Currently Reading / You Are Not a Gadget

Jaron Lanier’s You Are Not a Gadget has a very intriguing introduction. 

“It’s early in the twenty-first century, and that means that these words will mostly be read by nonpersons-automatons or numb mobs composed of people who are no longer acting as individuals. The words will be minced into atomised search-engine keywords within industrial cloud computing facilities located in remote, often secret locations around the world. The vast fanning out of the fates of these words will take place almost entirely in the lifeless world of pure information. Real human eyes will read these words in only a tiny minority of cases.”

Larner’s book is a powerful critique of web 2.0 culture and the dehumanising aspect of the wisdom of the crowd mentality. I don’t entirely agree with all of his conclusions, but this is essential reading. Especially for techno-optimists in need of a strong counter point / reality check…