Jaron Lanier Got Everything Wrong

Sadly there's very little value in reading this article, insofar as it contains no useful insights or lessons but rather is simply an exercise in throwing stones at someone's life-work, and, near as I can tell, it comes from out of left field.

Mostly this article makes me feel bad for its author. He must have spent a non-trivial amount of time writing this piece, and it serves no end. I suppose I just can't fathom why it made him feel good to write it.

"Lanier's strident warnings of giant mainframes run by a few to control the many missed so many critical trends that it now sounds like 1980s science-fiction. "

...except for the part where it's a pretty decent description of "cloud computing". What is a datacenter but a modern mainframe?