Jaron Lanier Makes “Open Culture” a Buzzword

Last week, Jaron Lanier, the father of vir­tu­al real­i­ty, pub­lished his new book (You Are Not a Gad­get) and an accom­pa­ny­ing op-ed in The Wall Street Jour­nal. The WSJ piece begins:

All too many of today’s Inter­net buzz­words— includ­ing “Web 2.0,” “Open Cul­ture,” “Free Soft­ware” and the “Long Tail”—are terms for a new kind of col­lec­tivism that has come to dom­i­nate the way many peo­ple par­tic­i­pate in the online world. The idea of a world where every­body has a say and nobody goes unheard is deeply appeal­ing. But what if all of the voic­es that are pil­ing on end up drown­ing one anoth­er out?

Lanier goes on to make the case against Web 2.0. Using “crowd­sourc­ing” to build free prod­ucts (think Wikipedia), Web 2.0 ends up pro­duc­ing infe­ri­or con­tent and soft­ware code. It slows down inno­va­tion. It destroys intel­lec­tu­al prop­er­ty and the finan­cial struc­ture that incen­tivizes cre­ative indi­vid­u­als and insti­tu­tions. And final­ly it dis­em­pow­ers the indi­vid­ual, the real source of inno­va­tion. (Lanier says, “I don’t want our young peo­ple aggre­gat­ed, even by a benev­o­lent social-net­work­ing site. I want them to devel­op as fierce indi­vid­u­als, and to earn their liv­ing doing exact­ly that.”) If you think this sounds like Ayn Rand phi­los­o­phy (see vin­tage clip) graft­ed onto tech talk, you’re prob­a­bly right. And from here, you can decide whether you want to buy the book or not.

On a per­son­al note, I find it amus­ing that “Open Cul­ture” qual­i­fied as an “Inter­net buzz­word,” accord­ing to Lanier. As you can imag­ine, I track the use of the expres­sion fair­ly close­ly, and quite frankly, it did­n’t reg­is­ter on any radar until Lanier’s piece came out (and we got a simul­ta­ne­ous men­tion in AARP’s mag­a­zine). All you have to do is look at this Google Trends chart. It maps the usage of “open cul­ture,” and you can see how it goes from nowhere to ver­ti­cal in 2010, right when Lanier’s op-ed gets pub­lished. So what can I say to Jaron Lanier, but thanks (in a thanks, but no thanks kind of way) and may you sell a mil­lion copies of You Are Not a Gad­get


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  • Jeremy Keith Hammond says:

    “Web 2.0 ends up pro­duc­ing infe­ri­or con­tent and soft­ware code. It slows down inno­va­tion. It destroys intel­lec­tu­al prop­er­ty and the finan­cial struc­ture that incen­tivizes cre­ative indi­vid­u­als and insti­tu­tions. And final­ly it dis­em­pow­ers the indi­vid­ual, the real source of inno­va­tion.”

    What a shame that he thinks this. I would hard­ly call prod­ucts like Mozil­la Fire­fox and its code infe­ri­or. As for intel­lec­tu­al prop­er­ty and the “incen­tiviz-ing” finan­cial struc­ture… the for­mer does­n’t real­ly exist and who cares about the lat­ter oth­er than those with an obso­lete and inhibit­ing instinct to hoard?

    Cre­ation itself IS the incen­tive. It’s at the core of our human desires. Peo­ple have cre­at­ed and inno­vat­ed long before there was finan­cial gain to be had.

    I don’t write poet­ry for mon­ey. There’s a rea­son why artists “starve” and work at restau­rants. I play with web codes and site build­ing for fun. Many peo­ple build new bicy­cles because they like to tin­ker. Is it nice to get paid? Of course. But it’s cre­ation itself that adds val­ue to our life, not the rec­i­p­ro­ca­tion from soci­ety.

  • Mike says:

    As some­one who despis­es Ayn Rand and her pseu­do-phi­los­o­phy, and hav­ing recent­ly read Lanier’s book, I have to say I cringe at the com­par­i­son. Rand was a mis­an­thrope, while Lanier’s con­cerns (as the book’s title sug­gests) are human­is­tic.

    Lanier writes, “I fear that we are begin­ning to design our­selves to suit dig­i­tal mod­els of us, and I wor­ry about a leach­ing of empa­thy and human­i­ty in that process.” (p.39) A very un-Ran­di­an sen­ti­ment.

    “You Are Not A Gad­get” is a fas­ci­nat­ing and stim­u­lat­ing book. I also heard Lanier speak last week in Cam­bridge and he has a lot of thought-pro­vok­ing things to say. If you’re inter­est­ed, he gave an inter­view to NPR’s “On Point,” which can be found here:

    http://www.onpointradio.org/2010/01/where-the-web-went-wrong

    As for your com­ments, Jere­my, I’ll be frank: I’m dis­gust­ed. When you write, “There’s a rea­son why artists ‘starve’ and work at restau­rants,” I can see that you are utter­ly unaware of the fact that mil­lions of human beings who were able to sup­port their fam­i­lies in the past through cre­ative work (and I’m not talk­ing about chefs) are no longer able to do so because of the chang­ing tech­no­log­i­cal land­scape. If that does­n’t con­cern you…

    On this sub­ject, I’ll pull one more quote from Lanier’s book: “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. Reci­procity takes the form of self-pro­mo­tion.” (p83)

    I don’t agree with every­thing Lanier writes but it’s an inter­est­ing book and well worth read­ing.

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