This self-referential tidbit opens directly onto the thesis of Lanier’s provocative, if eccentric, new book. “You Are Not a Gadget,’’ which bears the subtitle “A Manifesto,’’ and judging by the opening pages the urgency is patent. “It’s early in the twenty-first century,’’ writes Lanier in his preface, “and that means that these words will mostly be read by nonpersons - automatons or numb mobs composed of people who are no longer acting as individuals.’’ The reader sits up. One of the insider’s insiders of the computing world seems to have gone rogue.
That sentence turns out to be slightly deceptive, for what Lanier is referring to are the various sluices - the scanning and keywording processes - that all information is subjected to these days, and farther down he adds: “The words in this book are written for people, not computers.’’
But in fact the original import - that humans might be taking on the inhuman characteristics of automata - is not so far off the mark of the author’s gravest fear, and the more polemical part of his manifesto sets this out with hammering insistence.
Lanier begins by laying out a core tenet. Basically, as supple and inventive as any given software program may be in its origins, the need for digital compatibility creates a kind of Procrustean process known as “lock-in.’’
The model, as I understand it, is that of a pipeline. At one end lies the culture of users, all of us ever more dependent on the technology, and at the other, a systemic sclerosis, which imposes radical limitations on what the technology can offer. The upshot: We are increasingly subject to what the machine gives us - information shaped by the logistics of the large-scale programs that drive everything else.
Repeatedly harking back to the pioneer nonconformist days of computer culture - a spirit he channels both in his pronouncements and appearance (his Wikipedia photograph shows a dreadlocked figure playing some arcane-looking 3-piped instrument) - Lanier exposes the root tension of technology.
