You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto
by Jaron Lanier (January, 2010)
Alfred A. Knopf, 209 pages, $24.95
Lanier is a big thinker, and he asks his reader to follow the train of his thought, which varies pretty widely at times, though his main points include at turns arguing against the singularity (the eventuality that computers will be “smarter” than humans one day, most famously championed by Ray Kurzweil), discussing such futurists and their new religion, and of course — taking on Web 2.0. What Lanier describes as “mashup” culture — where nothing is quite a whole work but rather snippets of things remixed together — leads to aggregation of aggregators such as FriendFeed, where it’s hard to tell the source of a work, idea, or quote, and where there is barely any context, if any at all.
