On Jaron Lanier's Brand

I just finished reading You Are Not A Gadget by Jaron Lanier. It's a summation of ideas that took Lanier about two decades to form so I can't comment, or even summarize, for a little while. One thing that struck me about it is Lanier is probably the most recognizable commentators on digital culture (and the overlap of digital culture and culture more generally). Strange that this realization should occur from reading a book because it concerns his appearance - his personal equivalent of a logo. Some people are extremely changeable in their appearance. Think David Bowie's first decade. Lanier, like another favourite of this blog Slavoj Zizek, is remarkably constant.

About ten years ago, Lanier provided a metaphor for the digital landscape. It is, he said, like a new continent. The first people to go there are the explorers. They are (and here he used himself as an example) funny looking or unkempt, maybe not that great in social situations, unconcerned with fashion. The next group to arrive are the settlers. Their goal is to make the new place look as much as possible like the place they came from. So the result (in this context) is stores showing up where there had been none previously, systems of navigation (akin to streets) where previously there had only been paths accessible to those who knew the terrain. But it is the first generation of settlers who produce the first generation of natives and those kids have an experience no one else has ever had - they grew up in this new place and, consequently, know it in a deep and personal way not even the explorers can match.

This metaphor makes sense and appeals to our desire to understand the digital realm through analogies to the physical one. But, if it was literally true, Lanier would have disappeared from the scene long ago. He would be as obsolete as the computer systems he was working with 20 years ago. That he isn't is due to his astounding intelligence, creativity, ability to become fascinated with new projects, and (I maintain) the instantly recognizable brand he has cultivated. Jaron Lanier is not just a musician, a computer scientist and theorist, an engineer, and social commentator. He is an imago of the virtual explorer. That is the cornerstone of his brand.

Lanier is a brilliant man. You Are Not A Gadget is a very good book - the prose are not especially great but he is writing exclusively from his wheelhouse. No one has given this material more thought (or thought about it more creatively) than Lanier. At least, no one so instantly recognizable. But as I was reading it the question that kept popping into my head was, "Would I be reading this if Lanier was a skinny guy without dreadlocks?" The question got so obtrusive at times I had to put the book down and take a minute to reconsider what I had just read - evaluating the ideas separate from my image of the man.

Here are two pictures. One is Jaron Lanier. The other is a man named Pete Lee about whom I know precisely nothing. I did a Google Image Search for "boring guy" and his face showed up. Sorry, Mr. Lee - I don't know why Google thinks you are boring and assure you this is nothing personal.

Regardless of its virtues I never would have either purchased or read You Are Not A Gadget if it had been written by the guy in the bottom picture. And neither would you, I suspect.

That Lanier is overweight is meaningless in itself. As is the fact he has dreads. But together and with the classically Lanieresque shaggy beard and t-shirt it constitutes a kind of logo, a stable iconography that has accompanied every clever thing I have ever heard him say, every fawning introduction by an interviewer, every appearance on TED or Charlie Rose or other socially sanctioned venue where smart people are curated from amongst the rest of us.

I don't mind Lanier cultivating a brand. I admire him for being able to keep at the forefront of an industry to blatantly predisposed to youth for so long. What I do mind is the subtle manipulation branding exercises on my thinking. As Lanier goes to great length to point out in the book, people do not think like machines. We have very little idea about how people think. Scientists are getting good at figuring out certain aspects of brain activity but this is a classic case of the thing being greater than the sum of its parts. Many millions of dollars have been spent figuring out how to make people buy things in extremely subtle ways. The people who are spending that money don't care how it works; they care if it works.

You Are Not A Gadget deserves more than some cursory observations about the fact Lanier is a brand as recognizable as most of the internet projects he writes about. And I will get down to that - probably after I read Who Owns The Internet? But at the moment I am having difficulty overcoming my own assumptions and prejudices about the author's brand. I don't know what impressions are genuinely mine and which are the product of expectations. How does my expectation of Lanierism change my reading of the book? I suspect it will take a while for the fact it is Lanier's to wear off. In the interim, it does bring up some intriguing ideas I will want to address.