What Turned Jaron Lanier Against the Web? | Hacker News Reader

What Turned Jaron Lanier Against the Web?

smithsonianmag.com

61 pointscwan39 comments

I 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.

I 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.

Indeed, 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.

I recommend Rene Girard insight into that.

I 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.

From 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).

Internet2 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.

Jaron 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.

This 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.

The point is that he's sweeping away strawmen left and right, leaving himself at the center of what remains.

So he is his own strawman?

No, the emperor of an imaginary country continually advertising for citizens.

This 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.

did you read the article? ironically, he's kind of concerned about people like you.

Just like religious people "worry" about those resistant to the fold. It's a form of pity inflicted upon those unconvinced by his perspective.

I'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.

From 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.

Self-Promotion alert: You might enjoy my iOS game. Adding more features and "content" soon.

https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/mixball/id578469049?mt=8

Interestingly, 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 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.

I 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

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.

I 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.

How does he know that's how it works?

I don't know. It does seem very plausible.

I 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. 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.

I don't thin your comment is "middlebrow" at all. I came to the end of the article confused as well. My guess is at Lanier is, in some sense, "all over the place", and the writer didn't really know how to pull it all together into a coherent picture of Lanier.

Regardless, there wasn't a single argument in the article that I would call cogent. That doesn't mean Lanier doesn't have cogent arguments (I really don't know); just that they didn't come through in this piece.

I'm pretty sure it's your reading comprehension that's at fault here. Don't blame the article for you making a mess of it.

> 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.

from the article:

Indeed, one of the foundations of Lanier’s critique of digitized culture is the very way its digital transmission at some deep level betrays the essence of what it tries to transmit. Take music.

One of the foundations is a general process, and music is used as an example for that process. Which is so far from what you turned it into, I'd really suggest reading it all again.

> 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.

What he actually says:

[With translation] you’re producing this result that looks magical but in the meantime, the original translators aren’t paid for their work—their work was just appropriated. So by taking value off the books, you’re actually shrinking the economy.

The way I understand that: If you don't pay the people who do the work, and people who make a collage out of their work get paid, you'll end up with much fewer new translations being undertaken. You take money from the people who do the work and give it to those who made a collage from it, and the total amount is much less. His argument isn't "it's bad because it's cheaper" -- rather your counterargument seems to be "that [criticism I kinda missed] is made up for because it's cheaper".

And I disagree. If I can buy a bun for 20 cents, or someone could rob the baker and give it to me for 5 cents, I'd rather have the bun for 20 cents, because that means more delicious bun tomorrow, and the day after that.

> Isn't every other non-tech article on HN a critical piece?

Critical, yeah. Self-critical (big difference) in the sense of "why I didn't succeed or how I could succeed harder", yeah. But in the sense of "wtf am I doing, why, and should I really be doing it?" -- not so much. You say every second non-technical article? Can you link me ten from the last 7 days? Not because I don't believe you, but because I want to read them, and at the very least I want to know what kind of article you think qualifies for this. Also, if the consensus here is that criticism is given too much attention (which doesn't even mean there's a lot going on, just that what of it is going on is already too much for some people - logic!) kinda confirms is point instead of refuting it.

But it's not about criticism anyway, it's about being self-critical. Plus, HN isn't the whole industry. So how would that even be a valid counterargument if it was true? (which also makes me asking for those self-critical articles kinda moot; I just like to be throrough)

>The way I understand that: If you don't pay the people who do the work, and people who make a collage out of their work get paid, you'll end up with much fewer new translations being undertaken.

That's silly. Those previous translations don't magically go away, they still exist. And new translations exist as well except they're now being done by a machine or by a much smaller number of human translator (see below for why this doesn't do any harm).

Having a million people translate "I like cats" into French doesn't give you a million translations. It gives you one translation repeated a million times. That's 999,999 redundant translations. Nothing novel or amazing about those 999,999 translations.

What is the difference between a machine doing those million translations and humans doing identical translations?

Of course, there are novel translations and those would require human input but that's a minority. If the machine can do 99% of translations but requires humans for the additional 1% why is it better to have humans translate 100% rather than just that 1%. You end up with the exact same quality and quantity of translations in both cases.

>You take money from the people who do the work and give it to those who made a collage from it, and the total amount is much less.

The machine is lowering the cost of translations and thus may increase the amount spent on translations. The people who made translations got paid already.

>And I disagree. If I can buy a bun for 20 cents, or someone could rob the baker and give it to me for 5 cents, I'd rather have the bun for 20 cents, because that means more delicious bun tomorrow, and the day after that.

Except that's not the situation. The situation is that someone took the bun, figured out how to make one from it and then started selling their own buns for 5 cents each. You can have that exact same bun forever from the new seller.

Of course, one day you may want a new bun and, you'd argue, that there are no bakers left. But that's silly and utterly simplistic. Once there's not enough bakers with buns to copy that doesn't mean that new recipes will cease to exist but rather than an an alternative will be found. So the new seller will have simply hired some bakers to create a new recipes. Some bakers will continue to have jobs except that instead of wasting all their time on the repetitive tasks of baking they'll instead spend it on innovative tasks of making new recipes (or improving existing ones). You end up with the same diversity and quality of buns now and in the future but at a lower price.

Of course, many bakers will lose their jobs but that's the consequence of all technology and progress. Light bulbs meant that many candle makers lost their jobs. Frankly I prefer light bulbs to candles.

In their place many new jobs will have opened up via the money which people used to spend on buns or candles. That's in addition to all the jobs needed to keep the new bun or light bulb making infrastructure running.

edit: Actually, the "perfect" machine translation would be superior to the average human translation for that 99% since it'd be based on the best human translation for every single piece of text. Needless to say machines are far from there yet but that also means human translators have little to fear job wise for now.

Amusingly, the next hot thing in web translation probably isn't machines. It's humans. Using mechanical turk. So thanks to the web there may soon be more human translators employed than ever before. That's on top of the machines which, to be frank, rather suck at any translation that really matters.

"The situation is that someone took the bun, figured out how to make one from it and then started selling their own buns for 5 cents each."

So why are they not simply buying the rights of the translations they are using? Because chopping it into pieces and analyzing it automatically doesn't require it? BS, we're talking about big data, if they wanted they could know exactly how many vowels and consonsants they used of each individual translator, and then start haggling.

And "heh" to "all technology and process costs jobs." How many jobs were lost when we found out washing hands before surgery is a good idea? It's such a mindless thing to say. It's a mantra, it's a goal, but far from the truth.

>So why are they not simply buying the rights of the translations they are using?

Why do you think they haven't done that? Or rather they paid the entity that owns the rights who at some point in the past paid those translators. Generally speaking the translators gave up their rights in exchange for money long ago.

Specifically google uses, for example, UN documents which translators were paid to translate and which are publicly usable.

If I write some code for a company, get paid for that code and then the company sells that code why should I get paid again?

Or do you think google is the first automated translation service? This has been done successfully for 30+ years commercially and academically. Nothing different just because it's on the web and not on some guys PC.

>How many jobs were lost when we found out washing hands before surgery is a good idea?

Actually, I'm sure there were all sort of quack solutions to infections and whole industries making them which went out of business as a result of doctor's realizing washing hands did the trick.

Edit: Not to mention the loss of jobs for morticians (in the short term), makers of amputation implements (and other tools to deal with all those infections), nurses specializing in dealing with infections, traditional healers (as doctors were now an even better choice) and so on. Lowering infections would have impacted every single person and industry that was built around the previous high-infection status quo.

Also, what you seem to not get is that this isn't a zero sum game.

Google translate doesn't cater to the same people as traditional translators. Google translate basically sucks, it can't compete with a half competent translator. It can however compete with a random friend who knows a hundred words in a language, it can compete with spending 6 hours digging through dictionaries, it can compete with asking people on forums for translations and so on. And it has done more than that.

It has increased the market for translations, things that no one would have ever wanted to translate before can now be translated. Things that would have forever been locked away in one language can now be read, barely, by everyone. This is something that human translators without the net could never achieve. The costs and latency were just too high to use them.

That is what technology does in a nutshell, it takes something that used to belong to the elite and brings it to the masses.

"That is what technology does in a nutshell, it takes something that used to belong to the elite and brings it to the masses."

You can't put technology in a nutshell. Also, you just said stuff nobody wanted to translate can now be crappily translated -- am I understand that this was previously an elite privilege? Why is the one-sentence explanation of what all technology is about, always, different in each post? And what does any of this have to do with me correcting the horrible misrepresentation of the article? That, which I consider my main point stands, the rest I happily concedem because I don't care enough, and you do have a point. But what you said would also be true also for a collaborative, public domain effort, so Google and their middleman dreams can gtfo either way as far as I'm concerned.

The discrete nature of MIDI and its purported effect on music is one of the main example complaints in You Are Not a Gadget, and one of the easier ones to evaluate. Has the richness of music been decreased since the MIDI standard was promulgated, or has it increased?

Music is like many other sorts of human information systems (natural languages, laws, business practices) in that there are various forces both for and against standardization. Standards in music are much older than MIDI; the equal-tempered tuning of the Western scale is exactly a somewhat unsatisfactory compromise forced by standardization.

More here: http://omniorthogonal.blogspot.com/2010/02/review-you-are-no...

I think Jaron Lanier is terribly, hopelessly wrong about MIDI and music, but I'm inclined to agree with his broader critiques of the web. Twitter and newspaper comments have soured me on social technology to a large extent. I'll get over this when semantic AI has improved to the point that my computer and/or the net can filter out rhetorical fallacies before I encounter them and start blowing steam out of my ears.

The tl;dr version: The net is a gun that we will shoot ourselves with.

The 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 [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer-aided_design#History [3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flight_simulator#Computing_in_f... [4] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aspen_Movie_Map [5] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_person_%28video_games%29#... [6] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helmet_mounted_display#History

Not 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.

Fortunately his arguments (his actual arguments in the book, not the summaries in the press) can be evaluated on their merits.

I 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.

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