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…