This book reminds me of the time I ran afoul of Richard Stallman at Wikimania.  Stallman, like Lanier, is one of the old digerati and, like Lanier, has transitioned away from being a techie into being a humanist--in a way we're like two fleets of ships passing in the night.  Like Stallman, Lanier has what seems to be only a passing familiarity with traditional philosophy and, like Stallman, it weakens his arguments about the human person, ethical norms and even the basic epistemological claims he makes regarding, for example, file structures. Lanier and others like him (and there are many--it seems that skill at hacking and coding invariably gives license to amateur philosophy in many areas) present a valuable antithesis to nascent digital humanities scholars.  As we struggle to reconcile a complex humanist view with novel digital means to express that view, we must keep in mind how simplistic our conceptualizations may sound to long-time practitioners.  This is not meant to stifle innovation, but rather to promote rigor.  Lanier's manifesto would have been better off if he'd engaged with 3000 years of thinkers who have been struggling with just the same topics. Of course, there are a few other themes that I found valuable in this book, but I think that's a good place to start.

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I find that Lanier's provocative style relies on a fairly superficial and reactionary response to the still evolving social structures of online spaces. By first describing the most rosy outlook on each trend, Lanier sets up easy polemic targets to take down, providing a mostly gloomy assessment in response and then asserting the need for supremacy of humans over technology in a repetitive rhetorical structure.

This is not to denigrate Lanier's contributions to the digital revolution; clearly he's been a serious contributor on the technical side, and his perspective from the frontlines yields some valuable descriptions of the social history of certain technologies, such as the section on how the development of MIDI has shaped the digital music industry to long-lasting impact.

Ultimately, YANAG may popularize the idea that technologies shapes us as much as we shape them, which could persuade developers to incorporate or at least consider arguments about the social impact of their technical decisions, in what can only be considered a positive step in policymaking around tech dev. Laura DeNardis, Jonathan Zittrain, and others will be happy to see Lanier help their cause.

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<believing game>

I am really fighting hard to play the believing game with this one. The bit on songles almost ruined it for me. (I'm not sure how creating more products with songs embedded in them is any greener than a record or CD or an iPod.)

But the book presents itself as a manifesto. So if we read it as such, well, then, it kind of works. (Kind of.) I try to imagine Lanier handing me a paper version of this on a street corner. What's he ranting about? Why is he wearing a tin-foil hat? If you listen to the economic and microeconomic issues as the signal and all the rest as noise, then I think it kind of works. This also helps explain why his packaging doesn't fit his genre. If this were truely a manifesto, it would not be a hardback book with deckle edge and reto-cover design. It would be a mimeographed. Or, better yet, it would be a hand-coded Web page like Karl Stolly's The Lo-Fi Manifesto.

Instead, I think this book is, in some way, a songle. It's a designed artifact that you purchase so that Lanier can get paid for the message. And this is, kind of, really, vitally important. As he notes, the patronage system is one option in which the producers of culture will get paid. But the patronage system is not going to give us some of the more radical kinds of culture that we have celebrated. It--like open-source culture--might not be as innovative as good old capitalism. Plus, patronage might mean that cultures get all walled-off from each other. That's not really ideal.

So I think part of his rant is that no one is willing to pay for content if it doesn't come in packages. The songle thing is ridiculous. But the underlying message, I think, is that there has to be a way to humanize bits and reward the bit pushers. It's easy to think of bits as immaterial. But they are parts of physical systems that include us. (cf. N. Katherine Hayles' My Mother was a computer"). So it has to be, in some way, about the benjamins, in so far as the benjamins get us at least a couple of rungs up on Maslow's hierarchy. Those of us in the patronage system of the university might be able to say, a la Shirky, that we push pixels for the love. But you can't pay the rent with love. (Or can you?)

</believing game>

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I'm fascinated that several people proposed this book for the HASTAC Scholars' first ever book club---those who love it, should please speak up!   I was floored at how much negativity could be piled onto the concept of "file" and agree completely with the comment above that Lanier's call for humanism would profit by being steeped a little more in humanities scholarship (i.e. humanism).   Even the pre-Socratics wondered about whether "categories" (i.e. "files") helped or hurt our view of the world and, by the time you get around to old Aristotle, the categories are everything.   Tim Berners-Lee did not invent the concept of "file."  

I'm also surprised by his fury at Wikipedia, since I love the aggregate nature of Wikipedia entries as opposed to most other resources where differences are so smoothed out that they become invisible or ghostly presences annoying but not elucidating the seemingly clear argument.   I also love the surprises on Wikipedia---such as finding out "calculus" was not invented by either Newton or Liebniz but has an ancient conceptual tradition going back to the Egyptians and that was passed back and forth like rice and spices along the Silk road, and that evolved over time and finally came to the West through the Arabic mathematicians and then, in fine Western tradition, we "claimed" it as our original and unique invention.  Mash up happened then, it happens now, and I happen to find it rich and exhiliarating. 

As in my blog post this morning.   I guess, foundationally and fundamentally, this humorous and also immensely practical post, that comes back to HASTAC after having traveled around the world, is my happiest refutation and counter-argument to Lanier's jeremiad:  http://www.hastac.org/blogs/cathy-davidson/tips-turning-dissertation-book

I have such admiration for Lanier's achievements and his vision is good as a goad and a prompt.  Still, he reminds me far too much of those old guys who sit in the back of the room at faculty meetings, grumpily grunting, rarely explaining their own point of view, and then, when it comes to a vote, any vote, all votes, they write, decisively:  "Abstain."

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I think the book is valuable and I've recommended it to quite a few people for two main reasons.  Firstly, Lanier is right in reminding us of how normative structures constrain and engender, and that the structures undergirding the digital world were not the "best" but rather the ones that happened to take root.  It's interesting that Lanier points to logical positivism when this kind of argument, I think, recapitulates Wittgenstein.

Secondly, the tone of Lanier's writing implies to me that there are far, far (far, far, far) more people who buy into the most radical versions of the noosphere/hive-mind/Singularity.  All this time, I'd thought that these things, while staples of science fiction and thought experiments, were held as purely logical constructs.  Based on the ease with which Lanier engages in his criticism of these beliefs and their proponents, though, I get the sinking suspicion that a lot of technologists are as eerily apocalyptic as the stereotypical fan of the Left Behind series.  For me, that's a major shift in how I view the digital world.  As a subset of this point, I think Lanier is an excellent example of the people who are currently setting the epistemological tone for digital theory and as such makes an object lesson in why humanists need to inject themselves into the digital world.  Old hackers like Lanier and Stallman, while really good at using tools, make very poor philosophers.

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After so many years in school, I've been trained not to say whether I like or dislike a book. So let me just reiterate that I have serious ish with this book. But I do find the discussions some of the discussions that he brings up helpful, especially the ideas of lock-in as it relates to big bloated software and neoteny as it relates to demogrpahics and how we learn.

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I agree that Lanier's manifesto would have been much more effective if it included more humanities scholarship. After all the hype, I have to admit that it has so far failed to make an impact... When a chapter has 18 headings -- I found myself getting intrigued by an idea Lanier throws out, but quickly becoming disappointed when I realized that the idea was not fully developed and lacked a more theoretical bent. For a work that proposes a new form of digital humanism, I anticipated stronger arguments juxtaposed with analyses of the scholarship that has broached this topic in the various ways it has been examined by philosophers, literary, and media theorists. I have to say, though, some of his ideas are, indeed, valuable (yes, we have to be skeptical of technological utopianism; yes, it is important to emphasize the individual as much as we emphasize the crowd; and, yes, reflecting in a meaningful way so that you are able to "find a way to describe your internal state instead of trivial external events" is important in a culture where people may be inundated by information) -- these are part of the new literacies we have to be critically aware of.

In the meantime, I thought some of you might find this image interesting (see below). I was reminded of this artwork -- ominously titled "Untitled (Figures with black presence) -- when I was reading the section in Ch. 2 about the apocalyptic Singularity, the "'gray goo' that eats the earth":

Chris Johanson, "Untitled (Figures with black presence)," 2002.

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Hi everyone!I've really enjoyed all your thoughts! While, I'm only 30% through the book, I felt I better jump in now while there's still some discussion!

I agree that Lanier's writing feels very thin and his editor should be taken aside and scolded; however, to me, those shortcomings are often counterbalanced by flickerings of insight that make the not-so-great stuff worth getting through. And I was thinking it might be interesting to take some of his "valuable themes" as a starting point for further, more reasoned discussion.

So, as I make my way through this "manifesto," I'm going to post certain themes that I honestly would like to talk to y'all about! And if you simply reply with a book list, that's fine too! I'll be the first to admit that I'm not well-versed in these subjects at all, but I sincerely want to know more! :)

Okay, so here's one thought (inspired by Lanier):

-What might be the implications of relying increasingly on information that is "accessed via user interfaces that encourage mashups of fragments that obscure the content of each fragment"?

The concepts of "authorship" and "attribution" are so well ingrained in me that I sometimes forget how important such concepts really are -- but does that have something to do with growing up in a world of books and "copyright"? And so, as we approach a future in which information is increasingly seamless, aggregated, mashed-up, and authored by people named "dichi07," what technological, social, and pedagogical steps do we need to take to make sure consumers of such information are sufficiently critical?

As someone interested in the educational potential of technology, I see this as a fundamental media literacy issue that students (who are probably the biggest proponents of web 2.0, without really considering why) unfortunately are not given enough time or space to reflect upon.

Thanks for reading this... I look forward to your comments! And feel free to post themes of our own!

Signed,A Boing Boing, Slashdot, AND Wired reader :)

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I listened to this book as an audiobook first. Then I reread and highlighted the parts I was interested in or wanted to quote in the hard copy. Part of me is ashamed to admit that I listened to the book as an audiobook first, which is kind of silly given that it was the same content and I accessed it in multiple ways. So I'd like to ask some McLuhan-esque questions if I may:

1) How do our expectations about this book shift from one media to the next? Several people have mentioned the number of subheads per chapter and the depth (or lack thereof) of analysis. Is this realted to our expectations for what a "chapter" is? What if this were scrawled notes in a journal? What if you listened to it? What if it was a Web page? Would that change the evaluation/analysis/discussion of the product?

2) Where does the anti-audiobook sentiment come from? Does anyone have any resources on/examples of anti-audiobook rhetoric from within academia or book culture? I have a vague sense/memory/feeling that audiobooks don't "count" as reading, but I can't really find much in the way of credible arguments to support this. Thankfully, pro audiobook rhetoric is becoming easier to find.

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When reading Laniers manifesto, his unstructured writing style was the first matter that irked me.  Now, Im not going to spend this review critiquing his lack of fluidity, but in retrospect, I wonder if we can view Laniers style as performative of one of his larger argumentshow we(ll) attain information in a hive.  Because Lanier composed his manifesto in smaller sections, his argument often felt interrupted. For example in Chapter 2 (An Apocalypse of Self-Abdication), he uses subtitles on almost every page. As a reader, on the surface I didnt find them effective for his larger argument because one could essentially begin at any of those sub-sections. One doesnt have to read the whole manifesto, one could simply jump into the text at whatever section s/he felt compelled.  I dont think it was purposeful, but Laniers style seemed to be performing his dislike of decontextualization, which is rather problematic in my opinion.  If hes arguing that services like Google Books will allow readers/researchers/students to gather only the snippets of information they after instead of understanding the concept in context, then Lanier should not have structured his book in a similar fashion. (And really, how many of us have used an index for the same reason? I dont find his example of e-books compelling). 

Enough with my personal beefon to the heart of the text. One of the questions posed in this forum asks, what does it mean to be a non-person? I find that questions quite intriguing, especially because of all the technology/digital media scholarship that has questioned this for ages.  Maybe we can validate the non-human in relation to the posthuman. Maybe validate is too positive, herehow about we at least begin to construct.  In How We Became Posthuman, Katherine Hayles suggests that the we of posthuman collectivity is a false weit is still a large collection of autonomous agents acting together (6).  I dont believe this collective we negates personhood, but instead celebrates its connection to the larger capital-P, People. Its unfortunate that Lanier didnt engage with scholarship in the humanities that have been questioning digital subjectivity for so long, and, I feel, much more effectively, critically, and thoughtfully than Lanier.  Examining a text like Hayles would have been an easy way to appeal and persuade many other readers (like myself!) outside of computer science as well as readers who are afraid of what collectivities offer.  So, what does it mean to be a non-person? I dont think noosphere or singularity theories are suggesting a dichotomy between person and non-person.  The idea of a non-person is limited by personhood as we know it today, and not as collectives are fostering personhood.  We (all human beings) cannot be non-personthe noosphere presents the possibility to become non-human (which is likely different than posthuman) by uploading our consciousness, an event that I think frightens Lanier.

Okay, so that last sounded a bit too utopic, since we still have to wonder what our current collectivities offer.  Lanier repeatedly expressed his disappointment for the state of the hive noting that it has drifted far from the original intentions of digital collaboration. Overall, I have to say yes to the noosphereI am constantly excited to have the opportunity to participate in collaborative spaces, and engage in and contribute to collective intelligence. (Although, maybe I was biased before I read Lanier because I truly was saying yes before.)  Finally, Laniers text was an interesting counterargument to much of the existing digital media scholarship, and while I have recommended it to many, I cannot say that I agree with much of what he puts forth.

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Here's an interesting blog post about the future of open source--sounds even further from Lanier and Stallman's original intentions...

(And, I really know how to use punctuation! For some reason, there's a ton of it missing from my previous post!)

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Hope we can keep this "hive" of activity going -- heh heh.

I'm in the middle of Lanier's manifesto right now after coming across an excerpt of it in the February Harper's (yes, the print edition!). Speaking of print, there are a few related articles about assessing digital and digital culture in the latest issue of the reborn Baffler magazine: http://www.hastac.org/blogs/michael-j-kramer/i-got-them-ol-digital-blues-again. They reminded me of Lanier's sense of something having gone terribly awry with digital technology and culture, and that terrible thing may have more to do with current relationships between market culture and civic culture (and what Lewis Hyde calls gift culture) than with the digital itself.

Look forward to following the book club and adding more soon.

PS We always talk about how the digital speeds things up, but one thing about this forum is that we might actually slow things down and let the conversation unfold over time, as we all absorb the book and related issues and questions. Something going on here about different tempos and speeds of digital conversation made possible by HASTAC worth continuing to think about.

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An intriguing book review of Lanier's You Are Not A Gadget by Rob Horning:

http://www.popmatters.com/pm/column/120581-the-digital-surplus-and-its-enemies/

Lanier, according to Horning, is really critiguing remix culture and the hive mind in the name of intellectual property rights, not humanistic potential.

Horning offers a different vision:

The hive mindthe collective wellspring of knowledge that exceeds the limits of propertyneed not only yield mediocrity, as Lanier assumes. Instead, it has the potential to redraw the boundaries of market society, opening up new social spaces. The imperfect methods of production no longer organized by capital can be improved. The manifest reality of the social factory in the form of the internet has mobilized more creative energy than was ever before possible, ever if the creators can only benefit from it at the social rather than the individual level.

These levels can coexist, if the new modes of production can escape their commercial origins. Now that the link between creativity and capital has finally begun to be severed, lets not reforge our own chains.

Thoughts?

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