You Are Not a Gadget by Jaron Lanier

The title of the book is a bit misleading; it contains a collection of thought-provoking essays rather than a coherent statement of principle. But it’s worth reading closely because it’s an insightful critique of current techno-culture made by a prominent technologist that helped to create that culture.

Jaron Lanier is one of the pioneers of virtual reality technology. He’s worked on human computer interface research and design in Silicon Valley for decades. When he discusses the dark side of social media, social software, and the Web 2.0 ethos, he does it with an insider’s eye and enthusiast’s attention to detail.

If you’re looking for a thinker to challenge the current techno-centric zeitgeist championed by futurists like Ray Kurzweil and Clay Shirky, Jaron Lanier is your man.

Lanier touches on many different topics relating to culture and technology in this series of essays. But if I had to pick three themes that captured my imagination, these would be:

1. How collective or collaborative Web 2.0 designs devalue individual contributions
2. How social software cheapens interpersonal relationships
3. How the pursuit of artificial intelligence undermines our appreciation of human intelligence

To understand fully the arguments Lanier is making, you’ll need to read the book itself. But I’ll try to summarize the key points here, partly as a reminder to myself.

Emphasizing collective ownership harms individual initiative

One of Lanier’s central themes is that the ethos of anonymous social production devalues the contributions of creative individuals. Contributing ideas and artifacts anonymously often means that the significant contributions to knowledge and culture made by individuals go unacknowledged.

If people aren’t rewarded for their efforts somehow, most will stop participating. Only the tiny minority that find the act of creating new music or books or software intrinsically rewarding will continue to do so. But these can be expensive hobbies. How will those individuals pay their bills?

And if fewer folks make original contributions to culture or knowledge, then online culture might degenerate into nothing more than remixing or repeating previous material.

Social software reduces relationships

The praise lavished upon the current crop of social media and social software tools must be galling for a researcher that has spent his entire career inventing technologies to deepen human interactions on the Internet.

Lanier provides many examples of how these “social” systems dumb-down human thought and opinion, and eliminate any nuance in relationships.

What does it mean to boil down all interpersonal connections to the single act of “friendling” or “following”? This reduces human relationships to the equivalent of a second-grader’s hastily scribbled “Do you like me? Check this box!” note.

Other means of social or collaborative filtering are just as primitive. The advantage of simple thumbs-up/thumbs-down rating systems is that the results can be easily aggregated and calculated by computers. The results might help gauge popularity, but lack the depth and context that human reviews provide.

Many of these tools, with their profiles and avatars, make self-definition a conscious and deliberate act. In the past, only public figures and celebrities needed to manage their identities carefully. Now we all do.

Worse, these constructed identities tell us much more about our tools than they do about ourselves. We stuff our resumes with keywords so that search engines can find them. We tailor our public profiles, leaving out gender or age or location, so we won’t be deluged with advertising. It’s not about who we are. It’s not even about how we want other people to understand us. It’s about how we want our computers to see us.

Artificial intelligence undermines our appreciation of human intelligence

Lanier devotes several large sections of You Are Not a Gadget to deconstructing the idea of computationalism. There are several strands to this belief, the primary tenet of which is that the human brain processes information like an ideal Turing Machine would.

If human thought is computable, then it is only a matter of time before computers become humanly intelligent.

This goal has become the holy grail of the Artificial Intelligence community. But Lanier points out that today’s hardware and software have limitations that cause them to deviate from an ideal Turing Machine. (It’s not physically possible to construct one, so it’s less a real “machine” than a thought experiment carried out by Alan Turing, for which it is named.)

But even if you could work around the technical limitations, it’s not clear that human intelligence is computable at all. The brain-as-computer analogy might be completely false. Despite the fact that processing power is getting faster and cheaper all the time, it could be that machine intelligence is a very different thing than human intelligence. Computers will never catch up to people; they are running a different race.

Lanier notes that despite a few well-publicized successes, progress in artificial intelligence has been slow, and its definition of success has shifted over time. Yet it’s still an article of faith in Silicon Valley. It is the motivating philosophy behind Google and hundreds of other companies there, and it infuses the culture of the technology industry in general.

He worries that the drive to create artificial intelligence harms our understanding of the human kind. In the tech industry’s rush to build and promote machine intelligence, it could accidentally create solutions that constrain individual creativity, thought and judgment.

Worse, the notion of computationalism contributes to the sense that computers and people are interchangeable. If you only had a big enough server farm in the cloud, the thinking goes, you could replace most of what people do with their brains. And the bits that computers can’t calculate or simulate could be gathered or harvested by aggregating the actions of billions of anonymous users online. Humans become just another input device to the computing cloud.

Conclusion

While the idea that an individual is just one component of the vast collective consciousness of the Internet might be appealing to some, it’s a horrifying proposition for humanists that celebrate individual creativity and initiative.

Lanier reminds us that our technologies have cultural implications. We shape our tools, but they also shape us. We should be mindful of the effects that these tools will have on the way we think and interact.

We are not gadgets, he says, and we should be skeptical of technologies that treat us that way.

Related posts:

1. People in the Computer
2. Jabberwocky
3. Review: Ambient Findability

So what have we been up to lately?

Based on the continuing feedback from our initial release of Infovark, we decided to forgo a 1.5 update and push ahead to Infovark 2.0. Our second release brings several major changes.

First, we’re focusing the core of the application on keeping things together. Whether you call it information management or knowledge management or content management, it all boils down to one key principle: having one place to look to find what you need. Infovark will help gather and organize your stuff so you can spend more time doing and less time searching.

Second, we’ve cut out many of the confusing parts of our application. This includes just about anything that caused us to get a bewildered look or blank stare when we tried to explain it. The cuts include one or two features that are dear to our hearts — and may resurface in later versions in different forms — but we think simplicity and ease of use is an important feature, too.

Third, the new focus and stripped-down feature set has allowed us to completely re-engineer the Infovark user interface. Where before we had a separate “Manager” application and a website for everyday use, we now have one consolidated view of your information.

We’re really excited about the new direction the product is taking. As we get closer to launch, we’ll share more details.

Until then, happy varking!

Related posts:

1. Infovark 2009
2. Ideas are Easy
3. One to Throw Away

I’ve talked a lot about the drab look of enterprise applications. Most corporate-ware simply looks unfinished to me. I’m surprised by companies that will pay millions for fancy office space, but won’t spend a little extra to make their internal applications a little more pleasant to use.

But then I saw an article on Read Write Web reviewing an application that touted its battleship gray color scheme as a feature. No kidding: Waste company time without getting caught using FaceoffIM. It’s corporate camouflage in action!

FaceoffIM: Ugly is the new social?

Battleship gray, indeed. Why fight grim a corporate culture when you can employ a little subterfuge?

Related posts:

1. Whoa! Look at the Colors, Man!
2. You Sank my Battleship!
3. Why the Web has Won

Making Things Happen by Scott Berkun

Making Things Happen: Mastering Project Management is the title of Scott Berkun’s revised second-edition book on project management. It contains the lessons distilled from a career in getting a team of people to work together to achieve common goals.

The book doesn’t spend time on any particular methodology. Instead, the focus is on the practical skills you’ll need to determine priorities, manage tasks, and lead teams. There’s no grand theories here; just things that have been proven to work.

If you’re an accomplished project manager, you’ll probably find the book a bit basic. But for someone like me, who accidentally finds himself in charge of teams from time to time, it contains down-to-earth descriptions of the essential tools and skills you’ll need to get things done.

The book is organized well, with clear section headers, lists and diagrams. It makes it easy to find the sections you need. The revised edition also contains discussion questions and what-if scenarios, which I found useful for putting the advice in context.

I really appreciated Scott’s focus on pragmatism and real-world issues. If it’s more complicated than making prioritized lists or checking in with the members of your team regularly, you won’t find it here. But those simple reminders are just the sort of advice many of us occasional project managers need to keep things on track.

Related posts:

1. Review: Thinking with Type
2. Review: Keeping Found Things Found
3. Review: Ambient Findability

The root of the debate is whether you feel it’s better to focus on organizational effectiveness or individual productivity. Oscar Berg highlights some influential articles from both sides and notes that there seems to be a bias toward personal efficiency in most of the arguments made to support Enterprise 2.0

I think he is right that there is a bias for personal efficiency. I think it’s a healthy one, though others disagree.

The two strategies

Every organization is composed of multiple functions. These are normally grouped into logical departments such as accounting, marketing, product development, and so forth. The proponents of organizational effectiveness ask the question, is there a better way to arrange these parts? Can we reduce the friction between these components?

Now, let's see... should marketing report to sales or...?

If you fall in this camp, you want to do things like improve interdepartmental communications, establish clear lines of authority and areas of responsibility, break apart organizational silos, ensure smooth hand-offs, and improve business processes.

Those that focus on knowledge worker productivity, on the other hand, focus on whether the parts themselves can be improved.

Adopting bright ideas to save time and effort.

If you fall in this camp, you’re concerned about knowledge sharing, expertise location, cultivating talent and skills, and making sure that individuals have the right information for making decisions and the right tools to take action.

Power to the people

Both approaches are valuable and necessary. Which one you prefer has much to do with where you sit within the organization, as this article on productivity points out. But there are good reasons why we should favor the personal productivity over organization effectiveness.

1. Web 2.0 technologies follow a user-centered approach. Applying Web 2.0 sensibility to organizational problems will require lots of customization and re-engineering. Applying those designs to knowledge workers is a much better fit.
2. Many employees are already familiar with the conventions of these social tools. They use them at home. You lower training costs by following those models as closely as possible.
3. User adoption has been a major stumbling block in most Enterprise 1.0 technology deployments. It makes sense to highlight the benefits to employees.
4. While there have been at least two or three different waves of enterprise products targeted at organizational effectiveness (ERP, portals/KM, BPM, CRM, etc.) the suite of office tools used by knowledge workers have changed very little since the early 90s. There’s simply more opportunity for improvement there.
5. Small changes applied across all knowledge workers can lead to dramatic gains. Just like in finance, productivity improvements yield compounding interest. If you can save a few extra minutes per day or per week, over time it can add up to something revolutionary.

For these reasons and others, I believe that companies pursuing Enterprise 2.0 should start — and think — small. What can we do to simplify, streamline or eliminate the tasks that prevent our knowledge workers from producing their best work? How can we provide support to small, agile, ad-hoc teams? 

For me, the defining characteristic of Enterprise 2.0 is that it is about the individual, not the organization. There would be no need for an Enterprise 2.0 approach if Enterprise 1.0 approaches had worked.

Instead of Enterprise 2.0, perhaps it should be Employee 2.0?

Related posts:

1. Why Enterprise 2.0 Will Fail
2. Meet Dave
3. Using the Right Tool for the Job