{"id":4915,"date":"2012-12-31T05:00:39","date_gmt":"2012-12-31T12:00:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=4915"},"modified":"2013-01-01T09:31:39","modified_gmt":"2013-01-01T16:31:39","slug":"a-techo-prophet-who-says-the-web-has-harmed-us","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=4915","title":{"rendered":"A Techo-Prophet Who Says the Web Has Harmed Us"},"content":{"rendered":"

Back when I was subscribing to Stewart Brand’s CoEvolution Quarterly<\/em> <\/a>in the 1980s, Jaron Lanier made frequent appearances in its pages as techno-prophet extraordinaire.<\/p>\n

He was the guy who was helping to invent virtual reality. He was presented as being miles ahead of the rest of us. He was, as this Smithsonian <\/em>article, “What Turned Jaron Lanier Against the Web<\/a>”\u00a0 says, a Silicon Valley rock star.<\/p>\n

Now he is a Silicon Valley heretic. And having seen the consequences, he has changed his mind about a number of things, including the whole “information wants to be free” mantra, which he helped to promote.<\/p>\n

The mistake of our age? That\u2019s a bold statement (as someone put it in Pulp Fiction<\/em>). \u201cI think it\u2019s the reason why the rise of networking has coincided with the loss of the middle class, instead of an expansion in general wealth, which is what should happen. But if you say we\u2019re creating the information economy, except that we\u2019re making information free, then what we\u2019re saying is we\u2019re destroying the economy.\u201d<\/p>\n

The connection Lanier makes between techno-utopianism, the rise of the machines and the Great Recession is an audacious one. Lanier is suggesting we are outsourcing ourselves into insignificant advertising-fodder. Nanobytes of Big Data that diminish our personhood, our dignity. He may be the first Silicon populist.<\/p>\n

\u201cTo my mind an overleveraged unsecured mortgage is exactly the same thing as a pirated music file. It\u2019s somebody\u2019s value that\u2019s been copied many times to give benefit to some distant party. In the case of the music files, it\u2019s to the benefit of an advertising spy like Google [which monetizes your search history], and in the case of the mortgage, it\u2019s to the benefit of a fund manager somewhere. But in both cases all the risk and the cost is radiated out toward ordinary people and the middle classes\u2014and even worse, the overall economy has shrunk in order to make a few people more.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

This is a challenging article, one that I plan to return to and absorb. Read it yourself.<\/a><\/p>\n

Added:<\/strong> Rod Dreher talks about the Lanier article and how it dovetails with a lesson he learned in life: Never trust the Crowd.<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Back when I was subscribing to Stewart Brand’s CoEvolution Quarterly in the 1980s, Jaron Lanier made frequent appearances in its pages as techno-prophet extraordinaire. He was the guy who was helping to invent virtual reality. He was presented as being miles ahead of the rest of us. He was, as this Smithsonian article, “What Turned […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[26],"class_list":["post-4915","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-culture"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6xQTg-1hh","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":1668,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=1668","url_meta":{"origin":4915,"position":0},"title":"Video Gaming and Lucid Dreaming","author":"Chas S. 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