Reviewed by Don Tapscott and Anthony D. Williams
Globe and Mail Update Published on Friday, Feb. 19, 2010 10:10AM EST Last updated on Thursday, Feb. 25, 2010 10:57AM EST
Marshall McLuhan, patron saint of Wired magazine and cameo star of Woody Allen’s Oscar-winning Annie Hall, explained how communications revolutions disrupt old ways of behaviour. As such they are received with enthusiasm but also coolness, skepticism, hostility and even mockery.
This has never been truer than with the Internet. In the 1990s, writer Robert Bly (The Sibling Society) argued that the Internet was “eating the human neo-cortex.” Astronomer Clifford Stoll achieved fame in 1995 by writing how e-commerce was Silicon Snake Oil.
You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto, by Jaron Lanier, Knopf, 209 pages, $29.95
Now with the rise of social networking, and the so-called Web 2.0, the skeptics are insurgent. Pundit Nicholas Carr made the case last year in The Atlantic that Google is making us “stoopid.” After publishing The Cult of the Amateur: How Today's Internet is Killing our Culture, Andrew Keen has been described as the bête noire of the Web 2.0 revolution. In The Dumbest Generation, English Professor Mark Bauerlein says the Internet “stupefies young Americans and jeopardizes our future.” James Harkin argues that we’ve all ended up Lost in Cyburbia, “a peculiar no man’s land, populated by people who don’t really know each other, gossiping, having illicit encounters and endlessly twitching their curtains.”
One of the most articulate critics is Jaron Lanier, who, unlike many, has a lot of street cred. Being a forerunner in virtual reality, he can’t be dismissed as a Luddite by technology evangelists. His much-awaited first book, You are Not a Gadget, is certainly the most erudite, albeit slightly disjointed, discussion of the downside of the digital age to date.
“ Mass collaboration and Soviet collectivism are really polar opposites”
Lanier argues that the Web has created a “hive” mentality that emphasizes the crowd over the individual, and is changing what it means to be a person. “Anonymous blog comments, vapid video pranks, and lightweight mash-ups may seem trivial and harmless, but as a whole this widespread practice of fragmentary, impersonal communications has demeaned interpersonal interaction.” Having grown up digital, “a new generation has come of age with a reduced expectation of what a person can be, and of who each person might become.”
As a result, we behave like gadgets. We are all suffering from a “digital reification,” where the basic characteristics of underlying technology algorithms are now determining how we relate to each other. In particular, Lanier seems concerned about new form of online “collectivism” that is suffocating authentic voices in a muddled and anonymous tide of mass mediocrity. He laments the idea that the collective is all-wise, and compares mass collaborations to totalitarian regimes. This collectivist mentality is led by a subculture of “digital Maoists,” who are the “folks from the open culture, Creative Commons world, the Linux community, and the Web 2.0 people.” To him, “online culture is filled to the brim with rhetoric about what the true path to a better world ought to be, and these days it’s strongly biased toward an authoritarian way of thinking.”
To be sure, the effects of the digital revolution on humans are largely unknown. But Lanier’s critique often seems misplaced. He writes that Internet-enabled collaborations produce mediocre outcomes when compared with the secretive, closed-shop approach to innovation that dominated the previous century. “When you have everyone collaborate on everything,” Lanier argues, “you generate a dull, average outcome in all things. You don’t get innovation.”
Lanier dismisses Linux, the open source operating system, as “ordinary,” and claims that the most sophisticated, influential and lucrative examples of technology stem from proprietary development.
But he’s wrong about Linux. When Helsinki-born Linus Torvalds first posted a fledgling version of Linux on an obscure software bulletin board, no one – apart from the most diehard open source evangelists – would have predicted that open-source software would be much more than a short-lived hackers’ experiment. And yet, within a few short years Linux became the largest software engineering project on the planet and spawned a multibillion-dollar ecosystem that upset the balance of power in the software industry.
Today, Linux is used in everything from the smallest consumer electronics to the largest super computers. It helps run Germany’s air-traffic-control systems. It also runs a number of nuclear power plants (whose names cannot be disclosed for reasons of national security). If you drive a BMW, chances are it is running Linux. And, at the time of writing, more than 500 million users of set-top cable boxes, TiVos, Android phones and other home appliances use Linux, and more than 1.5 billion people use it indirectly every day whenever they access Google, Yahoo or myriad other websites.
So what’s Lanier’s answer? If you want to foster creativity and excellence, you have to introduce some boundaries. “Teams need some privacy from one another to develop unique approaches to any kind of competition. Scientists need some time in private before publication to get their results in order.” Making everything open all the time creates what Lanier calls “a global mush.”
Unfortunately, Lanier mischaracterizes the nature of innovation today and fails to appreciate that mass collaboration is not about “everyone doing everything;” it’s about bringing together the complementary skills and knowledge required to create a new product or solve a problem. Take Apple’s iPhone, which Lanier erroneously singles out as the epitome of “closed-shop” development. The iPhone is, in fact, the result of a massive networked-based collaboration involving thousands of companies. Various partners help to design the product. A Taiwanese company does the technical specs, manufacturing and assembly collaborating with hundreds of their own suppliers. And most of the software – supposedly Apple’s main source of competitive advantage – is developed not by Apple, but by an army of third-party developers who have created more than 150,000 applications for the App Store.
Lanier gets closer to hitting the mark when he writes about the detrimental impact of the “free culture” movement on knowledge producers who increasingly rely on indirect methods such as advertising to reap economic rewards for their efforts.
One of the Internet’s great promises is a universally accessible library of all human knowledge and culture that could be made widely and freely available for education, entertainment and research. But Lanier appropriately questions what happens to the incentives for artistic and scientific creation in a system where every knowledge-based product is free.
Like Lanier, we are very sympathetic to the need for everyone from artists and writers to scientists and filmmakers to be able to control how their works are disseminated and repurposed on the Internet. For some people, that means giving it away to maximize exposure and reap rewards through some complementary avenue. But we tend to agree with Lanier when he argues that the world will be a poorer place if nobody pays directly for high-quality content any more.
The most disappointing aspect of Lanier’s book is his troubling equation of the collaborative communities on the Web with Stalinist-style collectivism. Mass collaboration and Soviet collectivism are really polar opposites. Collaboration is based on self-organization, decentralized power and knowledge, and freedom of action. Collectivism is based on coercion and centralized control. Whereas communism stifled individualism, mass collaboration is based on individuals and organizations working to achieve shared outcomes through loose voluntary associations. One produced the Gulag; the other produced Linux, Wikipedia, myriad large-scale scientific collaborations and the Twitter-inspired Iranian youth mobilization for freedom and a secular society, among other things.
Lanier is a contrarian of the digital age and an effective one at that. However, the debates that he and others have stimulated about the nature of the Web and its impact on how we work, learn, live and think, ironically belie his core thesis that we are all becoming mindless gadgets marching to some unitary, authoritarian collective voice.
Don Tapscott and Anthony D. Williams are co-authors of Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything. Their book MacroWikinomics: Rebooting Business and the World, will be published in September.
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