Sometimes when navigating a flurry of deadlines, which are totally uninteresting, the work appeas, which is interesting, with any luck. The latest: for Flavorwire, my review of Jaron Lanier’s You Are Not a Gadget.
If you are not a gadget, what are you? Jaron Lanier would have you be a person, but he warns that Web 2.0 is pushing us away from personhood in ways that we haven’t really examined. Actually, he might have you be a cephalopod, because he finds octopi mesmerizing, but that enthusiasm only appears at the end of You Are Not a Gadget
, his first book.
It is something of a reckoning. Lanier turns a philosopher’s eye to our everyday online tools. What do they say about us? How have they come to inhabit and inhibit the way we imagine ourselves? Who do our new systems reward? Is the Internet all that, really?
I really like that Lanier, the father of virtual reality, is a brilliant programmer who makes his case without making a straightforward linear argument. He hops from idea to idea, which is frutrating in places, but ultimately serves to force the reader to engage with his ideas dynamically, having space to think of counterarguments or make connections.
And now: coffee. Plus another deadline.
I once had a long phone interview with Jaron Lanier in regards to a book I was doing some research for about futuristic living. He was captivating, brilliant and charming. He went on at length about virtual reality and offered to give me a demonstration in person. As I was in NYC and he in Sausalito at the time, that, unfortunately, never came to pass. I would say unequivocally that he is a true genius, and that’s not a word I throw about lightly. What a mind…