The beauty of the recent volume of Jaron Lanier You're not a gadget is that it opens with an unusual question, at least in a book devoted entirely to computers, virtual realities and the web. The question is: what is a person? While it is true that technologies alter the sense of place, time and art, then they also affect human relationships, then this will impact the very definition of "person".
From this premise the first three dense chapters, devoted to "Missing Persons", the 'Apocalypse of the renunciation of self and the dangers of the "noosphere", the term, the latter known as coined by the philosopher Pierre Teihard de Chardin, but that has now become incorrectly synonymous with the concept of "collective intelligence".
If the attack on the type of emerging intellectual culture came from a retro classic nostalgia from a declared enemy of technology, no one would be surprised. The scandal lies in the fact Jaron Lanier is a recognized genius of computer science, among other things, inventor of virtual reality, an avid explorer of borderline territories that connect the computer science with cognitive psychology, neuroscience, medicine and even music. Lanier was and is a key problem in the history of hi-tech camera. That is why his book has caused an earthquake in the seventh grade in the panorama of culture Internet users.
Yes, because among other things You're not a gadget (Mondadori, 268 pages, € 17.50), the whose subtitle reads "because we must ensure that the digital culture to get control of our lives," examines the immense damage caused by "collectivism" computerized, accused of hiding behind a new kind of technological messianism, the worst damage to creativity, culture, civilization .
Needless to say that Lanier was immediately accused of treason by a large part of the web that people identify with the "cloud", ie the cloud point of anonymous individuals connected to think and act faster and better than any individual: the elusive "hive mind".
Cloud computing the new millennium seems to be dominated collectivist ideology that culture is embodied in the open or free. The domination of this ideology will lead to an early systemic collapse of gigantic proportions. Lanier's arguments are compelling, but in these brief notes can only be mentioned. For example, it is a mistake to confuse the freedom of expression and the absence of transactions in the exchange of information. Imagine what would happen if you applied the same methodology to the money or goods. Eventually we land to stagnation, and that is what is happening because of file sharing. The free exchange of films, videos or music draws on the enormous reservoir of what has been achieved in the past high level, but also discourages undertaken the equally high standard.
The paradoxical result is the emergence of a global subculture that, while declaring themselves revolutionary, in fact is fiercely conservative. The clues are many: Despite technological advances, the world seems trapped in the intellectual framework youth of the seventies. The epochal changes in the forms of communication do not inspire more (as has happened in the revolutions of the past systemic) thought and art equally extraordinary. Instead, apathy and repetition reign supreme and the world seems about to succumb to the torpor of Sleeping Beauty.
Criticism bolted to the collectivism and totalitarianism are technological So growing up, and not at the periphery of the system, but from his own heart. We find the considerations in Lanier The dark side of the network Nicholas Carr, but in The Shallows. What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains , his latest book, recently released in the U.S., a bolus injection examining the scientific literature concerning the effects of the subliminal digital culture in the wake of studies that have tested the effects of television, printing and writing. And the effects appear to be devastating, such as those resulting from the erosion of long-term memory, deep memory, which allows the production chains of complex reasoning. Similar criticism comes from BJ Fogg, cognitive psychologist who studies persuasion strategies favored by the web.
Spontaneously interventionist style compared to the Anglo-American "continental". Even in Europe to discuss the internett collectivism, just remember the cult of the Internet. The global interconnectedness and the end of the social bond by Philippe Breton, cryptic or not the Spheres trilogy, by Peter Sloterdijk. Although the United States, David F. Noble, well-known author of The Religion of Technology, this approach suffers from a purely critical. But these remain the major taken at the periphery apparatus that analyze, because it is entirely designed in the frame of thought of the press. Technologists, more pragmatic, aiming instead to the heart of the system. Hence the tendency to analyze Lanier but then to propose remedial concrete, practical.
take what he calls the "reduction of information systems." All information systems require data to operate. One example is the registry, without which there can not be modern bureaucracy. But in real life no one wants to reduce a person to all its data. But it is exactly what happens in Facebook, MySpace oTwitter, where the abstract obscure the real person. For a "funnel effect" of social networking users are forced to constantly manage their reputation online, an obstacle course where, however, are awarded the insincerity, the shrewdness, opportunism or careerism. So what? So everything is to rethink the software that allows the Social Network to promote the worst behaviors, such as the terrible phenomenon of "troll", a term used to describe those who, protected by anonymity, launches insults and provocations in an online environment. It is the son of the ideology of the breach, according to which everything can be defiled, naked, despised, revealed. The phenomenon has captured the record for the number of suicides caused by these attacks and anonymous collective. Yet, according to Lanier, they may be corrected, speaking just on the design of software. And here are the nodes to comb it all depends on policy choices. In fact
Lanier is not an isolated one. It is action in a specific cultural environment of the highest profile. For example, his ideas on the possible (and very surprising) positive innovations in finance and business Internet users make use of the contributions of persons who are establishing a new paradigm. These include biochemical Stuart Kauffman, Lee Smolin astrophysicist, mathematician and economist Eric R. Weinstein. An entire cultural environment comes together to raise key issues and propose innovative solutions.
The disconcerting quality of virtual reality and the web, think on other grounds, spread In fact, nothing short of stunning expressive possibilities. We find in these pages Lanier twenty years ago, which he outlined his pioneering ideas on post-symbolic communication: information that goes beyond the constraints of the symbols. Which, from the perspective of a technologist, it means transcending the limits of existing programming languages. In short, virtual reality and post-symbolic communication in the absence of protocols. But mind you, the keystone that holds the entire project is just the term "communication". Declared a humanistic approach, which relies on the technology and founded, but to strengthen the positive linkages between people. Something that totalitarianism can never understand cyberspace.
