Jaron Lanier is very angry about computers. While this book is a necessary antidote to the usual silicon valley cyber-utopianism, Lanier is not nearly as smart as he thinks he is, and this manifesto is plagued by conceptual and organizational difficulties.

The first target of Lanier's wrath is the Singularity, the idea that increasingly powerful computers will lead to an intelligence explosion and the rapture of the nerds. Singulatarians are easy targets for mockery, and Lanier's attack is based around the Hard Problem of Consciousness: explaining the phenomenon of experience. This leads us into some interesting philosophical and mathematical thickets: all computers that we know of are Turing Machines, which are classed as machines which can solve a certain set of formalized mathematical questions (actually, the ones we know how to build are less than Turing Machines because they run in finite time and space). Either brains are Turing Machines, in which case experience is just math, or brains are not Turing Machines, in which case our understanding of math is due for some big changes. Lanier, however, doesn't talk about this (I know about it because I've read Godel Escher Bach several times), preferring to bash Kurzweil et al as robot cultists.

Second are online communities, which he characterizes as Digital Maoism, or blind mobs, primarily interested in trolling. Now, there is a lot of trolling online, and mobs are fickle and sometimes dangerous, and Clay Skirkey is probably a buffoon, but actual scholars doing actual scholarship (cite forthcoming, mostly my friends) have done a lot of interesting work on the social interactions that make up the web. Ethnographic studies are a lot more work than generalized bemoaning about cyber-vigilantes and the ADHD spikiness of internet interests. Of course the internet looks like a mob from on high-from a sufficient distance, nearly everything can be treated as a problem in statistical mechanics. Real social scientists, as opposed to self-proclaimed polymaths, have stopped taking "cyberspace" as an intellectually productive conversation.

Third, and most interesting, is Lanier's attack against Open Source culture. According to his argument, the computer has killed authorship, creative expression, and the middle class, leaving nothing but Cloud Lords and Microserfs. He has some interesting points about hip hop as the last novel/pre-digital artistic movement, the retro sensibilities of modern pop culture, and the triumphs of Open Source software being a clone of UNIX and an encyclopedia rather than something new.

That said, there are some big questions that Lanier doesn't engage with. First, as awful as MIDI and other standards are, (and a friend of mine did an undergrad STS thesis on MIDI), working technologies are by definition 'closed', in the social construction of technology sense of closure. You want tools that can be used; you have to assume those tools' political values as well. A little reading in the philosophy of technology, particular Bowker and Star's Sorting Things Out, would've been immensely helpful here.

Second, Lanier has a rather confused notion of what a computer is, as a box that shows me images which are made out of math. Copyright, authorship, the whole shebang of culture that Lanier cares so much about and takes as reaching its optimum right at 1970 or so, is historically and legally contingent on a bunch of technological and political factors around the reproduction of physical objects. Well, computers make math infinitely reproducible. Stewart Brand's slogan "Information wants to be free" doesn't quite get at how free information wants to be. Given a computer and some math, information is free in the same way that air can't be locked up. It's basically the problem of the 'digital original,' and the question of the value of the original versus copies. Lanier is making some kind of worthwhile point here, but its buried under so much vitriol and romanticism that it's hard to see (much like this review).

In the end, I think Lanier ironically does the exact same thing he criticizes others for doing, in that he blames all the contradictions of Late Stage Capitalism on computers. It's a technologically deterministic argument with a few new twists, but not nearly as novel or rigorous as it could be.