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…
