It feels to me as though this book is a little alarmist - based on the reviews I have read. In general, I disagree with Lanier's overall thesis, and that said, there is probably something here we need to look at more closely no matter how off-base Lanier's argument.
Here is a brief review from The New Yorker and an interview from NPR's Tech Nation.
You Are Not a Gadget: by Jaron Lanier
You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto (Knopf; $24.95)In the nineteen-eighties, Lanier belonged to what he calls a “merry band” of Internet pioneers who believed that the digital revolution would mean a groundswell of creativity. But, he argues in this manifesto, around the turn of this century the dream was hijacked by “digital Maoists,” who value the crowd above the individual. Their influence, he writes, has led to an online culture of mashups, “pervasive anonymity” (which encourages bullying and moblike behavior), open access (so that individual ownership is devalued or lost), and social-networking sites that reduce “the deep meaning of personhood.” He fears that these characteristics are perilously close to “lock-in”: becoming permanent features of the Web. Lanier’s detractors have accused him of Ludditism, but his argument will make intuitive sense to anyone concerned with questions of propriety, responsibility, and authenticity.
Here are some recent online postings by Lanier that might be of interest (listed at his site). There are also some selected (positive) reviews at his page.Jaron Lanier, Computer Scientist, Composer and Author
Dr.Moira Gunn catches up with internet pioneer and author, Jaron Lanier to discuss his new book, You Are Not a Gadget...a Manifesto, where he 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.
PlayJaron's OpEd in Wall Street Journal: A summary of the economic futurism argumentJaron's answer to the annual Edge question: File sharing is a form of death denial
Read an excerpt from the book via the NY Times
You can read the whole review - there is some redeeming merit to the book, according to Slate's reviewer, .Lanier is best known as a pioneer of virtual reality and an early star of Wired magazine. He was the guy with the dreadlocks and the giant V.R. goggles perched on his forehead, the epitome of the hippie-shaman-guru strain in tech culture. In what may have been a high point, Lanier's V.R. glove was used to power the graphics in a Grateful Dead video. Lanier lost his company in the early '90s in a then-legendary flameout, and he has been working in the seams of academia and Silicon Valley ever since. He's the barefoot guy in the conference room, ever creative, childlike.
You Are Not a Gadget is basically a collection of his Internet columns and postings, bound, set into type, and called a "manifesto." Over the years, Lanier has become a skeptic of that amorphous thing called Web 2.0. He directs most of his ire toward the "anonymous blog comments, vapid video pranks, and lightweight mashups" that flit through our browsers and Twitter feeds. But he's also critical of bigger Internet landmarks, such as Wikipedia, the open-source software Linux, and the "hive mind" in general.
It would be fitting to rue Lanier's fate as mere sausage for search algorithms if he had organized his opinions into a coherent thesis. The reality is that Lanier's stimulating, half-cocked ideas are precisely the kind of thinking that gets refined and enlarged on vibrant Web places like Marginal Revolution, Boing Boing, and MetaFilter. Lanier maintains, for example, that musical development has essentially stalled. He has a challenge: "[P]lay me some music that is characteristic of the late 2000s as opposed to the late 1990s." Lanier claims that listeners can't distinguish between recent musical eras because music is "retro, retro, retro." I would like to see that debate play out in the columns on Pitchfork.* Being scanned and rehashed in a blog post somewhere will be the best thing that ever happened to some of these words.
That is mostly because Lanier is an unreconstructed geek who throws around terms like realistic computationalism and numinous neoteny, which make your ears hurt. He will spend a few pages bemoaning the fact that a "locked-in" technology such as the computer "file" has cut off other, potentially more beautiful ways of organizing information on a computer.
As near as I can make it out, Lanier's view is that the Web began as a digital Eden. We built homepages by hand, played around in virtual worlds, wrote beautiful little programs for the fun of it, and generally made our humanity present online. The standards had not been set. The big money and the big companies had not yet arrived. Now Google has linked search to advertising. The Internet's long tail helps only the Amazons of the world, not the little guys and gals making songs, videos, and books. Wikipedia, a mediocre product of group writing, has become the intellectual backbone of the Web. And, most depressingly, all of us have been lumped into a "hive mind" that every entrepreneur with a dollar and a dream is trying to parse for profit.
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