LINK | What is a Person?

Journal in ears book you're not a gadget a manifesto is in my estimation the most important book on culture published this year writing from inside the very center of the digital revolution he's asking profound questions about the goals and values of the internet the intelligence we impute to computers in the emergent theology of the digital age which Jaron calls cybernetic totalism the Jewish elements in his work are implicit but in my view somewhat substantial one can imagine his work in part perhaps as an updating of the theology of Martin Buber who famously divided the world into ivao relationships in which individuals truly relate to one another and I it relationships which individuals relate to others as objects and are objectified in return in the late 1980s Jaron Lanier led the team that developed the first implementations of multi person virtual worlds as well as the first avatars within such systems he has served as a visiting scientist at Silicon Graphics and he was scholar and large for Microsoft from 2006 to 2009 and serves as partner architect there he is also in the 2010 Time magazine top 100 a list of the world's most influential thinkers leaders and artists I noticed with some humor that he is on the same list as Lady Gaga but in a different category Jaron Lanier is also a pianist composer and collector of unusual musical instruments maintaining one of the largest and most varied collections of actively played rare instruments in the world our link program of which tonight is the concluding lecture for the spring series includes talks by prominent thinkers as well as a fellowship for Jewish educators the program as a whole is underwritten by the covenant foundation tonight's program is supported by the Wallace Foundation which seeks to support and share effective ideas and practices that will strengthen education leadership arts participation and out-of-school learning I wanted to thank the Wallace Foundation for their support tonight and welcome their leadership and members here this talk with Jaron Lanier will be available online on Monday if you are moved to tweet tonight please use the hashtag link without further ado please welcome Jaron Lanier so what is it Tom can its from Laos there's a pretty good case to be made that this is the original prototype of the computer now here's hucksterism many thousands of years ago things like this well many three four five thousand years ago things like this were traded across the Silk Route from Asia and were known to the ancient Greeks the Romans being the Romans felt they had to make the sort of mega version so they made a giant steam-powered thing that made noise in the Colosseum while people were being killed and stuff sort of like being the house man for worldwide wrestling I guess in the ancient world and the thing was so big that people couldn't operate it so they had these levers that they would use and that turned into the keyboard that turned in the whole thing evolved into the pipe organ but because there were these huge levers from the very earliest days they could be played through an automation mechanism a very crude one and from the very earliest history of the pipe organ there were player pipe organs as a result of that legacy because of how big the hydrolyse was the player pipe organ evolved into the player piano there were player piano instruments almost as early as real pianos you're tweeting it makes you only have here I'm sorry to bug you about it but I do someday you'll think back on these days like what was like thank you and and the there was an early improvising player piano a piano that actually could choose its chords randomly that thing inspired a guy named is a card to make a programmable loom and that thing served as the prototype for the general-purpose calculator via Babbage tada so first digital computer this is the first object with multiple parallel similar similar parts that are turned off are on that I know of in human culture so this is the first digital memory and even better we don't quite know how it works there's a weird balance that allows the notes to go on or off and it's not fully understood it's sort of understood and I once had a wonderful afternoon taking one of these apart with Richard Fineman the great physicist trying to really nail down the mechanism and it still eludes us and it's details you cannot Google to find out how this works okay so um this is fun for me because it's the first time I've done something in a Jewish context since my bar mitzvah I think most people don't realize I'm Jewish I think I don't maybe I don't look or sound Jewish I am very Jewish I'm a child of a Holocaust survivor and on my that was on my mother's side on my father's side the family was almost utterly destroyed in the pogroms barely survived when of one of the folks in my father's family was mute for life because she'd survived as her sister was killed by a sword under a bed by keeping completely silent and she never made another peep in her whole life so I feel about as Jewish as you can be up until not too many years ago if I looked at if I looked up myself on the internet on one of the search engines the only people who listed me as Jewish with the anti-semites who had would would have these sites about like oh look at all these prominent Jews and I noticed that exactly that list made it onto the first list of prominent Jewish computer scientists on Wikipedia and okay so now now it's now the secret's out so I think I'm going to talk about Jewish stuff a bit I'll also talk about the book but I'll just try to say a couple things um one thing is I've always thought that the sense of optimism that is the foundation of the Enlightenment and of the whole project of Technology has a Jewish origin more or less I don't think I'm the first person to say this but if you look at the great old cultures of mankind and the sort of worldview the metaphysics that they have some of the cultures have this sort of cyclic Sensibility Hindu and Buddhist cultures tend to think of time as being a great cycle and what there is will be again what there is was there's another sort of a thing which is this ramp to a specific destination which is in the end of time Ragnar role or the apocalypse or something but in the Jewish idea was always like this Messiah will come and things look get better there was this notion of something still within this world at some time that's absolutely not revealed that you can look forward to that the future is better than the past but in a very temporal way in in a in a concrete way and I think that that's unique or and the combination of that with the Diaspora the combination of that with these people who are kind of hanging on to each other through texts and networks spread out across the world over centuries and centuries amazing combination and I see a little bit of that quality in the I think it made it into the Enlightenment a little bit via figures God my brain you know the guy who we excommunicated and treated terribly spin knows of course who I really love I love spinosus writing so I've always felt very Jewish in my work as a technologist I'll tell you one little story briefly about my work as a musician and being Jewish and then I'll talk about the book a little bit I just finished I write symphony music I write for casters and I just finished a big piece with a full chorus which I've never done before and I'm terrified it's really hard but it's gonna premiere in October in Orlando at the Bach Festival there and the text is by Amelia Lanier how many people have heard of Amelia so this is like astounding to me they're all these things called Women's Studies programs and nobody's nobody knows about her so amelia was the first published female poet in the english language and is one of the few friends of shakespeare that we know about she lived across the courtyard from William Shakespeare and published these sonnets and these essays and these diatribes and she's also known as the first feminist in English and her writings really kind of ordinary this case is where she makes fun of summer Shakespeare stuff and there's turns of phrase that show up in her stuff before Shakespeare so this is this is an amazing figure now does this have anything to do with being Jewish well you might have noticed that my my name doesn't sound very Jewish right linear it's a name my dad chose in part because of fear of anti-semitism he it's an Ellis Island name he just felt like we're you know sound gringo and we're gonna go off to the farthest place on the road where they still have a college that's how I ended up in southern New Mexico as a kid and just like get away from all this crap in Europe and just go as far as possible so he chose Lanier in honor of a guy named Sidney Lanier Sidney Lanier is a fairly well-known nineteenth-century figure he founded a lot of the American orchestras and he was probably the best flute player of the century but mostly he's known as a poet and he also was a philosopher he wrote a book on poetry and music and this sort of synesthetic idea from the 19th century perspective also one of the first people to write about industrialization thoughtfully I think Sidney Lanier is the direct descendant of Amelia as our tons and tons of musicians and poets I have a good friend named Quincy Jones who's very well known as a music producer and musician an amazing guy a bit of a nut case but just wonderful and sweet and whenever I see me says now the reason he says that is that one of Amelia's descendents ended up in Barbados and Quincy's mom was a linear and so an i/o sail Quincy you know I'm just I'm a virtual linear and not a real one but the story has more twists than you might expect it turns out amelia was Jewish what happened was she was part of a family based in Morocco that made their living as itinerant musicians they got a gig in Venice moved to the the Venetian ghetto and we actually have a portrait of her that survives and also a woodcut of the family business and when you look at these things it's really kind of weird because she has this hair that's totally frizzed and virtually coming into dreadlocks it's like right on the edge and these for me have no significance or meaning except it'd be too much damn work to avoid them and there's a certain steam I met some kids at a train station in Vienna where my mom is from who had dreadlocks and they turned out to be Jewish which is there aren't that many Jewish kids around there and there's like some strain of Jesus with hair like this you know and so it turns out her family moved to the Venetian ghetto looking for work we have this this is a woodcut of their of their family their calling card basically looks just like my studio with all these instruments flying everywhere in this huge mess it's just amazing they got a gig in London of court musicians for the royal family they had to hide their Jewishness to do it took on any name Emilia gets pregnant at 17 to avoid scandal she's married off to a French guy that she never met named Lanier thus the name so so basically it is a Jewish name it's really strange and Jewish yeah yeah you know I think you're there yeah so yeah so I won't suggest that he does what might there's a you know that jazz saxophonist Ornette Coleman in midlife he became very interested in Kabbalah and decided to have a circumcision and so he oh you're kidding but he did it yeah so I don't think Quincy's going to do that but it's just like what not to do with the news that you're actually Jewish in middle age anyway so these are some of the tales we should talk about my book the book the book is an attempt to find a way to be a humanist in pro technology at the same time and it's hard because the overwhelmingly dominant culture of technology in the last decade especially has been at least to my sensibility anti-human there's been an assault on the idea that an individual perspective really matters that somebody taking the time to introspect really matters that there's something mysterious if not a soul than a center of consciousness something that we don't quite understand that just might be there at the center of a person that a person might be something different than a computer these are things that I believe are true I don't know for certain of course there are limits to how much we can really know but there's a cost to believing in the sort of nerd view of reality that's become so mainstream the cost is that we can expect less of ourselves and gradually turn into pseudo people and that's what I'm concerned is happening I'm concerned that a lot of the media designs that have become popular at least from my perspective as the sort of agent I'm like this old guy I turned 50 so that makes me like this thing in antique you know I actually when I turned 40 I was at Stanford an undergraduate said jaron lanier you're still alive said I'm 50 which makes me like some sort of holdover from some wormhole Oh in another universe I guess but at any rate the from my perspective these ideas that I abhor are only they've been around since the origin of computing and in the book I described the precise origin of them which is Alan Turing just before his death but the the dominance of these ideas is incredibly recent and there's no reason to believe that it can't be reversed there's no reason to believe that we couldn't have a humanistic computing culture now to add insult to injury or I guess injury to insult the particular designs that devalue people don't just do so symbolically they also make people poor and I'm personally convinced that a lot of the economic trouble and the general decline in Outlook around the world has a lot to do with humanity's decision to regiment itself according to computer network designs instead of according to reality in human designs you have and this becomes more of an argument some of is in the book and some of which isn't stuff that I'm in the process of writing now but from an American perspective which is different from the European or the Chinese or the Indian which which although they all connect but from an American perspective what essentially happened was in the 80s and 90s we had a national conversation in which we decided screw manufacturing screw making real stuff let's will be intellectual property people will make the movies we'll make the software will be the glamorous ones will be the intellectual people who get paid for intellectual property and we more or less did that we ceded the display industry and many others rather knowingly and consciously as part of a decision to pursue this this life of the mind that we'd be paid for and then the internet comes along and internet culture says wait a second you shouldn't be paid for the life of the mind that's the stuff you should give up so we can advertise at you you're just fodder for our advertising business you're not going to benefit from that forget it you can pretend you will you can pretend you'll make a music career by putting up YouTube videos but you really won't and even in the back of the mind you know it so we essentially shut ourselves in both feet leaving ourselves without a paradigm for making a living now I'm exaggerating tremendously because there are many exceptions in the world is complex but in the big picture that's approximately what's happened in America's national story that we've rejected both plausible stories for how we could be responsible for our own keep and you know we can't just sit here whining we have to actually figure out something some some some means to so we don't want the government to take care of us because we're really libertarian but on the other hand we give everything away because we're really cyber libertarian and the other hand we don't really make any stuff because that's filthy and dirty and who wants to do it so new you know so we haven't gotten past new yet and so you have a sort of a spiritual problem that's echoed in a material problem that has almost the same structure and that is what I view is a core of our malady at the moment if you look at the structure of investment in the world it's to a remarkable degree a shadow or a mirror of the structure of the Internet and the way that people have seated their own careers to this advertising business let me let me describe to you what I mean and then I'll stop and I'll take questions so now I'm proceeding it's some stuff that isn't the book in the book that's in my next writing the new Silicon Valley run it with the exception of Apple which is a whole other story which I'm not happy about either Silicon Valley is reading on this idea of what's what we call advertising it's not really advertising because every time a company like Google or Facebook tries to put up a real ad that has a message they don't make money with that what it really is is selling links it's connection its connection fees it's like a dating service or something it's just connecting connecting people together and so you charge for it if there's commercial value and then if there isn't of course then you don't charge for it now what happens so the way things work in computers is that digital software and digital designs intrinsically have these qualities that lead to extraordinary lock-in effects meaning that when somebody's using it they have a hard time doing something different there it used to be that this happened around layers of software or file formats but with the internet it happens because of the difficulty of coordinating everybody to move from one server to another one so for instance if you want to start a competitor to Eva it'd be really really hard because everybody's ready on eBay so at any given moment if somebody wants to buy or sell something they're better off being there than hoping for people to show up at some new site and it's just so hard to coordinate a mass migration that it happens very rarely so that's what we call a network effect lock-in they're very very powerful the the lock-in that Google has is a really unusual one and I finally realized how it work the other day and what I've been telling my friends at Google about it they suddenly go oh my god you're right that's how we make money and I'm really uncertain if it's a it's a strange little thing but how it works is let's say you're buying a keyword on Google and somebody else wins the auction well normally in in the physical world if you don't if you lose an auction or for some reason you can't buy something you just go into something else with your money but the thing about the Google world is that the stuff being sold is made up by the customers because it's some keyword it's some piece of the language and the language is infinitely extensible so you oak so what you do is instead you spray instead when you're punched down vertically and you lose something you instead move horizontally and create a new thing that you can defend a new keyword and so the thing spreads out like a film horizontally and generates you know tens of billions of dollars now the interesting thing about it is that anybody who's putting any money into this kind of has to stay there because the moment they let go of a piece the next best competitor in the world for whom it's relevant will be right there because it's an it's everything is subject to this auction structure so everybody's kind of locked into this huge thing now the reason I'm describing that so that so the interesting thing is that the lock-in on the eBay saw the eBay lock-in is based on benefit and the Google lankan is based on risk it's a it's a it's a really interesting inversion so I won't go over that in too much detail right now but what's interesting is that if you look at how investment works over the internet with massive hedge funds and these huge leveraging schemes that move capital around internationally they have exactly the same structure and instead of making up new light new natural language keywords he make up new transactions so the actual number of things to invest in is a small finite list but you can always make up new transactions and spread this huge film that can grow to an arbitrary size so they're precise merits it's the same structure and yes I've had this realization and it's the natural way to get the toughest lock using networks and this is the power so what's happening is basically the game of human power the game of politics in the game of managing influence has turned into this computer architecture thing and computer architecture tends to be all on a loss so it tends to have incredible concentrating effects and this to me is an is a core of why our economies have become incompetent that what we've done to ourselves with social networking is exactly what we're doing to ourselves with capital and so we have a huge problem and my own sense is that they're gonna be a lot of angry people in the next 10 or 20 years who grew up in a world that is less functional than it ought to be given our technological capabilities and I hope they have the right target to be angry at I'm a little worried about you know when people get angry they're very easy to misdirect the very very easiest number one trick in any politicians book is misdirect angry people so that's the old game before the server's came up so I'm I'm very interested in seeing how this turns out and I'm a little concerned about it so I hope that doesn't sound too dark I'll just say a positive thing and then I'll take questions the positive thing I want to say is that if I there was this thing that was happening with high school kids and undergraduates for like 15 years where every class that came in was sort of nerdier and less questioning than the previous one sort of more conformist from my point of view to the point where about like last year there was people were so incredibly conformist on the social networking diet and on a certain way of doing things that it was almost as if they were just following a script in their lives it was I found it disturbing I found sort of less individuality and less speaking in the broth of course with exceptions but there was this extraordinary degree of sameness suddenly this year I'm seeing it turn around I'm seeing a lot of kids who are thinking for themselves a lot of kids who don't view the designs as being in a badge of their generation but rather something that's been imposed on them by the previous one and I'm suddenly starting to feel really optimistic and I'm really liking these kids so I'll end with that and take questions we could ask the US speaking to the mic would be great so everyone can hear and we can also tape it and also if you have any surveys if you could just pass them all the way to this end so you won't lose them for our raffle hi I was wondering if you get to speak a little bit about when you're sort of talking about the commodification there's a sort of a finite list of things and we're getting this horizontal spread and I was just curious if you could talk a little bit about a lot of privacy issues and how people don't really understand their identity and the value behind that and how it sort of fits into that commodity scheme yeah well the usual focal question on Facebook that lately is privacy which i think is a little bit of a misstatement let me say a couple things about it first of all if the seeding of privacy was genuinely symmetrical it wouldn't necessarily be a bad thing I think it's entirely imaginable to live in a world in which there are fewer secrets in general and for a little while the internet was looking like it might turn into that world so if it's true that in exchange for exposing one's life everyone else does it but also all the institutions all the powerful people if it if it's really symmetrical that could work I mean the truth is that almost all secrets are dull you know I mean all you have to do is look at political scandals and you fall asleep I mean the rarity is if one of them actually seeing a woman instead of a man these days but but that you know absent that novelty basically it's just it's just so dreary and predictable and and that's so so most most secrets are not that interesting the thing is that there's a radical asymmetry here so what happens it's like let's say you have a very pro Facebook kid who's like you know this is this is this is my generation it's sharing you know whatever so the problem is of course that the social graph and other data structures representing them which which live inside the dark heart of the Facebook servers are not shared it's not symmetrical at all but they versus their friends the symmetry is maintained so from their point of view they're acting rationally and the so then the question is well could anything bad happen because of this this radical asymmetry and the answers yeah I mean the weird thing about Facebook is that no matter how hard it tries it can't make much money I mean it's like maybe gonna hit a billion this year in revenue and probably not any profit or maybe a smidgen or something that's like embarrassing it's six years I mean come on Google got there three years after introducing their their ad model and it's like I mean like for the for the user growth that Facebook has their revenue growth is pathetic you know and that's like why well part of it is Google's lock which I described before but also I mean the truth the basically nobody's found out how to exploit this stuff yet and that's what makes it so scary like what's what's it gonna take to actually make something of this and and since the obvious things aren't working like somebody's gonna have to come up with something it's not you know they're investors they're at least they don't have to do something what'll it be that's scary if they were well you know many people about did everybody hear the question okay he's asking like why can't it just stay a billion-dollar company why does it have to grow it has investors I mean you probably know another Jewish we don't and Craig Newmark who had it thought like that I was like you know these internet services you can grab one of these persistent lock-in niches and you don't really have to make all that much money so you have this so Craigslist is this giant site and there are many things to be said about it that either there many complaints one can have and I'm not praising everything about it and it's been a disaster for newspapers and blah blah blah but the thing is he said that more or less I think you know it doesn't have to be giant it can be perfectly good business why does it have to be this big thing the problem with Facebook is it already has an investor so it's obliged you know it's it's that's the way our world works so maybe what'll happen to Facebook is it'll be nationalized or turned into god-knows-what maybe there'll be some weird fate but what's going to happen well before that there's gonna be this long parade of people are saying we gotta do something with this data and that does scare me I I just if it knew what it was gonna do when it grew up already then it would be a known quantity Google is more or less a known quantity Facebook isn't Facebook doesn't know what its gonna do when it grows up and that's that makes it that makes it kind of scary plus the people are just they have like this incredible talent for revving everybody the wrong way and I'm a little I'm a little concerned that they're getting too comfortable with being disliked so that they won't be socially persuadable anymore they're not bad people but I'm concerned about that that effect yeah speaking of music as a musician how do you see music and art having an impact or the possibility for it having an impact on this anti-humanist network lock-in how can the art just be a little disruptive of all of this it's mostly going in the other direction right now I the Internet one of the reasons I really turned on so I was one of the I helped make up the open ideology I mean I made up a lot of this crap I really did I mean like a lot of a lot of the lines people spew about how oh the newspapers and the record companies they should have seen it coming they were stupid I actually came up with some of that rhetoric a long time ago I was like but what made me realize it wasn't working was seeing all my musicians be disempowered basically like there's all this endless rhetoric you're so empowered you can get all these views on YouTube or whatever and meanwhile people are losing their livelihoods and suffering and it's just ridiculous I mean if you look at this you can look at hard data for how many people used to actually survive as middle-class musicians and it's just floored and pressed and then there's this lose and there's this illusion that oh there's all these people making this living from giving away stuff and then getting stuff out of it I have tried to track down those people I have a story about it in the book and more recently there are there a few tech journalists that do it there are a few there are a few special cases where it happens but there vanishingly small they're just handfuls and in the case of musician I actually can't find one I mean they're every single case that I've really pursued seriously turns out to be a trust-fund baby or something like that or if it like like to actually find people they just it's like this imaginary population it's it's it's a it's really kind of extraordinary so now what about the other direction what can the arts do to help well I think there's a lot to be done there one thing to say is that the overlap between sort of math East brainy kids and musicians is very very strong and music is one bridge between culture and tech that might be stronger than almost any other film and cinema is another one that's kind of there and some writing but music is probably the strongest one and exactly what to do with that I'm not sure I mean it's really hard I have these ideas myself that if you make the experience of using computers more somatic and more sensitive and it'll actually change the way people think about them and it'll change the way things work I might be wrong about that but we're gonna have a big test of that because there's some designs coming out in a big way that have that quality and we'll see what cultural resonance has happen with them and I don't know it's a tough one it's really it's it's actually and also what people think music is this really under assault there's so many people who think that music is just this combinatorial pattern thing like the rock band like hit the buttons right and that I have mixed feelings about because on the one hand I kind of like to see them doing that but on the other hand I feel like you're so missing the point and you know not that there weren't generations of bad music teachers that committed exactly the same sin you know but at least then you had like this nasty person to blame in this case you know that negative figure isn't there so it's a little harder to see the problem I think as a follow-up to that I know there's at least a couple people in the room that are technologists by vocation and musicians by avocation and I'm wondering as you as an individual how do you rectify jaren the musician to join the technologists and where do you see sort of the combinations and what are your how do you live both lives well in a chaotic indescribable semi functional manner the usual answer I give is true which is that I practice cross procrastination where I try to create I'm always using one to delay the other so that I can feel like a lazy person getting away with something until there's some huge crisis and then somehow it all comes together and there's that's kind of my modus operandi and it's immature and pathetic but there you are so I can if I only did one thing I would I would starve in a alley somewhere but by having by going back and forth enough gets done that it sort of happens and I have pretty much separate lives like in the movie I do soundtracks and in the movie database my name my main my name was misspelled a long time ago and I just kind of left it alone and I just have this other persona in that world and I you know it's like I can it's it's weird how variegated the world is these days I was I just did a show in Oakland in like a 3,000 seat house so it was sort of like a what was it was joke oh no spam I'm part of the new Yoko Ono plastic plastic gun event and we did and I was thinking well it's Oakland there's got to be a bunch of people who'd know me from tech stuff but I don't you know almost nobody noticed you know it's like I'm just like this weird guy doing stuff with Yoko and it seems to work that's all I can say so what do you think about the argument that or the idea that with all these social networks and all these new relationships forming that they're actually seeding the way for future collaboration that we haven't even yet seen I mean they're I mean I hear what you're saying and I kind of I go back and forth with being concerned and being extremely excited about the potential but I you know Howard Rheingold was talking to me about this kind of seeding the way for collaboration it's adding all this like connective tissue I'm a total believer in collaboration and the importance of the Internet I mean like to see the thing is I'm still a true believer I actually I'm totally into that stuff it's just like to me this stuff that I'm dumping on is the stuff last ten years I just think it's this huge wrong turn I think this idea of this really simplistic just slice people up and have people like enter database representations themselves on Facebook and tweak a little bit of a sentence on Wikipedia and like that's supposed to be the real deal that to me is completely missing the point I want those people to be fully there and to push themselves more than they ever expected and to learn and grow and take risks and be em you know go through go through real experiences and if you go back before this this last ten years the rhetoric around the internet really had a different character Martin Buber was mentioned in the intro which is great and I'm like one of my grandfather's was a close friend of Martin Buber a rabbi and I've always loved Buber stuff if you go back to the 70s i I thou was like required reading in the movement you know the early internet and people are talking Stewart Brand used to be Hawking I though and the whole thing has gotten turned around into this nerdy thing where people are just little information cogs in this giant quest for the singularity or some kind of nonsense like that if there's been this real shift in emphasis I'm still at full I'm actually a true believer and an optimist about the overall project I mean don't you think that I mean I'm with you I mean the the overall I guess I hear what you're saying but I believe optimistically that the good of it and the collaborative nature of it and what it's doing will ultimately win ya know I mean there's different kinds of collaboration has you know this is in my book somewhere early on it says you have to be somebody before you can share yourself and that to me is the core issue here if you think about a great collaboration in history in any field if you use ik beetles as a good collaboration example in science the generation of quantum quantum mechanics scientists or a good example they're all there's like these amazing examples but each of each of the people involved was was really fully formed and the collaborations didn't last forever because they couldn't and there wasn't anything automatic about them they were hard they involved risks and conflict and the people became more individual in the course of them and you know I think collaboration has to really be something you know how you have to be somebody before you can share yourself in to pretend otherwise you just lessen yourself and that's been the big mistake of the recent years and it's all because the stupid Google thing makes so much damn money you know it's just you know it just it does and that's that's the problem Sarah annuity wants that there any sorry there questions in the higher altitudes higher altitudes what can we learn from non-digital previous cultural lock-in and paradigms that we have rectified that may be applied to maybe some of the the concerns that you have there are some interesting ones I I compared the Wikipedia to a traditional holy book without mentioning Torah specifically but one of the things that really you know if you read Torah scholarship where people derive the original individual voices and you can sort of start to hypothesize about people who wrote different parts of it that to me is similar to the skill it takes to actually get something out of the Wikipedia instead of just being duped by a sort of a phony version of whatever the topic is and you have to learn to find voice in an environment in which it's been suppressed now so what happened with not just Torah but with with all of the holy books of the world is that exactly the same process was applied where you have a bunch of people contribute but then you forget who they are and you pretend it's divine and then you're screwed then you end up in this world where everything's closed and and so the thing is we were never the people the book grows the people the books or at least those of us who are making a living for the community and not not just living on the well I'm a little upset about some events in Jerusalem from today and if you really believe there's only one book as was so famously said in an American context if you believe there's only one book then that book loses value but the idea did anybody know who Aaron Marcus is Oh Aaron Marcus is a key figure in the history of computer information designing Berkeley he's local and and Aaron did these wonderful talks in the 80s about you can see we were all thinking about what the stuff would be like and he was using Talmud as the model of what the internet should be because soso Ted Nelson who I who I endorsed in the book as being the person who really had a good idea about how to make all this stuff happen had this one notion and Aaron was saying well actually there's this historical model it's kind of more sophisticated and and look at the Talmud where you have commentary commentary and commentary but it's all distinct so you can see different streams and it's not almost it's anonymous in the sense because it's centuries-old we don't necessarily have the individuals name but we definitely have a stream of the context in which each perspective came from so it's not just all mushed into some sort of ideal perfect text where everything is equal and there's no context with the global context Tom it has multiple voices preserving context which the Wikipedia and torez taken by itself rejects so torah plus talmud creates this optimistic Jewish culture which continues through Spinoza and Einstein and Freud and all of us nutcases you mentioned that you have some problem with Apple and it would be interesting to hear they just banned Ulysses I mean come on I mean it's like I'm sorry I interrupted you please can finish your question that's a question okay look I have I have there's a religious origin to apples problems in my estimation I'm gonna get God I always keep on wondering like when will I say that the thing that finally gets me banished from Silicon Valley so this here's the key here comes a candidate I've never said this in public before so I have a I have a friend who was the first employee at Apple though he never was compensated for that he's been it was kind of an injustice but anyway when he was young he and Jobs were best friends and he went to India to visit gurus and find enlightenment they did the whole hippy and India thing and my friend came back saying how these gurus moves you know whatever but Jobs came back saying I want that job and it's like I think he's modeled the whole thing on the guru scam so you treat your disciples kind of badly you tell them what to do you regiment them into these groups and then it's like a perfect modern revival of this ancient Indian craft and so that's that's essentially what I think is happening there but all right then to say something sympathetic about Apple the thing about is that if there's a there's a contest right now perceived by many people between the sort of Linux open everything if this whole ideology where you share stuff and share stuff and mince it and mash it and their authorship doesn't matter so much because you lose it in this grand collaboration that's supposed to somehow do something so there's that vs. the Apple thing which is this super closed will ban Ulysses to protect you from from anyway so this super open and super closely the thing is neither of those can win they need each other we either have a the only question in the future is whether we have extremes or moderation but if you're telling people that the only way to make money from content is to have one of those iPads sorry to pick on you so much you seem like a very nice man but to have like some closed thing it's the only way to make money from content aside this super-close thing then you're gonna have a super closed thing and some obsessive abusive guru type running it and the the way out of this is not to try to have either the super open people or the super close people win but to have a middle path moderation which is what Ted Nelson's design would have given us that's the only choice we have there's no way that one of those will win create each other so the app the insanity of Apple isn't partly is in part created by the insanity of the open movement is Ted here okay so Ted Ted as opposed to the the the the same layer within Ted is that good yeah no Ted yeah Ted it's - Ted as a model of sanity shows you how far this world is falling oh here this poor fellow I've here let me we're talking about Facebook and Twitter and you but I where's my thought there's 500 million people on Twitter and for once I'm in on Facebook we're listening to the voices of millions of people and these are ordinary people these aren't the geniuses that are doing you know the great collaborations of and and rocket science and things like that this is the normal voice of small people now people used to write letters and almost all of that is gone letters get destroyed even postcards we don't we can't track what we used to be like and now for once we can't listen in to this sort of ordinary voice or the common people's voice and it's fascinating to listen to well my view on it is that that I love that voice the thing you're talking about but it appeared in the 90s with the web and what's happened with Twitter is unless you aggressively use Twitter to try to get at that voice what you instead get is this load of crap um Twitter is because you saying that that's what ordinary people do no no no no I'm saying it's what you get out of the mass because the problem with Twitter see to my mind Twitter and some of these other designs of the sponge that absorb from the open web which which has the quality you talked about which I adore I absolutely adore and have-have lauded endlessly and continued to and it's it soaks it up into this commercial context where it gets filtered and lessened you know so I agree that there are interesting tweets out there and that there are there are a lot of anecdotes that are quite profound and/or charming and positive but overall I mean let's be honest what you see I mean what with Facebook yeah I'm sort of looking over the shoulder of my three daughters as they go through their their lives and they're letting me know what clubs they're going to and the people that they're seeing I I think it's sort of like the old date when you lived in a village you would see mrs. Smith oh that's mrs. Smith going to the post office or or the windows are open and you see oh that's mr. Jones and he's doing you know he's getting up or something like that you would over you'd have this view they would have to they wouldn't tell you these things you would just be noticing these things so then when you would go and see them and when you when you met them and said you would know exactly what was going on in their lives well it's kind of like the village that is owned by the mine and you can only shop in the company store or something I mean that you know see the thing is this I have this conversation a lot where the qualities that you like in it I absolutely acknowledge are there but they were there in the open web in the first place and what we have to understand here is that it's not these designs that bring you those qualities those were there they might add a little bit of an organ organ izing function on top in the same way that Craig Newmark did with Craig's List there's like a little layer there that can help make things happen I don't want to discount the importance of such a layer but the fundamental openness and sharing and seeing into people's windows and seeing all that stuff was there before what's happening is actually reducing it the thing is that a lot of people only first encountered it in this commercial form and so don't realise that there's something even better before and so I end up in this position where I say well you don't know what you're missing frequently and it's the last thing I want to do is tell you that there's anything invalid with a positive experience you're having go for it you know it's not it's a I I'd like to ask you to push yourself to see if there's more I think I think I can do that yeah you Karen I'm you you've alluded several times to ten years ago as being some kind of a halcyon period where things were right and that have since gone terribly wrong I guess with the massive capitalization in Google is a Sherman of the web can you talk a little bit more about the virtues you see in the web ten years ago which was actually the height of the dot-com era and you know there was all the burn rates and venture capital that was fueling tons of companies that were yourself nothing tell me it's going with the good pin scar that you think things up it's a reasonable question and there's always a danger in thinking about better days in the past because there they often really weren't and I appreciate that I'll give some specific examples the first all right so there were two prototype social software projects they were both Bay area-based because we make up all this stuff for everybody else one was the well and the other was community memory and to me does anybody know what I'm talking about okay so we need a local history class sometime because it's a it's amazing how much has come out of this funny little place we live so community memory was this thing where there were little booths put up around Berkeley where you could get online and there was something like a very early crude cross between Craigslist and Facebook or something like that and it was this really idealistic thing that all these people believed in and it degraded pretty quickly into something that really wasn't interesting anymore a lot of well I just I'll leave it at that I can talk more about if anybody's interested but it just it didn't it lost interest pretty crack the well was a different model where people wrote instead they didn't they it wasn't database driven it wasn't like little little snippets what they wrote substantial multi paragraph messages to each other and there was persistence one of the key ideas from none other than Stuart brand was you own your own words we don't how about that so so people stand the thing persists to this day and it's still substantial and it's still interesting and people have been on it for decades and I a really interesting study would be to see what participation on the well has done to people's net worth in their careers versus participation on Facebook or other designs my hypothesis would be that people on the well have done better per year of participating in it than people who've spent time on the diminishing designs that fragment what they do in which they don't on their words but that's a hypothesis it's falsifiable at science so somebody could do it and anyway so this is just to say that everything wasn't perfect but there were ideas in play and in practice that I think were better and there there was still a kind of a humanism in a lot of design thinking that's very hard to come by these days with the well being an example I think what I would like to suggest is that there are still a number of hands we need to end pretty soon could we have let's have four more quick questions and jaren maybe you could do a kind of an omnibus answer synthesis i'll whicka fie your questions let's let's do a couple coats great questions and then well I want to just so from the well I knew Mitch kapor and Terry Winograd and they had a design humanistic design initiative at Stanford that kind of didn't go anywhere and I'm looking for as a designer ways to design in a manner that basically takes community to the next level that we can have a more humanistic internet one of the things I didn't get from your book is kind of these design points can you can you put mark that for a moment there Brandon you know actually my thing my question really fits with that too I'm wondering the book as a manifesto and I'm wondering what are see I work with technology firms they are such echo chambers right like they're following that dominant paradigm and the people that they're attracting the same what are some opportunities you see where you know people can influence the direction that things are going like in either in big steps or incrementally this might be harder than I thought hi Jaron my my commenter my question is that it seems to me that the the internet will only be as humanists or as interesting as the individuals who use and who make it so who or what is incubating these humanist individuals these whole people it seems childrens are so submerged in digital technology that there seems oftentimes to be a closed circuit of personality development from where will come the raw material of life that makes us into whole people the sort of people who will make technology humanistic all right should we do one more and see what happens so you keep talking about how with Twitter and Facebook you get everything's closed in but also it's the best news source that's totally decentralized the you know dominant media and if you could just talk to that a little bit about how that's completely shaking things up rather than being closed okay certain cogging all right so there's one there one question is another sort of defend your position and the other three are fix this please so for defend my position the thing is I I want to repeat something I said just now which is that the stuff that you're talking about of opening things up and having an alternative to the official network news or something happened before all this stuff that it unlike it was there I mean it was extraordinary in the 90s and and well it was naturally there's naturally there's us the machines were still more expensive I mean there's there's a growth curve so what happened is this other stuff leached on to it as it was taking off I think that for every design that people praised their previous ones that are demonstrably better that had a shot that were squeezed off due to commercial interests so think West is better than Wikipedia for instance I think unquestionably it helps answer your question where think West was really building home lines and home perspectives and was serving it provided the benefits of Wikipedia but much more so both for the people who created and for the people who used it and and so the thing is it's not as if I'm saying oh these things are horrible there's no alternative what I'm saying is actually were better alternatives and so I I view your position as compromised as sort of or sort of like Pangloss Ian or something there there's really better stuff that's been and that could be and it's not a choice between Twitter and TV or if it is man what a shame that would be and then the on how to fix it well there are a lot of good designs out there that deserve reconsideration I try to highlight rather than providing entirely new inventions that are out of the blue in a little book I try to highlight historical ones that I think are demonstrably better Ted Nelson Xanadu implemented by not insane people would be better think West is better than Wikipedia well is better than Facebook so it's not a matter of it's not a Battle of abstractions but of actualities and demonstrate demonstrated ones you know real real things so I I don't I think the trick were in here is not a sparse design space or huge design mystery but rather a business lock or it's a power struggle it's not it's not a problem of imagination but a problem of struggle and it's a really interesting one and that is that's just the nature of our of our times and it's very strange that nerds instead of Wars decide who makes it in in this century it used to be Wars and oil and now it's like nerds it's so strange I sometimes think that the whole world is a Revenge of high-school sexual politics or something on many levels that's probably the smartest thing I can tell you tonight and with that I bid you goodnight you you

Channel: Contemporary Jewish Museum

Views: 34,991

Rating: 4.8153844 out of 5

Keywords: contemporary, jewish, museum, san, francisco, events, programs, exhibitions, culture, performance, education, history, art, ideas, judaism, cjm, jaron lanier, virtual reality, you are not a gadget

Id: jtuM1j-vFsA

Length: 59min 4sec (3544 seconds)

Published: Sun Jun 20 2010