INTRODUCTION
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I HAVE READ MANY DEFINITIONS OF WHAT IS A CONSERVATIONIST, AND WRITTEN NOT
A FEW MYSELF, BUT I SUSPECT THAT THE BEST ONE IS WRITTEN NOT WITH A PEN,
BUT W...
The Cross Maker
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Whenever I look at that cross above the altar I see his plane moving back
and forth along the wood like the pendulum of some old clock, see little
curls of...
Jaron Lanier ends his long awaited first book, You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto, by trying to explain his gig as a philosopher of the early 21st Century. In doing so, he cannot help but allude to Marshall McLuhan:
The phase of life we call "childhood" was greatly expanded in connection with the rise of literacy, because it takes time to learn to read. [...] It has even been claimed that the widespread acceptance of childhood as a familiar phase of human life only occurred in conjunction with the spread of the printing press. (180)
Lanier takes pains to show a physiological basis for metaphor, for metaphor is the route by which we get closer and closer to the nature of consciousness, and that brings us full circle to Chapter 1.
Jaron Lanier begins his long awaited first book, You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto, by trying to explain his day job as a technologist of the late 20th Century. In doing so, he cannot help but allude to Marshall McLuhan:
We make up extensions to your being, like remote eyes and ears (webcams and mobile phones) and expanded memory (the world of details you can search for online). (5)
This would have been yesterday's news to McLuhan, whose 1964 opus, Understanding Media, is subtitled "The Extensions of Man." McLuhan understood well that Lanier and his technologist coworkers were merely extending human organs in new, virtual ways.
Lanier, however, is aware of his ironic position, and takes pains to separate himself from the hive mentality that dominates Web 2.0 and all of its adherents (including contributors to the blogosphere). And since his own subtitle is "A Manifesto," which would seem to indicate a high level of public importance, Lanier provides a self-help list of do's and don'ts for those addicted to the superficiality of Web 2.0 reductionism:
Don't post anonymously unless you really might be in danger.
If you put effort into Wikipedia articles, put even more effort into using your personal voice and expression outside of the wiki to help attract people who don't yet realize that they are interested in the topics you contributed to.
Create a website that expresses something about who you are that won't fit into the template available to you on a social networking site.
Post a video once in a while that took you one hundred times more time to create than it takes to view.
Write a blog post that took weeks of reflection before you heard the inner voice that needed to come out.
If you are twittering, innovate in order to find a way to describe your internal state instead of trivial external events, to avoid the creeping danger of believing that objectively described events define you, as they would define a machine.
That's some good advice. If we all adhered to Lanier's dicta, we would be spared the vituperative trash that infects topical forums, Wikipedia would be useful background to the real story, websites would be windows into our souls, YouTube would be worth watching, more blogs would be worth reading, and Twitter might actually be interesting. Imagine the kind of Singularity we could then produce!
In 1991, Brian Eno famously quipped that "Future TV will be made with simple equipment, unqualified people, small budgets, and bad taste." Lanier sees the fulfillment of that prophecy in a section called "Schlock Defended." Again, he can see the irony of YouTube, and suggests that, while it could--and should--be of much higher quality, the motivation to create schlock is inarguably human.
Lanier then takes on computationalism in his chapter titled "I Am a Contrarian Loop," an obvious spoof on our own Doug Hofstadter's work. Lanier critiques the three "flavors" of computationalism that are supposed to result in the Singularity--the awakening of the web. First there's the notion that sheer quantities of data held in databases such as Google's will somehow wake up to some kind of cosmic consciousness. A second flavor--that proferred by Hofstadter--requires self-aware recursion--a "strange loop"--in order to qualify as consciousness. Finally, there is Web 2.0 computationalism, which holds to a new twist on the Turing test: if you buy music based on the recommendations of the hive "then the hive is effectively a person" (156). Lanier then suggests that human evolution is, in fact, realistic computationalism, and we could construct a myth, a creation tale, "to think computationally that isn't as vulnerable to the confusion brought about by our ideas about ideal computers" (157). For McLuhan, myth "is the mode of simultaneous awareness of a complex group of causes and effects" (McLuhan, 1962, 266). This "complex group of causes and effects" is simply another way to express Lanier's realistic computationalism.
Every day, the largest nuclear reactor in the solar system appears on the eastern horizon; in fact, it is constantly doing so somewhere on the planet. This star alone is responsible for the reserves of energetic capital that we are rapidly depleting through our heavy reliance on fossil fuel technologies. We must now remember how to live solely on our solar income, tapping into our savings only when absolutely necessary.
, is subtitled "The Extensions of Man." McLuhan understood well that Lanier and his technologist coworkers were merely extending human organs in new, virtual ways.
