Jaron Lanier - You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto (1 Viewer)

Erik

If u don't know the poetry u don't know Bukowski
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What do you ppl know about this guy?
His new book called "You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto" sounds interesting. Heres a quote from a Q&A on Amazon:

It became fashionable to aggregate the expressions of people into dehumanized data. There are so many things wrong with this that it takes a whole book to summarize them. Here's just one problem: It screws the middle class. Only the aggregator (like Google, for instance) gets rich, while the actual producers of content get poor. This is why newspapers are dying. It might sound like it is only a problem for creative people, like musicians or writers, but eventually it will be a problem for everyone. When robots can repair roads someday, will people have jobs programming those robots, or will the human programmers be so aggregated that they essentially work for free, like today's recording musicians? Web 2.0 is a formula to kill the middle class and undo centuries of social progress.
- Jaron Lanier
Think I'm gonna read this book. More info here:
http://www.booksvariety.com/you-are-not-a-gadget-a-manifesto
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i think, like alan kauffman's histrionic article about ebooks, that this book most likely oversimplifies the issue to an intellectually suspect degree. for instance: "the producers of content get poor. this is why the newspapers are dying." yes, the gazillionaire tycoons like rupert murdoch who own newspapers, those poor hand-to-mouth souls getting the life choked out of them by fat cats a google. who in the middle class owns a newspaper and is being forced into the lower class by data aggregation?

and the poor musicians! the poor, poor working musicians who were living it up on fat checks sent to them dutifully every month by the honest, profit-sharing record companies. oh the horror of technology swooping in and giving their music away, so now they essentially work for free! everyone knows that pre-internet, music was a totally viable way for thousands of people to earn a living, but certainly not anymore.

and, for fucking serious, "WHEN ROBOTS CAN REPAIR THE ROADS?!!" this is now what we're worried about? leaving aside the centuries of mechanization required before road repair is a totally automated and remote procedure requiring no human intervention whatsoever, are we to assume that the companies at the top can "program" the robots into existence in the first place? like, no manufacturing base at all will need to be created to serve society's apparently overwhelming need to do everything by robots instead of humans?

i will admit that i haven't read anything about this book and am basing my opinion about it solely on the quotation below, but that one quotation is pretty fucking stupid.
 
the poor, poor working musicians who were living it up on fat checks sent to them dutifully every month by the honest, profit-sharing record companies.
Ha ha ha ha ha ha...

This guy is utterly and completely off base if he thinks any of this here netty technology is bad for musicians. Quite the opposite.

But he's passionate, you have to give him that.

Web 2.0 is a formula to kill the middle class...
What middle class?

Okay, I just noticed his name...Jaron Lanier has been around online making his opinions known for as long as I can remember, and he's kind of a douchebag. I don't know if I'd rush out to read anything he wrote.
 
I certainly do not want to see robots working on the road, I'd rather want all robots to be like the one in this cnn article. though, man she's one ugly robot.

The internet killing musicians always makes me laugh, but also makes me think of Metallica and how much I despise them. So I do hope web 2.0(whatever that is) has the power to at least kill Metallica.
 
OH MY GOD! KINDLE!
It is going to kill the publishing industry and then move on to road work! Oh please no, no! I need to work. I'm almost middle class now, don't let robot road workers steal it all away.
 
Hmmm, on the other hand, maybe I won't read this book after all.....:D
 
Ha. Hey, I read a lot of stuff I don't agree with, and Jaron Lanier bias aside, he is passionate and I don't doubt that the book is full of crazy ideas. I just think, for someone who has been "in on" the internet since the beginning (him, not me - I was early, but not that early), he's come to some pretty weird conclusions.
 
it stuns me that it's become a cause of many on the progressive/activist left to protest data aggregation in this way... as if moving back to a system when the flow of information was controlled by a handful of extremely powerful corporations is somehow better?
 
... as if moving back to a system when the flow of information was controlled by a handful of extremely powerful corporations is somehow better?
Boy am I glad we only have a handful of extremely weak corporations like Google, Yahoo, Ebay, Amazon, Facebook etc. who control the flow of information as little as possible. That definitely sounds better...
 
it stuns me that it's become a cause of many on the progressive/activist left to protest data aggregation in this way...
It is odd. I assumed anyone who wanted to work or do business on line came to grips with data and privacy issues a long time ago, But here we are again protecting each other from ourselves. ;)

Boy am I glad we only have a handful of extremely weak corporations like Google, Yahoo, Ebay, Amazon, Facebook etc. who control the flow of information as little as possible. That definitely sounds better...
None of those companies control the flow of anything that you didn't voluntarily hand over to them. With the exception of Google, but they don't control anything either, they just provide an index to the web. They don't owe any of us anything. People use them because they are good at what they do, but there is an alternative provider for every service they offer.

The difference between those companies and the companies that Jordan may have been referring to, is the old school companies typically walled off data (e.g. the mountains of personal date that insurance companies aggregate) while the newer web-based companies typically exist to make money off making information publicly available. Big difference.

And no online company is stealing your blood. You can exist quite pleasantly on line without leaving a footprint anywhere.
 
yeah, pretty much. i was referring to big news orgs that used to be able to act like gateways to the information that people received. they still try, but it's just not effective now, since information flows so freely across the web. google could, in theory, start doing this - dropping sites critical of google from their index, making it easier to find articles sympathetic to their political aims, etc. - but people would stop using them, because doing so would make them an ineffective search engine.

there's a big difference between large corporations that INDEX data and large corporations that DISSEMINATE data. if you can disseminate data that no one else can, you control the information. the web has made this largely impossible.
 

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