Jaron Lanier is an unusual and endearing presence in the world of digital futures. A working musician with a collection 700 musical instruments; a passion for cephalopods, virtual reality and augmented medical surgery; and a profound commitment to the ways in which digital futures should recognise and (re) incorporate the human.  His new book, You are Not a Gadget, is not only a counter-cultural rant against the new orthodoxy of cybernetic totalism (its subtitle could have been ‘Be a person, not a collection of bits in the crowd’), but also a paean for a new humanism, a humble humanism in those who author the digital worlds we are increasingly inhabiting.

Lanier is not a cyber-pessimist, although he may well share many of their concerns. His  critique runs deeper and ranges from the physical to the metaphysical. The target of his ire is also wider, more inclusive. Lanier is worried that the new sub-culture (cybernetic totalism) which has developed around such concepts as the Noosphere (the collective brain created from a sum of all those people connected on the web), the Singularity (the fantasy of an earth overrun by superintelligent robots), the cloud (computing resources available over the internet), and Web 2.0, is beginning to look and act like a religion with adepts, proselytizers and doctrinaire liturgies. The problem, according to Lanier, is in accepting uncritically the tenets of the new religion. One of these tenets is that higher forms of consciousness arise the networked group which is more than the sum of its parts. It’s the idea that fuels work on the hive mind and swarm intelligence and which has entered popular culture through Surowieki’s The Wisdom of Crowds and Shirky’s Here Comes Everybody. Lanier has been involved in debates around this before (see Lanier’s Digital Maoism and the ensuing discussion) and whilst his ideas haven’t changed, they are clearer and more nuanced. He’s not against the collective. Nor is he against collective decision-making. But he is wary of the dangers of unfettered collective decision making and more importantly the human consequences of modeling digital software development on the back of it.

The digital hive is growing at the expense of individuality (26)

Lanier doesn’t define individuality but instead suggests the ways in which the human is being degraded by the totalism he warns against, thus arriving by stealth at what he means. So, for example, even seemingly small technological innovations can have enormous consequence for how we understand ourselves and our environment. The ‘file’, now firmly embedded as a metaphor for our understanding of how information is broken up and stored, has quickly become the only (and the only likely) metaphor. It didn’t have to be that way. There were alternative digital futures that could have been designed but file stuck – and stick it will for the foreseeable future. This lock-in phenomemon (when simple software programmes become complex their building blocks become very difficult to change) means that we have to be alert to the philosophical implications in the design decisions for new technologies. Such design decisions not only give us tools for doing, they are also tools for being. Lock-in + religious ferver + uncritical acceptance give us technologies that, if they weren’t ‘cutting edge technologies’, we would question. Both Microsoft and Google think they know what we want to do before we do so they ‘suggest’ that we want to create a document outline or that we are seaching for David Cameron and not David James. However, Lanier wonders:

Did that search engine really know what you want, or are you playing along, lowering your standards to make it seem clever?

And this is true he argues of so much web 2.0 software and services. Wikipedia (“the oracle illusion”) degrades the notion of authorship and so surpresses human authority to serve superhuman authority … just as the bible did.  Facebook degrades friendship in the service of ‘connections between nodes’. Digital ‘information’ has replaced the irreducible mystery of being human. Much of Part 1 of You are not a Gadget is concerned with showing that consciousness is not reducible to bits and that any attempt to do so degrades what it means to be human. Because information architects have forgotten that information is ‘alienated experience’ we are in the process of losing the human value that information can have when it is contextualised in human experience.

It wasn’t (and isn’t) always the case. In the 1970s as an apprentice applied linguist I was asked to participate in some research being conducted by the author of the Oxford Dictionary of Current Idiomatic English, Anthony Cowie. Presented with a list of idioms we were asked which we felt were acceptable and which not. In an important sense we were being asked to use our judgement based on intuitions as users of the English language. It was a method that led to the inclusion or exclusion of particular idioms in the dictionary. This was a time when corpus linguistics was just emerging with the availability of low(er) cost computing. Digital datasets were collected of naturally occuring language from various text media. Software programmes were designed to sift through the sets looking for occurances and patterns that would otherwise have taken an enormous amount of time to find. But as Tony’s method showed, there was a practical understanding that the mysteries of intuition were irreducible to bits and that when information is alienated from the experience of that information, its use becomes limited.

The ‘information cult’ has had other consequences in education. Lanier argues that the rise of standardised testing can be mapped to the rise of the adoption of information systems. He doesn’t exactly, but that’s the thrust of his observation. Information systems are seen as essential to the effective running of a system – a school. It’s not difficult to see why. Mapping attendance and location (the register) is clearly an advantage in an institution which is responsible for the children in its care. Yet, the information such systems contain always underrepresents reality: Johnny may be at school but dreaming, suffering from a cold, love-lorn etc. etc. However, this doesn’t deter the evangelists of the information cult. In fact it fires them up to find ever more information to justify the existance of the system. Introducing performance marks is one way of doing that and standardised testing is a way of converting performance into a format that the system can digest. With standardised tests comes standard comparisons and the choice of teaching the curriculum or teaching the test. It’s not difficult to see the way that one went.

So the human is increasingly squeezed out by a system designed and maintained in bits by designers who think in terms of information. But that’s the point. The standardisation, the clinical precision, the fragmentation and surpression of individual experience and creativity are all design issues. The system is one system not the system. We need to fight back.

It’s now easy to understand why Lanier might think that free or open culture is a disaster. If cyber totalists are degrading what it means to be human, free culture (one of its creeds) is substituting people as the sources of their own creativity for anonymised fragments of bits.

The combination of hive mind and advertising has resulted in a new kind of social contract. The basic idea of this contract is that authors, journalists, musicians and artists are encouraged to treat the fruits of their intellects and imaginations as fragments to be given without pay to the hive mind. Culture is to become nothing but advertising.

Worryingly few authors are making money in the new digital economy. Fewer still are making a living. So, what do they live on? Or, more importantly for Lanier, instead of celebrating the creation of Lords of the Cloud and Serfs of the Free, how could technology designers give the cultural middle class (the jobbing musician, the newspaper stringer, the photographer) a way to live off their hard-earned professional crafts? What he suggests is a re-negotiation of the social contract in which we would, he argues, agree to pay a tax in order to have the ability to earn money from our own creativity. Such a toll could have many forms but the principle is one that would underpin new models. It would underpin ‘telegigging’, the idea of renting a telepresence ( a juggler for a party, an immersive fantasy production for a village); songles, physical musical artifacts which create exchange value through inbuilt scarcity; and a financial system which removes layers of abstraction (the cause of immoral speculation) where necessary to produce contextualised exchange and investment.

The project is vital and urgent as cyber totalism threatens to become totalitarian. But the signs aren’t good. To achieve progess a radical creativity is needed but the hive mind has, thus far, only stifled the imaginations of a new generation of futurists who are strapped to a series of intellectual frameworks that were established in the 1970s. The hive hasn’t let them break free to be truly radical. Wikipedia might be a wonderful thing – but it is an encyclopedia. It becomes less radical when we remember that it is based on an idea that pre-dates the digital era. Musical mash-ups continuously reference and re-use pre-digital forms. We’re in a retro time warp and Lanier suggest that the only solution is to kill the hive. To do that we have to attack the principles on which the hive’s existance is based: the arguments for the continued reverence to the hive mind and all that comes with it.

Lanier does a good job. He’s readable, polemical, eminently quotable (as a good manifesto demands) and ultimately optimistic. He reminds us that computationalism (at heart, a theory of mind), when used as a tool for scientific understanding, is a valuable heuristic. When used as a solution to problems of engineering it could lead us to a fate worse than the Matrix.