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What Turned Jaron Lanier Against the Web?
- jeffehobbs 14y agoThis guy has always been a shyster, even back in the Mondo 2000 years. I think it's just as likely that he ran out of gullible audience to buy into his particular brand of elitist, VRML Kool-Aid.
- andrewcooke 14y agodid you read the article? ironically, he's kind of concerned about people like you.
- rhizome 14y agoJust like religious people "worry" about those resistant to the fold. It's a form of pity inflicted upon those unconvinced by his perspective.
- googoobaby 14y agoI don't disagree with what he's saying, but find it interesting that he's still making a living as a fluffer to those very same people.
- dsplittgerber 14y agoI read his book, "You are not a gadget", and found it really thought-provoking and inspiring to focus more on real-world stuff I needed to do and less on reading about the ever latest fad that has no impact on my life whatsoever. As always, was it the book or my state of mind/stage in my life during which I read the book that made me change my mind about re-prioritizing? I don't know. But I'd recommend the book for an alternative perspective not often heard in the TechCr/otherblogs/Forbes/BW hype cycle that is the tech (esp consumer internet) world. FWIW, the book didn't strike me as elitist at all. I didn't know anything about him before, so I was strictly considering his arguments for their merits. Edit: Just finished the Smithsonian article, which I consider singularly unhelpful in really understanding the points he makes in his book. Do not judge his book or his arguments by this article. The article is an incoherent mess.
- luu 14y agoI wish a full transcript was available, because it's hard to tell if the writer has turned Lanier's views into an incoherent mess, or if his views actually are a mess, and the writer is doing the best he can to synthesize them. Page 2 seems to imply that part of Lanier's dislike of digital culture stems from the fact that MIDIs can't represent saxophone music. Was that really such an important part of the interview that it deserves space in what's clearly a short summary of a long interview? It sounds more like an aside that's been taken out of context. Later on that same page, the article seems to imply that automatic translation is bad because "by taking value off the books, you’re actually shrinking the economy." That is, because technology allows something to be done more cheaply, it's actually hurting the economy by shrinking nominal spending. But that's precisely why technology has been the primary driver of economic growth since the industrial revolution. You can make a case that it hurts some people while helping people in the aggregate, but, read as written, his criticism is an attack on pretty much any technology, ever. And then there's all the straw men, like the idea that "Web 2.0 intellectuals" think that "we shouldn’t be self-critical and that we shouldn’t be hard on ourselves is irresponsible." Isn't every other non-tech article on HN a critical piece? If anything, the consensus here seems to be that criticism is given too much attention (e.g., the most upvoted comment in many HN threads is a comment telling people not to be so harsh, the criticism of 'middlebrow dismassal' [1], etc.) [1] If my comment qualifies, I apologize. I'm writing this because I literally don't understand why Jaron Lanier believes what he does or what this article is trying to convey. The article is full of logical fallacies and contradictions that are so absurd that they're surely not his real views. Other people around here seem to be familiar with Lanier; perhaps someone with more background can make sense of this article. EDIT: his wikipedia page is decent, although it's a bit light on content: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jaron_Lanier http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jaron_Lanier. I don't agree, but, unlike the article, wikipedia presents his opinions in a reasonable light. EDIT2: Just as an aside, one of the biggest anti-features I find when I read HN is that there are often many comments expressing variants of the same opinion. They're not exactly redundant, because each presents a unique viewpoint, but it makes comment sections overly long. I'll often delete my comments after other, similar, comments pop up, to reduce the reading load. I'd delete this, because there are now six other comments expressing the opinion that either Lanier's opinions aren't cogent or that the article isn't representative of Lanier's opinions (and only one dissenter), but it's bad form to delete a comment after someone's quoted it, so I'll leave it here for posterity.
- smacktoward 14y agoI wasn't aware that Jaron Lanier was ever really for the Web. The things he's known for -- art games for the Commodore 64, early work on virtual reality, consulting on Second Life and Kinect, etc. -- are not really Web things. They're rooted more in the older William Gibson-style vision of completely immersive digital environments, rather than in hypertext. Which makes it a bit unconvincing to call him "the double agent, who, from a position deep inside, turns against the ideology he once professed fealty to." His ideology has always been orthogonal to the ideology the Web came out of.
- 001sky 14y agoFrom 1997 to 2001, Lanier was the Chief Scientist of Advanced Network and Services, which contained the Engineering Office of Internet2, and served as the Lead Scientist of the National Tele-immersion Initiative, a coalition of research universities studying advanced applications for Internet2. ==Looks like his first "contra" essay was in 2000. (Per Wikipedia).
- smacktoward 14y agoInternet2 is not "of the Web" either; it's focused more on developing out the IP network itself than on any particular application that runs over IP (of which the Web is one). I'm not familiar with the work of the National Tele-immersion Initiative, but from the name it certainly sounds like it's more interested in the type of full-sensory environments Lanier has usually been associated with than with hypertext applications.
- randallsquared 14y agoJaron Lanier always seems to be about to make a deep, profound point, or to be talking as though he just made a deep, profound point. Somehow I always miss the point, though.
- fatbird 14y agoThis is my experience of him, too. I've never understood why he gets the attention he does, except perhaps that he fits a nice caricature of what people who want to be lectured at, think the lecturer looks like. Besides a branch of technology that fizzled out, he's contributed nothing of which I'm aware has had any real impact on my daily life. Being a perennial on the TED circuit is an effect, not a cause.
- rhizome 14y agoThe point is that he's sweeping away strawmen left and right, leaving himself at the center of what remains.
- lsdkhjfvgasn 14y agoI don't know if Jaron is right or not about the web, information freedom, and its effects on musicians, translators, and other content creators. It will take a few more years to find out what happens to a society with true freedom of information once the dust has settled, assuming we actually manage to build one. One thing from the article that did really hit me is the quote, “This is the thing that continues to scare me. You see in history the capacity of people to congeal—like social lasers of cruelty. That capacity is constant.” I see it on a small scale all the time. The tendency that lets middle-schoolers pick on ugly kids and the Westboro Baptists to spread hate about gays is the same flaw in group psychology that gives us witch hunts and holocausts and suicide bombers. "Kill the outsider! Shun the nonbeliever! Purify the tribe! Root our the Communists!" To the people involved it feels so perfect and righteous and true. We never realize until it's too late what a horrible thing they've started. This pattern, this tendency toward purges and mass hysterias, has probably been with us as long as we've had tribes and it's not going anywhere unless we do something very serious about it. Human nature is old and big and it doesn't go down without a fight. This particular quirk of human nature scares the shit out of me. I don't think I'm exaggerating when I say it threatens the very survival of our species. Again I don't know much about this Jaron character but I get the feeling we're on the same side. "Social lasers of cruelty" is a perfect name for something I've been trying to pin down and name for a while now.
- gojomo 14y agoIndeed, the early days of 'living online' offered a respite from peer pressure. The rise of 'social' and arrival of everyone means conformist pressures are back, and maybe stronger than ever... the high school that you can never leave.
- zby 14y agoI recommend Rene Girard insight into that.
- mcantelon 14y agoNot sure why Lanier's opinion is relevant. Like Kurzweil, seems like he did his best work in the past and is mostly coasting on past cred these days.
- wmf 14y agoFortunately his arguments (his actual arguments in the book, not the summaries in the press) can be evaluated on their merits.
- contingencies 14y agoInterestingly, with all the economy references, the lead Bitcoin developer Gavin Andresen was apparently on the VRML standard committee. I wonder if those two have had a chat yet. Single page: http://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/What-Turned-Jaron-Lanier-Against-the-Web-183832741.html?c=y&story=fullstory http://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/What-Turned-Jaron...
- Tloewald 14y agoI find his views far more compelling than Kurzweil's. I do not know how accurate his description of Google Translate is, but if accurate it is depressing.
- hakaaak 14y agoThe tl;dr version: The net is a gun that we will shoot ourselves with.
- tod222 14y agoThe article's subtitle calls Lanier the "visionary behind virtual reality" and tempers that slightly in the body text calling him "...a pioneer and publicizer of virtual-reality technology..." and stating "...he helped make virtual reality a reality..." Yet most of the Timeline section of Wikipedia's entry for VR predates Lanier. [1] From the article: > Lanier is still in the game in part because virtual reality has become, virtually, reality these days. "If you look out the window," he says pointing to the traffic flowing around Union Square, "there’s no vehicle that wasn’t designed in a virtual-reality system first. And every vehicle of every kind built—plane, train—is first put in a virtual-reality machine and people experience driving it [as if it were real] first." No, they were designed in a Computer-aided design (CAD) system first. The 20 year history of CAD prior to 1985 is omitted and CAD is subsumed into VR. Automakers were leading users of high-end graphics systems and CAD prior to Lanier's involvement: > ...probably the most important work on polynomial curves and sculptured surface was done by Pierre Bézier (Renault), Paul de Casteljau (Citroen), Steven Anson Coons (MIT, Ford), James Ferguson (Boeing), Carl de Boor (GM), Birkhoff (GM) and Garibedian (GM) in the 1960s and W. Gordon (GM) and R. Riesenfeld in the 1970s. [2] Designs are now tested with VR, but that's really just an extension of the CAD process. Another issue is that navigating through virtual 3D environments was being done long before 1985 in the form of high-end flight simulators delivered to the military [3] and projects such as the Aspen Movie Map. [4] First person games existed but were severely limited by the capability of the hardware of the time. [5] Head-mounted displays also predate 1985. [6] [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtual_reality#Timeline http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtual_reality#Timeline [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer-aided_design#History http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer-aided_design#History [3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flight_simulator#Computing_in_flight_simulators http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flight_simulator#Computing_in_f... [4] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aspen_Movie_Map http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aspen_Movie_Map [5] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_person_%28video_games%29#History http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_person_%28video_games%29#... [6] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helmet_mounted_display#History http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helmet_mounted_display#History
- CKKim 14y agoI'm seeing much skepticism and criticism of Lanier in the comments here, which would be my position too, based on 99% of what I've watched or read about him (a scene with an Aibo comes to mind especially!). However, there was a 1% where I felt he really shined and that was in a bloggingheads discussion with Eliezer Yudkowsky. It's been about a year since I last watched it but I've seen it four times in total and every time there are large periods where I'm really locked into the points Lanier is making and find myself in agreement. Check it out here (go on, Yudkowsky is always good value!): http://bloggingheads.tv/videos/1849 http://bloggingheads.tv/videos/1849.
- b1daly 14y agoFrom reading in the popular press about Jaron Lanier he strikes me as more of an artiste than technologist. Which is fine by me. His comments in this article hint at something that nags at me as a musician and lover of music, which is the rise of the concept of "content" to describe creative works. The ubiquity of digital networks has led to an unprecedented level of commodification of music (for example). Various large entities like (Google, Apple, Facebook) and influential networks of transmission (bit torrent, Grooveshark, Spotify, Mega-Upload) seem to have not only captured more of the value of creative artists, they have also captured huge cultural mindshare. (The tech CEO as rock star). Google in particular disturbs me as it seems like the search engine has become more important than what is searched for. This somehow feels hollow to me. I'm interested in general about how meaning is created by and for people. Music is an old means of adding, or at least enhancing meaning. Now figures like Steve Jobs take some of that role. But there is at least some irony that the gadget that broke Apple into the popular mainstream was a music player, completely un-interesting with out the content that it commodifies.
- guscost 14y agoSelf-Promotion alert: You might enjoy my iOS game. Adding more features and "content" soon. https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/mixball/id578469049?mt=8 https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/mixball/id578469049?mt=8
- zeruch 14y agoLanier has long since "lost the plot" in that he kind of seemed to have grown to dislike the commodification of "thought leadership". Even before this I was wary of a certain preciousness that went into his thinking; a kind of "we can make VR so cool..." but it always seemed less open and free wheeling. In a way you could say he's Apple and the web is Linux.
- jrogers65 14y agoI can't comprehend how this individual is considered to be influencial when, looking at his achievements, he has not really contributed anything of substance. I don't mean to be a killjoy, I just honestly don't see why he is considered to be an authority on, well, anything. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jaron_Lanier#Works http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jaron_Lanier#Works He wrote a couple of books and gave a few speeches? Perhaps I'm missing the point - if anyone would care to enlighten me, I'd appreciate it.
- bobcarr 14y agoI find the criticisms of Jaron Lanier here to be unfair, excessively dismissive and painfully elitist. Just because many of the technologies used in VR were already invented, it doesn't take away from his important contributions, namely the founding of VPL Research, whose patents were important enough to be acquired by Sun. Would you make the same argument about Steve Jobs who popularized products already invented by other individuals and companies such as Alan Kay and Xerox? There are tons of tech pundits who don't have a clue about how technology actually works, yet such criticisms are never leveled against them. Even if Mr. Lanier didn't contribute anything to the field of VR, it doesn't take away from his message: web 2.0 and open source has been a spectacular failure and is destroying individuality and the middle-class. I've watched several of his lectures and read his book, he nibbles around the his main point with lots of history and digressions. He's very careful with his language and tries to avoid opening himself for being labeled or attacked. Consequently, he comes off sounding tepid, overly philosophical and even incoherent at times. M. Lanier claims that online collectivism or the hive mind is benefiting the few (Google and Facebook) and not the masses, the content contributers. Content made freely accessible by trusting authors have been mined by network operators to make billions, while the authors, who put their hearts and minds into their work, receive neither money nor recognition. Facebook is now starting to charge their users to broadcast to their "friends." Web 2.0 has failed to create a larger middle-class through new opportunities that are financially rewarding. In fact, Mr. Lanier argues that it is shrinking it. His most salient arguements are aimed at the Open Source movement. He argues that it hasn't produced any notable innovations, nor has it expanded the pie for the software industry. On any given day, a small group at Apple out innovates the entire open source movement. Open Source was supposed to liberate us from the tyrany of commercial software companies like Microsoft and Adobe. Instead, it has only increased their dominance by weeding out all of their smaller competitors. What are the chances of something like PC-Write succeeding today? After all these years, the open source movement has yet to offer sensible alternatives to Windows, Mac OS X and large complex applications such as the Adobe Suite and Microsoft Office. Instead, Open Source has focused on software that doesn't require high-risk development such as development tools, frameworks and OS utilities. The few quality ones like Firefox, are developed by teams funded by large organizations. Being Open Source isn't what's made these applications successful. Mr. Lanier makes some very sound and persuasive arguments. If you don't agree at least take the time to ponder it and give it the respect that it deserves. Writing him off as a charlatan or an opportunist isn't an argument, but a cheap character attack.