Sometime in the mid-nineties, around the time I stopped reading Mondo 2000, Jaron Lanier stopped annoying me. I assumed he was still out there, being all far out and dreaded and inter-disciplinary, but he no longer forced his way into my attention, and was thus out of mind.

Apparently he’s not yet out of sight. He has in the interim, however, become more articulate, more insightful, and more interesting. This past January his newest book, You Are Not a Gadget, was published, and in February Harper’s Magazine published an excerpt called ‘The serfdom of crowds.’

(The complete article is only available online to Harper’s subscribers, but there is an illicit version available on Scribd, in beautiful HTML5. That said, I recommend that you go to your local library and read the damn thing in print.)

Let me quote from it at length, to give you something of its full flavor. Here is Lanier discussing the collapse of the financial markets in 2008 and how that related to, and derived from, the essential inequality of the current structure of the web:

True believers in the hive mind seem to think that no number of layers of abstraction in a financial system can dull the system’s efficacy. The crowd works for free, and statistical algorithms supposedly take the risk out of making bets if you are a lord of the cloud. But who is that lord who owns the cloud that connects the crowd? Not just anybody. A lucky few (for luck is all that can possibly be involved) will own it. Entitlement has achieved its singularity and become infinite.

What has allowed this infinite entitlement, this neo-feudalism? We have, in a thousand little ways:

People degrade themselves all the time in order to make machines seem smart. We have repeatedly demonstrated our species’s bottomless ability to lower our standards to make information technology good.

I would amend the last sentence to refer more generally to ‘technology’, rather than just to ‘information technology,’ for this lowering of standards is wide-spread. For example, it is precisely what allows us to claim that items fabricated from synthetic chemicals and compounds and shaped roughly into the appearance of traditional foodstuffs are, in any way, actually food.

Lanier is focused here specifically on the web side of this argument, not on the general case; but many of the things he writes apply more generally. For example:

Enlightened designers leave open the possibility of metaphysical specialness either in humans or in the potential for for unforeseen creative processes that we can’t yet capture in software systems. That kind of modesty is the signature quality of being human-centered.

To return to my example, this is the difference between manufacturing bread in factories and baking loaves in a wood-fired oven. (Brief aside: When did we begin using ‘manufactured’ to mean ‘not manufactured?’)

The former method asserts that there is nothing special about having a human bake bread; everything involved can be simplified down such that mechanical and software systems can handle it. The latter method, on the other hand, recognizes that there is potential inherent in the baking process that only a baker can explore. Choosing the first method devalues the second – devalues the method, devalues the bread, and devalues both the baker and the eater.

To return to Lanier, on this devaluation and its causes:

What computerized analysis of all the country’s school tests has done to education is exactly what Facebook has done to friendships. In both cases, life is turned into a database. Both degradations are based on the same philosophical mistake, which is the belief that computers can presently represent human thought or human relationships. These are things computers cannot currently do.

And on the resultant effects of this devaluation, this forced technological simplification, this database as life:

When technologists deploy a computer model of something like learning or friendship in a way that has an effect on real lives, they are relying on faith. When they ask people to live their lives through their models, they are potentially reducing life itself.