thinkers throughout the 20th century worried that mass media would reduce humans to “one-dimensionality” or that the rise of new technologies like cinema and television would dull and cheapen culture. The tension between the individual and the crowd that Lanier sees in the workings of Wikipedia have always been at the very heart of political theory; from Rousseau to John Dewey, intellectuals have been struggling to find the right balance for centuries.

Lanier does not provide any of this intellectual background, and as a result the book reads like a compilation of his personal concerns rather than an attempt to thoroughly examine the subject. But even though his answers are invariably banal, the questions he asks are significant – and there are not enough people asking them. You Are Not A Gadget may not be important for what it says, but for what it does, which is to reveal the dire state of our thinking about technology, and the unwillingness of the people most qualified to address these issues to move at the speed required to keep up.

Evgeny Morozov is a contributing editor of Foreign Policy magazine and a Yahoo! fellow at Georgetown University. His book about the internet and democracy will be published in late 2010 by Public Affairs / Allen Lane.