I've had great respect for Jaron Lanier for many years. He's one of a select band of creative thinkers that effortlessly cross many disciplinary boundaries and that, consequently, see new and enlightening connections between things that change how we see the world. I was therefore very keen to read his first book 'You are not a gadget', especially as it deals directly with the notion of collectives that I have been exploring for a long long time now.

Lanier is not a great fan of collectives, by and large. For the most part, the book is a manifesto, a cautionary call to arms to defend what is left of individual intelligence, creativity, expertise, skill and genius against the onslaught of the collective mob - what he calls the 'Digital Maoists'. For Lanier, the link between the political use of the word 'collective' and the hive-mind meaning is a strong one.

It starts with some great insights into how people can be changed by technology and some great thoughts on digital lock-in (the rich-or-first-get-richer effects of creating protocols, standards and software on which other things are built and which thus become entrenched) and how that in turn is reified into a world-view.  As he drifts on through the book, linking ideas from music, to technological criticism, to philosophising on the nature of consciousness, to critiquing the cult of the noosphere, it is hard not to feel drawn by the arguments. And many of the arguments are very sound: concerns about the reductionism that is (almost) inevitable when things are digitised, from MIDI to the schema that define identity on social sites; concerns that uncritical acceptance of the hive mind leads to lethargic banality; worries about reliance on machines hidden in layers of obscurity that shape everything from finance to social relationships; issues with crowd processes that stifle creativity; worries about the dehumanising influences of machines. There's a lot of good stuff here. I have a great deal of sympathy with Lanier's concerns about flattening spaces, and his thoughts on hierarchies and cultivating and celebrating evolutionary niches echo my own writings on the subject. Things get a bit quirky when he waxes lyrical about Ted Nelson's Xanadu, discusses solutions like Songles (song dongles), telegigging and formalising financial contracts, and there's some slightly dubious reasoning on the relative benefits of market-driven and socialist economies, but the book races to a rollicking finish as he describes different ways of seeing, understanding and believing. For instance, he illustrates one poetically described point on the delights of morphing in virtual worlds by explaining in great depth the behaviours of cephalopods. He also provides a fantastic account of possible ways that languages evolved, including a delightful theory that suggests evolution from olfactory processes that he perceptively observes are, unlike the wave-form senses of sight and sound, classificatory and combinatorial senses. To an extent he has lost the thread of the argument by then but who cares? It's brilliant stuff.

The book is a bit of a curate's egg, however. Wonderful metaphors, poetic brilliance and deep insights are interspersed with swathes of poorly argued opinions and weak logic. I think that he started with a reasonable idea: the central point of the book is that mob effects, especially those engendered by Web2.0 thinking, are having a de-humanising and flattening effect that means we are in danger of losing what is valuable and distinctive about individual genius and creativity. So far, I totally agree, although my agreement is tempered with the knowledge that the opposite is sometimes true and that it is wrong to tar all examples of the trend with the same brush. Lanier seems to have found a cause and is trying out as many options as possible to justify the cause in the the available argument-space. Unfortunately, in pursuing this maggot, he gets lost down a lot of rabbit holes and struggles to find enough coherent arguments to fill a book. Some ideas are great and insightful, others are simply flaky, self-contradictory and poorly conceived.

One problem Lanier faces is that, despite his usually excellent multi-faceted world view, his argument provides an inflexible blanket critique of the collective and that, in generalising a trend, he traps himself in a corner that forces him to ignore the good things. The point is illustrated well in an argument  (in the beautifully named chapter 'The unbearable thinness of flatness') that, while offering great value, Wikipedia is bland, characterless and lacking diversity, at least when compared with the earlier flowering of individual sites and resources created by passionate individuals and small groups. Unfortunately, in the same paragraph, he observes that these (typically older) resources can be found a little down the list of search results. He does not explicitly name Google as the search engine but it is fairly clear that this is the system he has in mind. Unfortunately, as he admits elsewhere, Google Search is the poster child for collective applications. It is precisely because of the crowd that he is able to find those other sites. Even if he does not mean Google, there are very few search engines that do not employ some variation on a PageRank-style of ordering results.

To make matters worse, as I've argued elsewhere,  Wikipedia is actually a poor example of a collective application and is a bit of a straw man: relying on much top-down control, it is more of an article farm than a truly collective system. Lanier could and should have found a more suceptible target than this. Similarly, his (good-natured) attacks on Linux lose a lot of their sting when you consider that the Linux kernel, while it may be written by vast numbers of individuals, is probably controlled by fewer people than the average Microsoft product. When he looks back to the past and imagine what early visionaries might have thought were they to find out that the greatest examples of collective activity are an encyclopedia and a better version of UNIX, it is hard not to feel amused, but in neither case is the project a truly crowd-driven collective system - they are both very tightly controlled projects run along pretty traditional lines apart from the way they succeed in getting content from many volunteers and don't seek to make fortunes for their shareholders.

Lanier's critique of collectives as a genre relies on a fuzzy persective on how they work. His fantastic credentials as a computer scientist and interaction designer ought to give him a uniquely deep insight into such things, but he concentrates too much on the crowd and too little on the other elements of the collective: most notably, the algorithms and interfaces of which they are composed. Of course, a stupid (naive, over-simple, careless) algorithm and interface will help to make a stupid crowd, especially if it fails to take into account the recursive effects that a crowd has on itself, and he is dead right to attack such things. However, just because some are bad does not make them all so. He does explore some ways that crowds can be intelligent but gives very little consideration to designing systems in which the crowd can indeed be wise, or wiser. It's doubly odd because he spends a lot of time discussing the importance of texture, hierarchies and diversity, but fails to apply any of those thoughts to improving the hive mind. It is true that mobs are dumb, but its equally true that, under the right conditions, in the right context, with the right algorithms and interaction designs, crowds can be wise. Lanier seems to have made the decision that the hive mind is a bad thing, and that means that, with a few exceptions that he's willing to concede in narrow contexts, most such uses are bad. 

Another fuzziness in Lanier's thinking is, ironically, a weakness in separating individual and group phenomena. For example, a core part of his argument and (one suspects) part of the motivation for writing the book, is that music (in particular, though he extends the argument to other arts), is becoming little more than bland mashups of earlier brilliance. Music from the Web-era lacks the distinctiveness of that found in earlier decades. He makes the observation that each decade of the 20th century saw radical shifts in musical styles and technologies, typically from one decade to the next, making it easy for the well-informed listener to accurately identify the decade for much of popular music, and that this is no longer true. His point is that, as we move away from the publisher-driven profit-based model that created an industry in the 20th Century, the various forces of crowd-oriented behaviour (file sharing, personal publishing, networked music) are leading to a diluted and blended shadow of former excellence and that, the more we allow crowds to rule, the more dilute and blandly blended it will become. Without paid creators, he believes, we will become a world of shallow amateurs, rehashing, remixing and pastiching the great works of former years. The problem here is that, in earlier days, trends were magnified and sometimes created by publishing houses and mass media. There *were* obvious trends because we had limited access to information outside the popular broadcast channels, and we all got more-or-less the same stuff through limited and auditable outlets. Hit parades made sense because there was a lot of manipulation going on that ensured out-of-control Matthew Principles were in effect. But they can't do that so easily anymore, especially now that there is a greater emphasis on tracks, rather than the (artificially and contingently formed) album and single formats. Throw into the mix the fact that the formerly inefficient (and consequently serendipitous and quirky) marketing machines of the industries that leeched on the talents of others to make their ill-gotten gains have got the bottom-crawling bottom-line more firmly in their sights and are pushing out soulless tripe with reckless abandon because that's what sells, and it's easy to see how the downward spiral towards talentless drivel is real, when compared with the same channels of yesteryear.  There is, however, still a huge amount of wonderful, creative, soulful, boundary-pushing music out there, it's just that it no longer trends in the same way it did in the past. The real threat to the publishing industry is not file sharing but dilution of influence. Personally, I'm very happy to see the death of an industry that owed its existence to industrial production methods, exploitation of artists and unethical control of supply. And, in case anyone should accuse me of ignoring the plight of poor struggling musicians, I made my living as a musician for ten years and never needed the services of publisher to do so.

Lanier offers some fantastic insights into the intricate dance between technology and knowledge, especially when talking about music. Music, he asserts, has become subject to the the tyranny of MIDI, that removes the subtle in-between-ness and texture of earlier forms. The note and rhythm, rather than being a convenient way to share and record musical form, have become absolute things in themselves and, as a result, the rigidity and loss of the information that makes music wonderful that is entailed is destroying it. All digital information is a sample of an analogue world and it always results in loss, but the particular characteristics of MIDI make that loss acute and have in turn affected how people listen to and create the stuff, contributing in part to his perception of increasing blandness. I totally get this, having had a modest musical career myself. I started my professional career singing in bars at a time when the Rhythm Box was new and fast-becoming ubiquitous. I hated it then and hate its descendants now, and feel exactly the same way as Lanier about the awfulness of MIDI: the further we drift from human expression of music the more we become dehumanised by the music we hear. Mind you, I have never been that keen on keyboard instruments of all sorts for the same reasons (I like to feel the music I play as a physical sensation, such when blowing into a wind instrument or touching strings that vibrate) although, at least, each analogue instrument sounds unique and many have a sensitivity to touch that pressure- and velocity-sensitive keys don't entirely capture.

I'm slightly taken aback by Lanier's dislike of SlashDot which, for me, is among the most sophisticated and mature collective systems out there, albeit one that is hard to transfer out of its geek-driven setting as it requires a lot of customisation and tweaking of the algorithms and interfaces on the part of the user for it to provide real value. In its default, public and anonymous state it does indeed reflect a flattened, mob-driven perspective and, perhaps, Lanier is right to be concerned about that. However, the real genius of the system lies in the selective filtering that is under user control, combined with a remarkably ingenious approach to reputation management, a great approach to utilising social capital, a highly sophisticated form of rich social tagging, some clever parcellation of the environment into interest-related areas, and a not-bad set of collaborative filters. Taken all together, the quality of the results is phenomenal. You do need to be an interested nerd to take advantage of all of this and it is far from friendly to the casual or occasional visitor. However, when it works (as it often does) it is among the most fantastic learning systems on the planet that achieves its purpose through almost entirely collective wisdom (again, bearing in mind that a collective is not just the people but the algorithms and interfaces that define the system). Here is an open-source project that is truly innovative and that points the way to how we should build collective systems. True, it is not created after the Linux model that Lanier finds problematic due to its lack of real creativity and locking in of old technologies, but it does show how a social application can work well.

This is not a perfect book, but it's a great read, offers thought-provoking insights, and raises issues that must be raised. While I remain convinced of the potential of the collective to enhance and support creativity and genius (not to replace it), Lanier is absolutely right to argue against its uncritical and careless application. And, when he does get onto the creative work that he has produced and researched, his insights and observations are breathtaking. It is great to read someone who really does know what he is talking about (not the likes of Andrew Keen) offering a serious, well-considered, critical view of the effects of technology, both good and ill, and it's wonderful to get an intimate view into the mind of one of the more interesting thinkers of the late 20th and early 21st centuries.