ntouk.com - Jerry Fishenden's technology policy blog

To the LSE yesterday evening, where I had the honour of chairing Jaron Lanier's lecture. If you've been living in a parallel universe and only just popped out for a KitKat and a cup of tea, Jaron is the American computer scientist, composer, visual artist, and author who coined the term "Virtual Reality" in the early 1980s.

Fresh from reading his new book, "You are not a gadget", I knew we were in for something special and rare -- someone with a different and informed view of the way our digital world and digital culture is evolving. My only disappointment was that on this occasion Jaron had not brought along one of his many unusual musical instruments, although this YouTube video will give you some idea of his talents. (He is, incidentally, doing a gig tonight at the Vortex although I'm not sure if there are any tickets left)

If you want to follow the full value of his perspectives and insights, well, read his book. But here are some approximate soundbites to provide a flavour (all transcription errors and misinterpretations are entirely of my own creation) of where his lecture went last night ...

".... I realised early on that the physical design of computers would have a profound influence upon our world..."

"... as an originator of open culture, I now reject much of it ... it has become a new religion, with people believing in ideas such as the Singularity in the same way as some Christian sects believe in The Rapture... If you don't espouse the new theology you get shouted down and trolled."

"... there are similarities between jihadi groups and Internet trolls banging on about poodles, or guitars or something that obsesses them insanely ...."

"... what's the point of dumbing down humans? So what --we become morons in order to make computers smart?!"

"... open culture has produced nothing new. It's most revered works -- Linux and Wikipedia -- are a re-hash of an antique and ugly 1960s operating system and a text-based encyclopaedia! Open culture has failed. Where is the imagination, the creation, the genuinely new thinking rather than the rehash of existing, old ideas? Where is the open culture iPod? It's no coincidence that such developments come from closed communities..."

"... open culture collided with a kind of neo-Maoist "everyone should be equal" and Google placing advertising at the core of the Internet ..."

"... we have ended up on an anti-human course ..."

"... collective works can be boring and derivative. There is nothing intrinsically good about them..."

"... try not using Wikipedia, the "one true source", for a week. You'll find the Web is much richer than you thought..."

"... I don't buy this idea that most people are passive recipients of others' creativity. I believe that by nature most people are creative, not passive ...."

"... the early days of the Web were something truly transformative. People used it and developed it because they enjoyed it and it was a good idea, not to feed a profit motive...."

"... journalists, musicians, authors, illustrators and other creators having their livelihoods destroyed are the canaries in the coalmine..."

"... anyone who uses the Internet should read EM Forster's "The Machine Stops". Written in 1909 it's a perceptive vision for the role of technology in our lives ..."

"... I think that Ted Nelson's first thought was a best thought ... that there should only be one copy of a digital file, controlled by the owner, with an associated micropayment mechanism ... it would give us the best basis on which to make the Internet work for content creators ...."

"... the Internet is one of the least green things around ... its infrastructure is a giant industrial machine, the hardware needed to run it (including silicon fabrication) is an intensive industry... and the waste of duplication! BitTorrent alone, copying and duplicating files around the Internet, takes up around 50% of all Internet traffic...."

Some of this may sound negative but in the context of Jaron's lecture, it most certainly wasn't. Jaron raises important issues about the need for human design as we navigate how best to charter our digital age. He remains at heart an optimist and digital enthusiast. But he's pointing out where we should be doing it far better, using it far more imaginatively and effectively.

It was a timely reminder that our digital age shouldn't be something that just happens to us. It should be something we help shape.

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