last highlighted date: 2023-12-20
Highlights
- The book was widely praised for its originality and cheerful techno-hippie vibes, but many readers rejected its most radical assertion: that the shift toward a Web 2.0 world, in which posting information was as easy as consuming it, might have been a mistake. A review of “You Are Not a Gadget” in the Guardian noted that “Lanier is clearly very well-informed about IT,” but then went on to describe the “social and spiritual strand of the book” as sounding like the “anxiety of an ageing innovator.” The implication was clear: don’t take this guy too seriously.
- A notable exception was the technologist Jaron Lanier, whose 2010 manifesto, “You Are Not a Gadget,” delivered a scathing indictment of the consolidation of Internet activity onto a small number of corporate-owned platforms, such as Facebook and Twitter.
- The communications theorist Neil Postman, who died in 2003, probably wouldn’t have been surprised by this reaction. Though he is best known for his anti-television polemic, “Amusing Ourselves to Death,” Postman’s masterwork is his 1992 book, “Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology,” in which he argues that our relationship with technology has passed through three distinct phases.
- Postman argues, the fight between invention and traditional values has been resolved, with the former emerging as the clear winner. The result is the “submission of all forms of cultural life to the sovereignty of technique and technology.” Innovation and increased efficiency become the unchallenged mechanisms of progress, while any doubts about the imperative to accommodate the shiny and new are marginalized.
- If successful, the lawsuit may force A.I. developers to remove certain copyrighted content from their training sets, limiting the ability of their models to mimic specific author styles and voices. “Generative A.I. is a vast new field for Silicon Valley’s longstanding exploitation of content providers,” the novelist Jonathan Franzen, a class representative in the suit, explained. But just because this potential for exploitation exists doesn’t mean it has to be acted on. What if we simply decided to leave professional creative writing to humans?