Archive for June, 2010
Jaron Lanier’s “You Are Not a Gadget”
The weaknesses of Jaron Lanier’s “You Are Not a Gadget” are readily apparent and well summarized by Evgeny Morozov, and don’t need to be recounted here. Suffice it to say the book is comprised largely of improvised riffs on the social impact of information technology that sometimes seem more worthy of Lanier’s musician alter ego than of a book subtitled “A Manifesto.” There is, however, much here worthy of attention, and I’d like to summarize and respond to a few of the book’s central themes.