Casey has finished
Jaron Lanier
You Are Not a Gadget
Casey's closing remark
Recommended“Jaron Lanier is a certified crackpot. It feels tricky to align myself with him (or even mention his name) because he's such a wildcard, but I picked up a lot from this book. Also enjoyed seeing him speak and play his instruments!”
highlights & comments
Is he really a fan of objects?! Benjamin's aura?
Interesting danger of overdesign.
Human constructions of nature.
Broken causality.
Like Aaron he wants to see leaps in time.
Amazing/hilarious.
Still thinking that Lanier places too much importance on the market and causality on the shift from plush social-contract record companies to Internet distribution.
He seems to be focused on a basic old school sped up kind of letter writing that is the forum/mailing list as the most technology you need. Against rigidity of designed web. Interesting.
This is interesting. People often see computers (aka the cloud) as making books obsolete because we have one machine & network that appears to contain all the content of another medium. This unprecedented access has led to remix and mining of archives as a national past time. Lanier doesn't give enough credit to this (the meme?) as an Internet native form of expression (though I am also quick to criticize those who try to intellectualize memes—that is not the point) but he correctly (if somewhat confusedly and defensively) argues for people to creatively interrogate the possibilities of computers and network technologies: simulation, database. However he has strict morals.
Danger of defaults.
O NO HE DIDN'T
How much respect for others' content is too much?
This is an interesting point. The slight danger of "publishing" a convenient collaborative resource.
Still not totally clear what exactly this is. Wikipedia? Creative commons?
Really relevant to Ted Nelson.
LOL
Art as evolutionary disarmament
Isn't the cloud just for stability, scalability, and speed at an effective cost?
Quashing semantic web fantasies? Isn't he a believer in Nelson's web??
Who is being idealistic now? Universality never seems like a good ideal to me.
Context online
Look into this!
Argument against comprehensively generative solutions. Finding the needle in generated haystacks, there isn't a needle.
Honestly??
Lanier is looking so far into the future that it is crazy. Who knows what will be? But at least he is a hilarious and inflamatory writer.
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