You are not a Gadget: A Manifesto

by Jaron Lanier

  Everyone knows that gangster rap didn’t exist yet in the 1960s, for instance. And that heavy metal didn’t exist in the 1940s. Sure, there’s an occasional track that sounds as if it’s from an earlier era. Maybe a big-band track recorded in the 1990s might be mistaken for an older recording, for instance.

  But a decade was always a long time in the development of musical style during the first century of audio recording. A decade gets you from Robert Johnson’s primordial blues recordings to Charlie Parker’s intensely modernist jazz recordings. A decade gets you from the reign of big bands to the reign of rock and roll. Approximately a decade separated the last Beatles record from the first big-time hip-hop records. In all these examples, it is inconceivable that the later offering could have appeared at the time of the earlier one. I can’t find a decade span in the first century of recorded music that didn’t involve extreme stylistic evolution, obvious to listeners of all kinds.

  We’re not just talking about surface features of the music, but the very idea of what music was all about, how it fit into life. Does it convey classiness and confidence, like Frank Sinatra, or help you drop out, like stoner rock? Is it for a dance floor or a dorm room?

  There are new styles of music, of course, but they are new only on the basis of technicalities. For instance, there’s an elaborate nomenclature for species of similar electronic beat styles (involving all the possible concatenations of terms like dub, house, trance, and so on), and if you learn the details of the nomenclature, you can more or less date and place a track. This is more of a nerd exercise than a musical one—and I realize that in saying that I’m making a judgment that perhaps I don’t have a right to make. But does anyone really disagree?

  I have frequently gone through a conversational sequence along the following lines: Someone in his early twenties will tell me I don’t know what I’m talking about, and then I’ll challenge that person to play me some music that is characteristic of the late 2000s as opposed to the late 1990s. I’ll ask him to play the tracks for his friends. So far, my theory has held: even true fans don’t seem to be able to tell if an indie rock track or a dance mix is from 1998 or 2008, for instance.

  I’m obviously not claiming that there has been no new music in the world. And I’m not claiming that all the retro music is disappointing. There are some wonderful musicians in the retro mold, treating old pop music styles as a new kind of classical music and doing so marvelously well.

  But I am saying that this kind of work is more nostalgic than reaching. Since genuine human experiences are forever unique, pop music of a new era that lacks novelty raises my suspicions that it also lacks authenticity.

  There are creative, original musicians at work today, of course. (I hope that on my best days I am one of them.) There are undoubtedly musical marvels hidden around the world. But this is the first time since electrification that mainstream youth culture in the industrialized world has cloaked itself primarily in nostalgic styles.

  I am hesitant to share my observations for fear of hexing someone’s potentially good online experience. If you are having a great time with music in the online world as it is, don’t listen to me. But in terms of the big picture, I fear I am onto something. What of it? Some of my colleagues in the digital revolution argue that we should be more patient; certainly with enough time, culture will reinvent itself. But how patient should we be? I find that I am not willing to ignore a dark age.

  Digital Culture That Isn’t Retro Is Still Based in a Retro Economy

  Even the most seemingly radical online enthusiasts seem to always flock to retro references. The sort of “fresh, radical culture” you expect to see celebrated in the online world these days is a petty mashup of preweb culture.

  Take a look at one of the big cultural blogs like Boing Boing, or the endless stream of mashups that appear on YouTube. It’s as if culture froze just before it became digitally open, and all we can do now is mine the past like salvagers picking over a garbage dump.

  This is embarrassing. The whole point of connected media technologies was that we were supposed to come up with new, amazing cultural expression. No, more than that—we were supposed to invent better fundamental types of expression: not just movies, but interactive virtual worlds; not just games, but simulations with moral and aesthetic profundity. That’s why I was criticizing the old way of doing things.

  Freedom is moot if you waste it. If the internet is really destined to be no more than an ancillary medium, which I would view as a profound defeat, then it at least ought to do whatever it can not to bite the hand that feeds it—that is, it shouldn’t starve the commercial media industries.

  Fortunately, there are people out there engaging in the new kinds of expression that my friends and I longed for at the birth of the web. Will Wright, creator of The Sims and Spore, is certainly creating new-media forms. Spore is an example of the new kind of expression that I had hoped for, the kind of triumph that makes all the hassles of the digital age worthwhile.

  The Spore player guides the evolution of simulated alien life-forms. Wright has articulated—not in words, but through the creation of a gaming experience—what it would be like to be a god who, while not rethinking every detail of his creation at every moment, occasionally tweaks a self-perpetuating universe.

  Spore addresses an ancient conundrum about causality and deities that was far less expressible before the advent of computers. It shows that digital simulation can explore ideas in the form of direct experiences, which was impossible with previous art forms.

  Wright offers the hive a way to play with what he has done, but he doesn’t create using a hive model. He relies on a large staff of full-time paid people to get his creations shipped. The business model that allows this to happen is the only one that has been proven to work so far: a closed model. You actually pay real money for Wright’s stuff.

  Wright’s work is something new, but his life is of the previous century. The new century is not yet set up to support its own culture. When Spore was introduced, the open culture movement was offended because of the inclusion of digital rights management software, which meant that it wasn’t possible for users to make copies without restriction. As punishment for this sin, Spore was hammered by mobs of trolls on Amazon reviews and the like, ruining its public image. The critics also defused what should have been a spectacular debut, since Wright’s previous offerings, such as The Sims, had achieved the very pinnacle of success in the gaming world.

  Some other examples are the iPhone, the Pixar movies, and all the other beloved successes of digital culture that involve innovation in the result as opposed to the ideology of creation. In each case, these are personal expressions. True, they often involve large groups of collaborators, but there is always a central personal vision—a Will Wright, a Steve Jobs, or a Brad Bird conceiving the vision and directing a team of people earning salaries.

  * LISP, conceived in 1958, made programming a computer look approximately like writing mathematical expressions. It was a huge hit in the crossover world between math and computer science starting in the 1960s. Any realization of my proposal for formal financial expression, described in Chapter 7, would undoubtedly bear similarities to LISP.

  CHAPTER 10

  Digital Creativity Eludes Flat Places

  A HYPOTHESIS LINKS the anomaly in popular music to the characteristics of flat information networks that suppress local contexts in favor of global ones.

  What Makes Something Real Is That It Is Impossible to Represent It to Completion

  It’s easy to forget that the very idea of a digital expression involves a trade-off with metaphysical overtones. A physical oil painting cannot convey an image created in another medium; it is impossible to make an oil painting look just like an ink drawing, for instance, or vice versa. But a digital image of sufficient resolution can capture any kind of perceivable image—or at least that’s how you’ll think of it if you believe in bits too much.

  Of course, it isn’t really so.
A digital image of an oil painting is forever a representation, not a real thing. A real painting is a bottomless mystery, like any other real thing. An oil painting changes with time; cracks appear on its face. It has texture, odor, and a sense of presence and history.

  Another way to think about it is to recognize that there is no such thing as a digital object that isn’t specialized. Digital representations can be very good, but you can never foresee all the ways a representation might need to be used. For instance, you could define a new MIDIlike standard for representing oil paintings that includes odors, cracks, and so on, but it will always turn out that you forgot something, like the weight or the tautness of the canvas.

  The definition of a digital object is based on assumptions of what aspects of it will turn out to be important. It will be a flat, mute nothing if you ask something of it that exceeds those expectations. If you didn’t specify the weight of a digital painting in the original definition, it isn’t just weightless, it is less than weightless.

  A physical object, on the other hand, will be fully rich and fully real whatever you do to it. It will respond to any experiment a scientist can conceive. What makes something fully real is that it is impossible to represent it to completion.

  A digital image, or any other kind of digital fragment, is a useful compromise. It captures a certain limited measurement of reality within a standardized system that removes any of the original source’s unique qualities. No digital image is really distinct from any other; they can be morphed and mashed up.

  That doesn’t mean that digital culture is doomed to be anemic. It just means that digital media have to be used with special caution.

  Anger in Antisoftware

  Computers can take your ideas and throw them back at you in a more rigid form, forcing you to live within that rigidity unless you resist with significant force.

  A good example to consider is the humble musical note, which I discussed in the first chapter. People have played musical notes for a very long time. One of the oldest human-hewn extant artifacts is a flute that appears to have been made by Neanderthals about 75,000 years ago. The flute plays approximately in tune. Therefore it is likely that whoever played that old flute had a notion of discrete toots. So the idea of the note goes back very far indeed.

  But as I pointed out earlier, no single, precise idea of a note was ever a mandatory part of the process of making music until the early 1980s, when MIDI appeared. Certainly, various ideas about notes were used to notate music before then, as well as to teach and to analyze, but the phenomenon of music was bigger than the concept of a note.

  A similar transformation is present in neoclassical architecture. The original classical buildings were tarted up with garish colors and decorations, and their statues were painted to appear more lifelike. But when architects and sculptors attempted to re-create this style long after the paint and ornamentation had faded away, they invented a new cliché: courthouses and statuary made of dull stone.

  A neoclassical effect was formalized for music with the invention of MIDI. For the first time, it took effort not to succumb to neoclassical reinvention, even of one’s own freshly invented music. This is one of the dangers presented by software tools.

  The best music of the web era seems to me to be “antisoftware.” The last genuinely new major style was probably hip-hop. That’s a rather sad thing to say, since hip-hop has already seen at least three generations of artists. Hip-hop’s origins predate the web, as do the origins of every other current style.

  But hip-hop has been alive during the web era, or at least not as stuck as the endless repetitions of the pop, rock, and folk genres. The usual narrative one hears within hip-hop culture is that it “appropriated” digital technology—but I hear things differently. Hip-hop is imprisoned within digital tools like the rest of us. But at least it bangs fiercely against the walls of its confinement.

  Outside of hip-hop, digital music usually comes off as sterile and bland. Listen to a lot of what comes out of the university computer music world, the world of laptop-generated chill-out music, or new-age ambient music, and you’ll hear what I mean. Digital production usually has an overly regular beat because it comes out of a looper or a sequencer. And because it uses samples, you hear identical microstructure in sound again and again, making it seem as if the world is not fully alive while the music is playing.

  But hip-hop pierced through this problem in a shocking way. It turns out these same deficits can be turned around and used to express anger with incredible intensity. A sample played again and again expresses stuckness and frustration, as does the regular beat. The inherent rigidity of software becomes a metaphor for an alienated modern life mired in urban poverty. A digital sound sample in angry rap doesn’t correspond to the graffiti but to the wall.

  Empathy and Locality: The Blandness of Global Context

  The hive ideology robs musicians and other creative people of the ability to influence the context within which their expressions are perceived, if they are to transition out of the old world of labels and music licensing. This is one of the more serious disconnects between what I love about making music and the way it is being transformed by the hive-minded movement. I’ve gone back and forth endlessly with ideological new-music entrepreneurs who have asked me to place my music into Creative Commons or some other hive scheme.

  I have always wanted a simple thing, and the hive refuses to give it to me. I want both to encourage reuse of my music and to interact with the person who hopes to use some of my music in an aggregate work. I might not even demand an ability to veto that other person’s plans, but I want at least a chance at a connection.

  There are areas of life in which I am ready to ignore the desire for connection in exchange for cash, but if art is the focus, then interaction is what I crave. The whole point of making music for me is connecting with other people. Why should I have to give that up?

  But no, that option is not currently supported, and the very notion is frowned upon. Creative Commons, for one, asks you to choose from a rich variety of licensing options. You can demand attribution—or not—when your music is mashed into a compound product, for instance.

  Context has always been part of expression, because expression becomes meaningless if the context becomes arbitrary. You could come up with an invented language in which the letters that compose the words to John Lennon’s “Imagine” instead spell out the instructions for cleaning a refrigerator. Meaning is only ever meaning in context.

  I realize the whole point is to get a lot of free content out there, especially content that can be mashed up, but why won’t Creative Commons provide an option along the lines of this: Write to me and tell me what you want to do with my music. If I like it, you can do so immediately. If I don’t like what you want to do, you can still do it, but you will have to wait six months. Or, perhaps, you will have to go through six rounds of arguing back and forth with me about it, but then you can do whatever you want. Or you might have to always include a notice in the mashup stating that I didn’t like the idea, with my reasons.

  Why must all the new schemes that compete with traditional music licensing revere remoteness? There’s no significant technological barrier to getting musicians involved in the contextual side of expression, only an ideological one.

  The response I usually get is that there’s nothing preventing me from collaborating with someone I find by some other means, so what difference does it make if third parties I never know are using the same digital fragments of my music in unrelated ways?

  Every artist tries to foresee or even nudge the context in which expression is to be perceived so that the art will make sense. It’s not necessarily a matter of overarching ego, or manipulative promotion, but a simple desire for meaning.

  A writer like me might choose to publish a book on paper, not only because it is the only way to get decently paid at the moment, but also because the reader then gets the whole book at once, and just might read it as a whole
.

  When you come upon a video clip or picture or stretch of writing that has been made available in the web 2.0 manner, you almost never have access to the history or the locality in which it was perceived to have meaning by the anonymous person who left it there. A song might have been tender, or brave, or redemptive in context, but those qualities will usually be lost.

  Even if a video of a song is seen a million times, it becomes just one dot in a vast pointillist spew of similar songs when it is robbed of its motivating context. Numerical popularity doesn’t correlate with intensity of connection in the cloud.

  If a fuzzy crowd of anonymous people is making uninformed mash-ups with my recorded music, then when I present my music myself the context becomes one in which my presentation fits into a statistical distribution of other presentations. It is no longer an expression of my life.

  Under those circumstances, it is absurd to think that there is any connection between me and mashers, or those who perceive the mashups. Empathy—connection—is then replaced by hive statistics.

  CHAPTER 11

  All Hail the Membrane

  FLAT GLOBAL NETWORKS are criticized as poor designs for scientific or technical communities. Hierarchical encapsulation is celebrated in natural evolution and human thought.

  How Nature Asks Questions

  There are some deep principles here that apply far beyond culture and the arts. If you grind any information structure up too finely, you can lose the connections of the parts to their local contexts as experienced by the humans who originated them, rendering the structure itself meaningless. The same mistakes that have stultified some recent digital culture would be disastrous if applied to the sciences, for instance. And yet there is some momentum toward doing just that.