Jaron Lanier

     In reading You Are Not a Gadget it's clear that Lanier has many opinions, abstractions and meanderings when it comes to the technology industry. While his writing isn't always organized or as articulate as it could be, all of his theories are well crafted and deserve some thought. His work is controversial and certainly contains at least some view that we find disagreeable, but I think it's important that we are not immediately dismissive of his contributions.

    In class we discussed Lanier's idea of 'lock-in' which was prevalent throughout the first portion of his book. If you are a technology aficionado and an optimist, the idea that the internet and technology as a whole can get locked-in to patterns that limit the potential for advancement and ultimately restricts ourselves, is not something we can conceive as possible. The potential for technology certainly isn't limited by the architecture of MIDI, nor the 140 character limit of a tweet, and Lanier is completely aware of this. The advantage Lanier has when thinking about the direction of the web is perspective. He is completely aware that we are capable of writing our blogs on our ugly and poorly crafted html web pages, and he encourages us to do so, instead of putting ourselves in the box provided by blogger. What I believe Lanier is articulating with his idea of lock-in is not the absolutist view that we find so easy to disagree with, but rather a trend he has noticed in the past several decades of technology development. He is not trying to say that no one can ever create a better protocol than MIDI, but that MIDI has been used so extensively and is so pervasive that it becomes very difficult to break free from its grasp. In the same light, it is much more difficult for us to express ourselves accurately by developing our own web pages, than it is for us to just become another type of Blogger user.

     Another idea Lanier touches on in his book, and more extensively in the video below, is the information marketplace. His criticism of the free and open web is controversial, but I think he illustrates some important points. First we must understand that while much of the information on the web is free to attain, it does in fact have a value. One of these valuable types of information is information about you, the individual. His argument is, as I understand it, that companies like Google collect massive amounts of information by providing a 'free' service in order to sell the information they collect at a much higher price than they paid for it. Understanding information this way allows you to realize that by using Google's services you are making a financial transaction, and one heavily weighted in Google's favor. What Lanier is advocating when he discusses financial transactions associated with information exchange is not greed or more capitalism but clarity. He wants to make people aware of the value of the information at hand so that people can accurately asses the value of the information they hold and a middle class can be developed in this information marketplace. As it stands, he sees the current approach to information exchange as rigged in the favor of large corporations. In the video he discusses all of this much more articulately and suggests his ideas for avoiding this Plutocracy. Even if you don't agree, it's certainly worth checking out.