book: You Are Not a Gadget

You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto
by Jaron Lanier

2010, Knopf

count: 240 / counting only 180 pages

I picked up a reference to this title from a tweet by one of our "25 People to Know," Neil Krasnof. The kernel of the work is that we must be aware of, and intentionally work against, the dehumanizing tendency of the Internet and many of the superficial Web 2.0 "gadgets" that work to deny individual identity for the greater consciousness of the web.

I decided to make this post a sharing of some of his more salient points. I read the Kindle version, so I use the location numbers to cite some of his quotes. (Then the Kindle loan expired, and I did not have the location numbers saved =/

• "You have to find a way to be yourself before you can share yourself."  (loc 114)
• The book argues that "certain specific, popular internet designs of the momemt --not the internet as  a whole-- tend to pull us into life patterns that gradually degrade the ways in which each of us exists as an individual. (loc 114)
• "They [the words of this book] will be scanned, rehashed, and misrepresented by crowds of quick and sloppy readers into wikis and automatically aggregated wireless text message streams." ( loc 150)
• Web 2.0:  "a torrent of petty designs ... [which] promote radical freedom on the surface of the web, "   "vapid, lightweight trivial."  "On the whole, this widespread pracice of fragmentary, impersonal communication has demeaned interpersonal interaction."   (loc 192)
• It is impossible to wok with information technology without also engaging in social engineering. ... The design of the web as it appears today was not inevitable. p. 6
• Lock-in turns philosophy in reality
• Entrenched software philosophies become invisible through ubiquity
• Technology criticism shouldn't be left to the Luddites  
• The new designs on the verg of being locked in, the web 2.0 designs actively demand that people define themselves downward.

What we can do to work against this de-humanizing tendency:

1. Don't post anonymously unless you really might be in danger
2. 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 are contributed to.
3. 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.
4. Post a video once in a while that took you one hundred times more time to create than it takes to view.
5. Write a blog post that took weeks of reflection before you heard the inner voice that needed to come out.
6. If you are twittering, innovate in order to find a way to describe your internal state instead of trival exteternal events, to avoid the creeping danger of believing that objectively described events define you, as they would define a machine. (These from Chapter 1, pp. 20, 21)

 I'm sorry, Jaron: I fear I have done exactly what you predicted: misrepresented your message as one of "crowds of quick and sloppy readers." I really was impressed with your book and the message -- I have not heard this elsewhere.

(And to add insult to injury, I did not finish the final chapters (page count adjusted accordingly).

Included in Amazon's Best Books of the Month, January 2010.