You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto

Jaron Lanier

Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, Jan 12, 2010 - Science - 209 pages

Jaron Lanier, a Silicon Valley visionary since the 1980s, was among the first to predict the revolutionary changes the World Wide Web would bring to commerce and culture. Now, in his first book, written more than two decades after the web was created, Lanier offers this provocative and cautionary look at the way it is transforming our lives for better and for worse.

The current design and function of the web have become so familiar that it is easy to forget that they grew out of programming decisions made decades ago. The web’s first designers made crucial choices (such as making one’s presence anonymous) that have had enormous—and often unintended—consequences. What’s more, these designs quickly became “locked in,” a permanent part of the web’s very structure.

Lanier discusses the technical and cultural problems that can grow out of poorly considered digital design and warns that our financial markets and sites like Wikipedia, Facebook, and Twitter are elevating the “wisdom” of mobs and computer algorithms over the intelligence and judgment of individuals.

Lanier also shows:
How 1960s antigovernment paranoia influenced the design of the online world and enabled trolling and trivialization in online discourse
How file sharing is killing the artistic middle class;
How a belief in a technological “rapture” motivates some of the most influential technologists
Why a new humanistic technology is necessary.

Controversial and fascinating, You Are Not a Gadget is a deeply felt defense of the individual from an author uniquely qualified to comment on the way technology interacts with our culture.

What people are saying

Review: You are Not a Gadget

User Review  - Don - Goodreads

Marshall McLuhan, patron saint of Wired magazine and cameo star of Woody Allen's Oscar-winning Annie Hall, explained how communications revolutions disrupt old ways of behaviour. As such they are ...

Review: You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto

User Review  - Michael Vagnetti - Goodreads

Content overabundance (too much information, with a deficiency of context to help you process it) is mostly silent. It's something to be "solved" with discovery tools, or kind of a personal challenge ...

About the author

Jaron Lanier is known as the father of virtual reality technology and has worked on the interface between computer science and medicine, physics, and neuroscience. He lives in Berkeley, California.

Bibliographic information

• Title: You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto; Borzoi Book
• Author: Jaron Lanier
• Edition: reprint
• Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2010
• ISBN: 0307269647, 9780307269645
• Length: 209 pages
• Subjects: Computers / Information Technology; Computers / Social Aspects / General; Science / General