1️⃣ Sentence Synopsis
Published in 2010, Lanier argues that the emergence of web 2.0 (the current state of the internet, where users are content-generators as well as consumers), cloud computing, and crowdsourcing are all leading to a global stifling of creativity and individuality that will fundamentally alter what it means to be a human in the world.
🖼️ Contexts
I picked this one up at our neighborhood Half Priced Books out on a walk with my younger son. I purchased it along with Barbara Ehrenreich’s Dancing in the Streets: A History of Collective Joy (she was on my mind as she had just recently passed away). I have long admired Lanier’s work and used his arguments to prompt student thinking around technology, virtual reality and “hive mind.” This book is prescient, especially with the rise of AI that has been peppered throughout so many news headlines since the release of ChatGPT. While his writing is often recursive, I enjoy the way his mind meanders and appreciate how he is able to talk about technological philosophies with simplicity and always with a hopeful eye on the future.
🔑 Key Takeaways
- “Open culture” online is more about freedom for machines than people. Yes, we are able to combine fragments of materials from across a vast cyber network but these “content pieces” are stripped of author attribution, of the connection to their original creators—and, thus, their existence as expressions of humanity.
- “The most important thing to ask about any technology is how it changes people.” As we design ourselves in the image of digital models, will we may leave empathy and humanity behind.
- “There is more than one possible technological future and the debate should be how to best identify and act on whatever freedoms of choice we still have, not about who’s the Luddite.”
- Advertising could be the only product that will maintain its value after the technological revolution. Even as other forms of expression are fragmentized and remashed, ads become more contextual, more individualized, more targeted, and unique. A new social contract has emerged: artists, musicians, and writers give their labor as unpaid fragments into the “hive mind” in exchange for self-promotion. “Culture is to become precisely nothing but advertising.”
💯 Strong Lines
- On how the internet affects us interpersonally: “Anonymous blog comments, vapid video pranks, and lightweight mashups may seem trivial and harmless, but as a whole, this widespread practice of fragmentary, impersonal communication has demeaned interpersonal interaction…A new generation has come of age with a reduced expectation of what a person can be, and of who each person might become.”
- On the challenges of changing technological design: “The brittle character of maturing computer programs can cause digital designs to get frozen into place by a process known as lock-in. This happens when many software programs are designed to work with an existing one. The process of significantly changing software in a situation in which a lot of other software is dependent on it is the hardest thing to do. So it almost never happens.”
- On crowdsourcing: “…often you don’t know where a quoted fragment from a news story came from, who wrote a comment, or who shot a video….Authorship—the very idea of the individual point of view—is not a priority of the new [digital culture] ideology.”
- On love and civilization: “The plausibility of our human world, the fact that buildings don’t all fall down and you can eat unpoisoned food that someone grew, is immediate, palpable evidence of an ocean of goodwill and good behavior from almost everyone, living or dead. We are bathed in what can be called love. And yet that love shows itself best through the constraints of civilization because those constraints compensate for the flaws of human nature.”
🧠 Brain Tickles
- A single person designed the web as we know it today: Tim Berners-Lee. It allowed for freely designed “web pages” to be accessible to all, and with no particular hierarchy or preference among them, and for access to be maintained by the creator.
- The “Circle of Empathy”: “An imaginary circle of empathy is drawn by each person. It circumscribes the person at some distance, and corresponds to those things in the world that deserve empathy….the tricky part is that some entities reside close to the edge of the circle…the liberal impulse is to expand the circle, while conservatives tend to want to restrain or even contract the circle.”
- This seems to Ezra Klein’s prediction that “We may soon find ourselves taking metaphysical shelter in the subjective experience of consciousness: the qualities we share with animals.”
- This seems to Ezra Klein’s prediction that “We may soon find ourselves taking metaphysical shelter in the subjective experience of consciousness: the qualities we share with animals.”
- The connection of the printing press to the “invention” of childhood: The rise of literacy protracted the “childhood stage” (because it takes many years to master reading); prior to widespread literacy, children went to work much earlier. Literacy is what led to “the extended womb” of the classroom.
🍎 Ideas and Excerpts for Teaching and Learning
- Lanier’s discussion of how information systems or “life turned into database” has had a “disastrous effect” on U.S. education (via the ubiquity of standardized testing and nationwide databases), just as Facebook has had a disastrous effect on friendships: “Both degredations are based on the same philosophical mistake, which is the belief that computers can presently represent human thought or human relationships. These are things computers cannot currently do.” (page
- The examination of the “brain as computer” metaphor or “computationalism.” Lanier describes four viewpoints that seem to connect to the ways we are discussing AI today:
- The probability of increasingly volumious levels of computation will eventually lead to “superbrains” or global consciousness (often discussed as Singularity). In other words, quantity = quality.
- Specific design features (usually related to self-representation and circular references) can make computer reasoning similar to that of human beings. This may relate to the concepts of “burstiness” and “perplexity” in AI today.
- If human beings recognize artificial intelligence (”hive mind”) as a person…it is a person. A simplified “Turning test” as it were.
- Human begins are the result of millions of years of “very deep encounter[s] with physical reality” so much so that there are no “abstractable bits”—we don’t know, and may never know, what the specifics of personhood are from a computational point of view. This approach to thinking about computationalism is what Lanier prefers.