
What Turned Jaron Lanier Against the Web?  - cwan
http://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/What-Turned-Jaron-Lanier-Against-the-Web-183832741.html
======
dsplittgerber
I read his book, "You are not a gadget", and found it really thought-provoking
and inspiring to focus more on real-world stuff I needed to do and less on
reading about the ever latest fad that has no impact on my life whatsoever.

As always, was it the book or my state of mind/stage in my life during which I
read the book that made me change my mind about re-prioritizing? I don't know.
But I'd recommend the book for an alternative perspective not often heard in
the TechCr/otherblogs/Forbes/BW hype cycle that is the tech (esp consumer
internet) world.

FWIW, the book didn't strike me as elitist at all. I didn't know anything
about him before, so I was strictly considering his arguments for their
merits.

Edit: Just finished the Smithsonian article, which I consider singularly
unhelpful in really understanding the points he makes in his book. Do not
judge his book or his arguments by this article. The article is an incoherent
mess.

------
lsdkhjfvgasn
I don't know if Jaron is right or not about the web, information freedom, and
its effects on musicians, translators, and other content creators. It will
take a few more years to find out what happens to a society with true freedom
of information once the dust has settled, assuming we actually manage to build
one.

One thing from the article that did really hit me is the quote, “This is the
thing that continues to scare me. You see in history the capacity of people to
congeal—like social lasers of cruelty. That capacity is constant.”

I see it on a small scale all the time. The tendency that lets middle-
schoolers pick on ugly kids and the Westboro Baptists to spread hate about
gays is the same flaw in group psychology that gives us witch hunts and
holocausts and suicide bombers. "Kill the outsider! Shun the nonbeliever!
Purify the tribe! Root our the Communists!"

To the people involved it feels so perfect and righteous and true. We never
realize until it's too late what a horrible thing they've started. This
pattern, this tendency toward purges and mass hysterias, has probably been
with us as long as we've had tribes and it's not going anywhere unless we do
something very serious about it. Human nature is old and big and it doesn't go
down without a fight. This particular quirk of human nature scares the shit
out of me. I don't think I'm exaggerating when I say it threatens the very
survival of our species.

Again I don't know much about this Jaron character but I get the feeling we're
on the same side. "Social lasers of cruelty" is a perfect name for something
I've been trying to pin down and name for a while now.

~~~
gojomo
Indeed, the early days of 'living online' offered a respite from peer
pressure. The rise of 'social' and arrival of everyone means conformist
pressures are back, and maybe stronger than ever... the high school that you
can never leave.

------
smacktoward
I wasn't aware that Jaron Lanier was ever really _for_ the Web. The things
he's known for -- art games for the Commodore 64, early work on virtual
reality, consulting on Second Life and Kinect, etc. -- are not really Web
things. They're rooted more in the older William Gibson-style vision of
completely immersive digital environments, rather than in hypertext.

Which makes it a bit unconvincing to call him "the double agent, who, from a
position deep inside, turns against the ideology he once professed fealty to."
His ideology has always been orthogonal to the ideology the Web came out of.

~~~
001sky
_From 1997 to 2001, Lanier was the Chief Scientist of Advanced Network and
Services, which contained the Engineering Office of Internet2, and served as
the Lead Scientist of the National Tele-immersion Initiative, a coalition of
research universities studying advanced applications for Internet2._

==Looks like his first "contra" essay was in 2000.

(Per Wikipedia).

~~~
smacktoward
Internet2 is not "of the Web" either; it's focused more on developing out the
IP network itself than on any particular application that runs over IP (of
which the Web is one).

I'm not familiar with the work of the National Tele-immersion Initiative, but
from the name it certainly sounds like it's more interested in the type of
full-sensory environments Lanier has usually been associated with than with
hypertext applications.

------
randallsquared
Jaron Lanier always seems to be about to make a deep, profound point, or to be
talking as though he just made a deep, profound point. Somehow I always miss
the point, though.

~~~
rhizome
The point is that he's sweeping away strawmen left and right, leaving himself
at the center of what remains.

~~~
chris_wot
So he is his own strawman?

~~~
rhizome
No, the emperor of an imaginary country continually advertising for citizens.

------
jeffehobbs
This guy has always been a shyster, even back in the Mondo 2000 years. I think
it's just as likely that he ran out of gullible audience to buy into his
particular brand of elitist, VRML Kool-Aid.

~~~
andrewcooke
did you read the article? ironically, he's kind of concerned about people like
you.

~~~
rhizome
Just like religious people "worry" about those resistant to the fold. It's a
form of pity inflicted upon those unconvinced by his perspective.

------
CKKim
I'm seeing much skepticism and criticism of Lanier in the comments here, which
would be my position too, based on 99% of what I've watched or read about him
(a scene with an Aibo comes to mind especially!).

However, there was a 1% where I felt he really shined and that was in a
bloggingheads discussion with Eliezer Yudkowsky. It's been about a year since
I last watched it but I've seen it four times in total and every time there
are large periods where I'm really locked into the points Lanier is making and
find myself in agreement. Check it out here (go on, Yudkowsky is always good
value!): <http://bloggingheads.tv/videos/1849>.

------
b1daly
From reading in the popular press about Jaron Lanier he strikes me as more of
an artiste than technologist. Which is fine by me.

His comments in this article hint at something that nags at me as a musician
and lover of music, which is the rise of the concept of "content" to describe
creative works.

The ubiquity of digital networks has led to an unprecedented level of
commodification of music (for example). Various large entities like (Google,
Apple, Facebook) and influential networks of transmission (bit torrent,
Grooveshark, Spotify, Mega-Upload) seem to have not only captured more of the
value of creative artists, they have also captured huge cultural mindshare.
(The tech CEO as rock star).

Google in particular disturbs me as it seems like the search engine has become
more important than what is searched for. This somehow feels hollow to me.

I'm interested in general about how meaning is created by and for people.
Music is an old means of adding, or at least enhancing meaning.

Now figures like Steve Jobs take some of that role. But there is at least some
irony that the gadget that broke Apple into the popular mainstream was a music
player, completely un-interesting with out the content that it commodifies.

~~~
guscost
Self-Promotion alert: You might enjoy my iOS game. Adding more features and
"content" soon.

<https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/mixball/id578469049?mt=8>

------
contingencies
Interestingly, with all the economy references, the lead Bitcoin developer
Gavin Andresen was apparently on the VRML standard committee. I wonder if
those two have had a chat yet.

Single page: [http://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/What-Turned-
Jaron...](http://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/What-Turned-Jaron-Lanier-
Against-the-Web-183832741.html?c=y&story=fullstory)

------
zeruch
Lanier has long since "lost the plot" in that he kind of seemed to have grown
to dislike the commodification of "thought leadership". Even before this I was
wary of a certain preciousness that went into his thinking; a kind of "we can
make VR so cool..." but it always seemed less open and free wheeling. In a way
you could say he's Apple and the web is Linux.

------
jrogers65
I can't comprehend how this individual is considered to be influencial when,
looking at his achievements, he has not really contributed anything of
substance. I don't mean to be a killjoy, I just honestly don't see why he is
considered to be an authority on, well, anything.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jaron_Lanier#Works>

He wrote a couple of books and gave a few speeches? Perhaps I'm missing the
point - if anyone would care to enlighten me, I'd appreciate it.

------
Tloewald
I find his views far more compelling than Kurzweil's. I do not know how
accurate his description of Google Translate is, but if accurate it is
depressing.

~~~
chris_wot
How does he know that's how it works?

~~~
Tloewald
I don't know. It does seem very plausible.

------
luu
I wish a full transcript was available, because it's hard to tell if the
writer has turned Lanier's views into an incoherent mess, or if his views
actually are a mess, and the writer is doing the best he can to synthesize
them.

Page 2 seems to imply that part of Lanier's dislike of digital culture stems
from the fact that MIDIs can't represent saxophone music. Was that really such
an important part of the interview that it deserves space in what's clearly a
short summary of a long interview? It sounds more like an aside that's been
taken out of context.

Later on that same page, the article seems to imply that automatic translation
is bad because "by taking value off the books, you’re actually shrinking the
economy." That is, because technology allows something to be done more
cheaply, it's actually hurting the economy by shrinking nominal spending. But
that's precisely why technology has been the primary driver of economic growth
since the industrial revolution. You can make a case that it hurts some people
while helping people in the aggregate, but, read as written, his criticism is
an attack on pretty much any technology, ever.

And then there's all the straw men, like the idea that "Web 2.0 intellectuals"
think that "we shouldn’t be self-critical and that we shouldn’t be hard on
ourselves is irresponsible." Isn't every other non-tech article on HN a
critical piece? If anything, the consensus here seems to be that criticism is
given too much attention (e.g., the most upvoted comment in many HN threads is
a comment telling people not to be so harsh, the criticism of 'middlebrow
dismassal' [1], etc.)

[1] If my comment qualifies, I apologize. I'm writing this because I literally
don't understand why Jaron Lanier believes what he does or what this article
is trying to convey. The article is full of logical fallacies and
contradictions that are so absurd that they're surely not his real views.
Other people around here seem to be familiar with Lanier; perhaps someone with
more background can make sense of this article.

EDIT: his wikipedia page is decent, although it's a bit light on content:
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jaron_Lanier>. I don't agree, but, unlike the
article, wikipedia presents his opinions in a reasonable light.

EDIT2: Just as an aside, one of the biggest anti-features I find when I read
HN is that there are often many comments expressing variants of the same
opinion. They're not exactly redundant, because each presents a unique
viewpoint, but it makes comment sections overly long.

I'll often delete my comments after other, similar, comments pop up, to reduce
the reading load. I'd delete this, because there are now six other comments
expressing the opinion that either Lanier's opinions aren't cogent or that the
article isn't representative of Lanier's opinions (and only one dissenter),
but it's bad form to delete a comment after someone's quoted it, so I'll leave
it here for posterity.

~~~
neumann_alfred
I'm pretty sure it's your reading comprehension that's at fault here. Don't
blame the article for you making a mess of it.

> _Page 2 seems to imply that part of Lanier's dislike of digital culture
> stems from the fact that MIDIs can't represent saxophone music._

from the article:

 _Indeed, one of the foundations of Lanier’s critique of digitized culture is
the very way its digital transmission at some deep level betrays the essence
of what it tries to transmit. Take music._

 _One_ of the foundations is a general process, and music is used as an
example for that process. Which is so far from what you turned it into, I'd
really suggest reading it all again.

> _Later on that same page, the article seems to imply that automatic
> translation is bad because "by taking value off the books, you’re actually
> shrinking the economy." That is, because technology allows something to be
> done more cheaply, it's actually hurting the economy by shrinking nominal
> spending._

What he actually says:

 _[With translation] you’re producing this result that looks magical but in
the meantime, the original translators aren’t paid for their work—their work
was just appropriated. So by taking value off the books, you’re actually
shrinking the economy._

The way I understand that: If you don't pay the people who do the work, and
people who make a collage out of their work get paid, you'll end up with much
fewer new translations being undertaken. You take money from the people who do
the work and give it to those who made a collage from it, and the total amount
is much less. His argument isn't "it's bad because it's cheaper" -- rather
your counterargument seems to be "that [criticism I kinda missed] is made up
for because it's cheaper".

And I disagree. If I can buy a bun for 20 cents, or someone could rob the
baker and give it to me for 5 cents, I'd rather have the bun for 20 cents,
because that means more delicious bun tomorrow, and the day after that.

> _Isn't every other non-tech article on HN a critical piece?_

Critical, yeah. _Self_ -critical (big difference) in the sense of "why I
didn't succeed or how I could succeed harder", yeah. But in the sense of "wtf
am I doing, why, and should I really be doing it?" -- not so much. You say
every second non-technical article? Can you link me ten from the last 7 days?
Not because I don't believe you, but because I want to read them, and at the
very least I want to know what kind of article you think qualifies for this.
Also, if the consensus here is that criticism is given too much attention
(which doesn't even mean there's a lot going on, just that what of it is going
on is already too much for some people - logic!) kinda confirms is point
instead of refuting it.

But it's not about criticism anyway, it's about being self-critical. Plus, HN
isn't the whole industry. So how would that even be a valid counterargument if
it was true? (which also makes me asking for those self-critical articles
kinda moot; I just like to be throrough)

~~~
mniejiki
> _The way I understand that: If you don't pay the people who do the work, and
> people who make a collage out of their work get paid, you'll end up with
> much fewer new translations being undertaken._

That's silly. Those previous translations don't magically go away, they still
exist. And new translations exist as well except they're now being done by a
machine or by a much smaller number of human translator (see below for why
this doesn't do any harm).

Having a million people translate "I like cats" into French doesn't give you a
million translations. It gives you one translation repeated a million times.
That's 999,999 redundant translations. Nothing novel or amazing about those
999,999 translations.

What is the difference between a machine doing those million translations and
humans doing identical translations?

Of course, there are novel translations and those would require human input
but that's a minority. If the machine can do 99% of translations but requires
humans for the additional 1% why is it better to have humans translate 100%
rather than just that 1%. You end up with the exact same quality and quantity
of translations in both cases.

> _You take money from the people who do the work and give it to those who
> made a collage from it, and the total amount is much less._

The machine is lowering the cost of translations and thus may increase the
amount spent on translations. The people who made translations got paid
already.

> _And I disagree. If I can buy a bun for 20 cents, or someone could rob the
> baker and give it to me for 5 cents, I'd rather have the bun for 20 cents,
> because that means more delicious bun tomorrow, and the day after that._

Except that's not the situation. The situation is that someone took the bun,
figured out how to make one from it and then started selling their own buns
for 5 cents each. You can have that exact same bun forever from the new
seller.

Of course, one day you may want a new bun and, you'd argue, that there are no
bakers left. But that's silly and utterly simplistic. Once there's not enough
bakers with buns to copy that doesn't mean that new recipes will cease to
exist but rather than an an alternative will be found. So the new seller will
have simply hired some bakers to create a new recipes. Some bakers will
continue to have jobs except that instead of wasting all their time on the
repetitive tasks of baking they'll instead spend it on innovative tasks of
making new recipes (or improving existing ones). You end up with the same
diversity and quality of buns now and in the future but at a lower price.

Of course, many bakers will lose their jobs but that's the consequence of all
technology and progress. Light bulbs meant that many candle makers lost their
jobs. Frankly I prefer light bulbs to candles.

In their place many new jobs will have opened up via the money which people
used to spend on buns or candles. That's in addition to all the jobs needed to
keep the new bun or light bulb making infrastructure running.

edit: Actually, the "perfect" machine translation would be superior to the
average human translation for that 99% since it'd be based on the best human
translation for every single piece of text. Needless to say machines are far
from there yet but that also means human translators have little to fear job
wise for now.

Amusingly, the next hot thing in web translation probably isn't machines. It's
humans. Using mechanical turk. So thanks to the web there may soon be more
human translators employed than ever before. That's on top of the machines
which, to be frank, rather suck at any translation that really matters.

~~~
neumann_alfred
"The situation is that someone took the bun, figured out how to make one from
it and then started selling their own buns for 5 cents each."

So why are they not simply buying the rights of the translations they are
using? Because chopping it into pieces and analyzing it automatically doesn't
require it? BS, we're talking about big data, if they wanted they could know
exactly how many vowels and consonsants they used of each individual
translator, and then start haggling.

And "heh" to "all technology and process costs jobs." How many jobs were lost
when we found out washing hands before surgery is a good idea? It's such a
mindless thing to say. It's a mantra, it's a goal, but far from the truth.

~~~
mniejiki
Also, what you seem to not get is that this isn't a zero sum game.

Google translate doesn't cater to the same people as traditional translators.
Google translate basically sucks, it can't compete with a half competent
translator. It can however compete with a random friend who knows a hundred
words in a language, it can compete with spending 6 hours digging through
dictionaries, it can compete with asking people on forums for translations and
so on. And it has done more than that.

It has increased the market for translations, things that no one would have
ever wanted to translate before can now be translated. Things that would have
forever been locked away in one language can now be read, barely, by everyone.
This is something that human translators without the net could never achieve.
The costs and latency were just too high to use them.

That is what technology does in a nutshell, it takes something that used to
belong to the elite and brings it to the masses.

~~~
neumann_alfred
"That is what technology does in a nutshell, it takes something that used to
belong to the elite and brings it to the masses."

You can't put technology in a nutshell. Also, you just said stuff nobody
wanted to translate can now be crappily translated -- am I understand that
this was previously an elite privilege? Why is the one-sentence explanation of
what all technology is about, always, different in each post? And what does
any of this have to do with me correcting the horrible misrepresentation of
the article? That, which I consider my main point stands, the rest I happily
concedem because I don't care enough, and you do have a point. But what you
said would also be true also for a collaborative, public domain effort, so
Google and their middleman dreams can gtfo either way as far as I'm concerned.

------
hakaaak
The tl;dr version: The net is a gun that we will shoot ourselves with.

------
tod222
The article's subtitle calls Lanier the "visionary behind virtual reality" and
tempers that slightly in the body text calling him "...a pioneer and
publicizer of virtual-reality technology..." and stating "...he helped make
virtual reality a reality..."

Yet most of the Timeline section of Wikipedia's entry for VR predates Lanier.
[1]

From the article:

> Lanier is still in the game in part because virtual reality has become,
> virtually, reality these days. "If you look out the window," he says
> pointing to the traffic flowing around Union Square, "there’s no vehicle
> that wasn’t designed in a virtual-reality system first. And every vehicle of
> every kind built—plane, train—is first put in a virtual-reality machine and
> people experience driving it [as if it were real] first."

No, they were designed in a Computer-aided design (CAD) system first. The 20
year history of CAD prior to 1985 is omitted and CAD is subsumed into VR.

Automakers were leading users of high-end graphics systems and CAD prior to
Lanier's involvement:

> ...probably the most important work on polynomial curves and sculptured
> surface was done by Pierre Bézier (Renault), Paul de Casteljau (Citroen),
> Steven Anson Coons (MIT, Ford), James Ferguson (Boeing), Carl de Boor (GM),
> Birkhoff (GM) and Garibedian (GM) in the 1960s and W. Gordon (GM) and R.
> Riesenfeld in the 1970s. [2]

Designs are now tested with VR, but that's really just an extension of the CAD
process.

Another issue is that navigating through virtual 3D environments was being
done long before 1985 in the form of high-end flight simulators delivered to
the military [3] and projects such as the Aspen Movie Map. [4] First person
games existed but were severely limited by the capability of the hardware of
the time. [5]

Head-mounted displays also predate 1985. [6]

[1] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtual_reality#Timeline> [2]
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer-aided_design#History> [3]
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flight_simulator#Computing_in_f...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flight_simulator#Computing_in_flight_simulators)
[4] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aspen_Movie_Map> [5]
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_person_%28video_games%29#...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_person_%28video_games%29#History)
[6] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helmet_mounted_display#History>

------
mcantelon
Not sure why Lanier's opinion is relevant. Like Kurzweil, seems like he did
his best work in the past and is mostly coasting on past cred these days.

~~~
wmf
Fortunately his arguments (his actual arguments in the book, not the summaries
in the press) can be evaluated on their merits.

------
bobcarr
I find the criticisms of Jaron Lanier here to be unfair, excessively
dismissive and painfully elitist. Just because many of the technologies used
in VR were already invented, it doesn't take away from his important
contributions, namely the founding of VPL Research, whose patents were
important enough to be acquired by Sun. Would you make the same argument about
Steve Jobs who popularized products already invented by other individuals and
companies such as Alan Kay and Xerox? There are tons of tech pundits who don't
have a clue about how technology actually works, yet such criticisms are never
leveled against them.

Even if Mr. Lanier didn't contribute anything to the field of VR, it doesn't
take away from his message: web 2.0 and open source has been a spectacular
failure and is destroying individuality and the middle-class. I've watched
several of his lectures and read his book, he nibbles around the his main
point with lots of history and digressions. He's very careful with his
language and tries to avoid opening himself for being labeled or attacked.
Consequently, he comes off sounding tepid, overly philosophical and even
incoherent at times.

M. Lanier claims that online collectivism or the hive mind is benefiting the
few (Google and Facebook) and not the masses, the content contributers.
Content made freely accessible by trusting authors have been mined by network
operators to make billions, while the authors, who put their hearts and minds
into their work, receive neither money nor recognition. Facebook is now
starting to charge their users to broadcast to their "friends." Web 2.0 has
failed to create a larger middle-class through new opportunities that are
financially rewarding. In fact, Mr. Lanier argues that it is shrinking it.

His most salient arguements are aimed at the Open Source movement. He argues
that it hasn't produced any notable innovations, nor has it expanded the pie
for the software industry. On any given day, a small group at Apple out
innovates the entire open source movement. Open Source was supposed to
liberate us from the tyrany of commercial software companies like Microsoft
and Adobe. Instead, it has only increased their dominance by weeding out all
of their smaller competitors. What are the chances of something like PC-Write
succeeding today?

After all these years, the open source movement has yet to offer sensible
alternatives to Windows, Mac OS X and large complex applications such as the
Adobe Suite and Microsoft Office. Instead, Open Source has focused on software
that doesn't require high-risk development such as development tools,
frameworks and OS utilities. The few quality ones like Firefox, are developed
by teams funded by large organizations. Being Open Source isn't what's made
these applications successful.

Mr. Lanier makes some very sound and persuasive arguments. If you don't agree
at least take the time to ponder it and give it the respect that it deserves.
Writing him off as a charlatan or an opportunist isn't an argument, but a
cheap character attack.

