by Jaron Lanier
This reminds me of the way some libertarians are convinced that lower taxes will always guarantee a wealthier society. The math is wrong; outcomes from complex systems are actually filled with peaks and valleys.
It’s an article of faith in cyber-democracy circles that making information more “free,” in the sense of making it copyable, will also lead to the most democratic, open world. I suspect this is not so. I have already pointed out some of the problems. A world that is open on the surface becomes more closed on a deeper level. You don’t get to know what correlations have been calculated about you by Google, Facebook, an insurance company, or a financial entity, and that’s the kind of data that influences your life the most in a networked world.*
*There are other problems that I explored more in my previous book. For instance, you also lose an ability to choose the context in which you express yourself, since more and more expression is channeled through Siren Servers, and that lessens your ability to express and explore unique perspectives.
A world in which more and more is monetized, instead of less and less, could lead to a middle-class-oriented information economy, in which information isn’t free, but is affordable. Instead of making information inaccessible, that would lead to a situation in which the most critical information becomes accessible for the first time. You’d own the raw information about you that can sway your life. There is no such thing as a perfect system, but the hypothesis on offer is that this could lead to a more democratic outcome than does the cheap illusion of “free” information.
We cannot hope to design an ideal network that will perfect politics; neither can we plan to replace politics with a perfect kind of commerce. Politics and commerce will both be flawed so long as people are free and experimenting with the future. The best we can aim for are network designs that focus politics and commerce to approximately balance each other’s flaws.
SIXTH INTERLUDE
The Pocket Protector in the Saffron Robe
THE MOST ANCIENT MARKETING
Are Siren Servers an inevitable, abstract effect that would consistently reappear in distant alien civilizations when they develop their own information networks? Or is the pattern mostly a function of distinctly human qualities? This is unknown, of course, but I suspect human nature plays a huge role. One piece of evidence is that those who are the most successful at the Siren Server game are also playing much older games at the same time.
Before Apple, for instance, Steve Jobs famously went to India with his college friend Dan Kottke. While I never had occasion to talk to Jobs about it, I did hear many a tale from Kottke, and I have a theory I wish I’d had a chance to try out on Jobs.
Jobs used to love the Beatles and bring them up fairly often, so I’ll use some Beatles references. When John Lennon was a boy, he once recalled, he saw Elvis in a movie and suddenly thought, “I want that job!” The theory is that Jobs saw gurus in India, focal points of love and respect, surrounded by devotees, and he similarly thought, “I want that job!”
This observation is not meant as a criticism, and certainly not as an insult. It simply provides an explanatory framework for what made Jobs a unique figure.
For instance, he liberally used the guru’s trick of treating certain devotees badly from time to time as a way of making them more devoted. This is something I heard members of the original Macintosh team confess, and they were tangibly stunned by it, over and over. They saw it being done to themselves in real time, and yet they consented. Jobs would scold and humiliate people and somehow elicit an ever more intense determination to win his approval, or more precisely, his pleasure.
The process is described in an essay1 by Alan Watts on how to be a guru that was well-known around the time Apple was first taking off. The successful guru is neither universally nor arbitrarily scornful to followers, but there should be enough randomness to keep the followers guessing and off guard. When praise comes, it should be utterly piercing and luminous, so as to make the recipient feel as though they’ve never known love before that moment.
Apple’s relationship with its customers often followed a similar course. There would be a pandemic of bleating about a problem, such as a phone that lost calls when touched a certain way, and somehow the strife seemed to further cement customer devotion instead of driving them away. What other tech company has experienced such a thing? Jobs imported the marketing techniques of India’s gurus to the business of computation.
Another way in which Jobs emulated the practices of gurus is in the psychology of pseudo-asceticism.
Consider the way he used physical spaces. Jobs always created both personal and workspaces that were spare like an ashram, but it is the white Apple store interior that most recalls the ashram. White conveys purity, a holy place beyond reproach. At the same time, the white space must be highly structured and formal. There must be a tangible aura of discipline and adherence to the master’s plan.
The glass exteriors and staircases of elite Apple stores go further. They are temples, and I imagine they might someday be repurposed for use along those lines. (Maybe, some decades from now, our home 3D printers will just pop out the latest gadgets, leaving stores empty.)
There is yet another Beatles reference to bring up: It was Yoko Ono who first painted a New York City artist’s loft white. Conceptual avant-garde art invites people to project whatever they will project into it, and yet the artist offering a white space, or the silence of John Cage’s “4:33,” still becomes well-known. This is the template followed by Apple marketing.
A dual message is conveyed. The white void is empty, awaiting you and almost anything you project into it. The exception is the surrounding institution, the business, which is not something to be projected away.
While that setup might seem to only benefit the establishment offering the white space, there’s actually a benefit to the visitor who projects what they will into it. It’s like a good parent or lover who will listen endlessly without complaint but also sets boundaries. Narcissism can then be indulged without the terror of being out of touch or out of control. This formula is a magnet for human longings.
It’s all about you, iThis and iThat, but we will hold you, so you won’t screw yourself up. Of course that’s not really a possible bargain. To the degree you buy into the ashram, you do give up a certain degree of yourself. Maybe that’s not a bad thing. It’s like how Apple customers experience culture in general through the lens of Apple’s curation whenever they use an Apple device. Maybe it’s the right mix for some people. But one ought to be aware.
It’s tempting to ridicule this aspect of Jobs’s legacy, but everything people do is infused with some degree of duplicity. This is doubly true of marketing.
Putting the duplicity up front might be best. Back to the Beatles: Lennon’s “Sexy Sadie” ridiculed the guru shtick, while McCartney’s “Fool on the Hill” praised it, and they were singing about the same guru. These two songs could well be applied to the appeal of Apple under Jobs. Yes he manipulated people and was often not a nice guy, and yet he also did either elicit or anticipate the passions of his devotees, over and over. (No one can say what the mix of eliciting versus anticipating really was.)
MONKS AND NERDS (OR, CHIP MONKS)
There is no single explanation for why tech culture has come to be as it is. However, Apple exemplifies one strain of influence that is particularly underappreciated: the crossover between countercultural spirituality and tech culture.
The prevalence of the New Age was a heavy burden to bear for skeptics in Palo Alto in the 1980s. Everyone was attending preachy “workshops” where a narrative about a mystical path to self-empowerment was reinforced. If you found it to be a load of claptrap you learned to keep quiet. It wasn’t worth the arguments.
We like to pretend this phase of Silicon Valley culture didn’t happen, but it did. To my mind, this was a distinct period from the 1970s hippie/tech crossover, which was documented nicely in John Markoff’s book What the Dormouse Said.
“est” (I recall one was supposed to spell it in all small letters) was an expensive workshop that started out with mystical metaphysics and led to secular, almost Confucian ideals about self-improvement. I never attended a session, but everyone else I knew seemed to have, much in the way that everyone is on Facebook now. The main thing attendees talked about, in addition to confiding that they were now masters of their fates, was that one was not allowed to pee during the workshop. You had to hold it in.
Many of the top scientists, politicians, and entrepreneurs attended est or similar happenings. Terms like self-actualization became ubiquitous. You’d develop yourself, and your success would be manifest in societal status, material rewards, and spiritual attainment. All these would be of a piece.
It’s hard to overstate how influential this movement was in Silicon Valley. Not est specifically, for there were hundreds more like it. In the 1980s the Silicon Valley elite were often found at a successor institution called simply “the Forum.”
The Global Business Network was a key, highly influential institution in the history of Silicon Valley. It has advised almost all the companies, and almost everyone who was anyone had something to do with it. Stewart Brand, who coined the phrases “personal computer” and “information wants to be free,” was one of the founders. Now Stewart is a genuinely no-nonsense kind of guy. So is Peter Schwartz, who was the driving force behind GBN and wrote The Art of the Long View. And yet the ambience of the New Age was so thick that it helped define GBN. It was inescapable.
I was one of the so-called remarkable people of GBN. These were experts who would consult or speak when GBN interacted with clients. I always thought the honorary designation was odd and a little embarrassing. It turns out to come from George Gurdjieff! Gurdjieff died in 1949, but he was a primary source of the New Age style of spirituality that defined the flavor of the Bay Area in the late 20th century and continues to thrive.
One of Gurdjieff’s books was called Meetings with Remarkable Men. There was also a movie made. We GBN “remarkables” were so-named to recall the esoteric masters Gurdjieff supposedly had to seek by climbing mountains in Turkmenistan. Feminism tempered the honorary title to “Remarkable People.”
Meanwhile, the world of marketing was being reinvented at the Stanford Research Institute. This is the same SRI that employed Doug Engelbart, who first demonstrated the basics of person-oriented computing in the 1960s. More recently SRI spawned Siri, the voice interface used in Apple products.
SRI had a unit called VALS, for Values, Attitudes, and Lifestyles, which was for a while the guiding light of a transformation in corporate marketing. (The use of the term transformation was long a signal of the technocratic/spiritual New Age. It has been mostly replaced by disruption since the Singularity replaced Gurdjieff as the spiritual North Star.)
The marketing, investment, and media sectors in the United States were all heavily influenced by VALS in the 1970s and beyond. VALS classified consumers and customers into a system that was reminiscent of Gurdjieff’s “enneagrams.” I knew some of the principals at VALS and they would speak openly about their goal being to change the world so that it would be more suitable for spiritual people, called “Inner Directeds” in VAL-speak. The expectation that a few people living near Stanford ought to be able to go and change the world in a few years wasn’t born with Facebook.
IT’S ALL ABOUT I
The lexicon of the New Age, or self-actualization, movement reserved a special place for the word Abundance. Abundance could mean two things. At the rational, technocratic, Confucian end of the spectrum, it might mean that people ought to take responsibility for their failures and successes, but they ought to believe that great success is possible. This sensibility sprouted the motivational speaker industry. Its traces are preserved in reality television and popular song.
In America before the New Age, you could find untold success if you went out and searched for it. This classically entailed a physical search, such as “going west.” In America after the New Age, you expect to find untold success once you have perfected yourself. What that means is becoming self-confident, “believing in yourself,” and the rest of a sequence of prompts that has become utterly ubiquitous.
But the other end of the spectrum of the meaning of Abundance penetrated the mire of superstition and magical incantations.
The idea was that the physical world is a mere façade conjured by people who are too asleep in their lives to realize they are the ones making up their own confinements. This was a taunt Gurdjieff always returned to, that most people are effectively asleep all the time. An enlightened, “remarkable” person would know better.
The magical version of Abundance is that if you can buck up your self-confidence, not only will you succeed in the world of human affairs, but you will also be able to bend or “dent” physical reality. It is really your show, if you would only realize it.
This idea of Abundance continues to thrive. An extremely popular book called The Secret promulgated the hope in the early 21st century. If you can only gain the confidence to just expect the finest lovers, the most exquisite possessions, the most vibrant health, then these things will simply accede to your robust imagination.
The faith that it’s all you, and not the world out there, probably runs thickest in the Bay Area. At a California vegan restaurant chain, with roots in the Forum and related institutions, each item on the menu2 is called something like, “I am successful.” That might be tofu with eggplant. A radish stew might be called “I am charismatic.” You have to say those things to the waitperson in order to eat. You have to be your own hypnotherapy tape in front of everyone.
Or more precisely, you have to prove fealty to an institution or be shunned for not being sufficiently self-actualizing.3 This twisted transaction is similar to what people buy into when they live their social lives through today’s consumer-facing Siren Servers.
Express yourself, you are prompted, but through Facebook’s template. If you don’t, you are not empowering yourself. Same old pattern, same old tricks.
“ABUNDANCE” EVOLVES
The business of starting Siren Servers would certainly seem to confirm the worldview of the Abundance movement. You just imagine that the whole world will use your social network and it does. Just like that.
Around the turn of the century, with the rise of Google, a new merger of the techie and the New Age streams of Bay Area culture appeared.
For some time, at least since those dinners at Marvin Minsky’s house, there had been talk of every manner of amazing future tech revolution. Maybe we’ll disassemble our bodies temporarily into small parts that will be easier to launch into space, where we’ll be reassembled and then float naked except for a golden bubble to shield us from radiation.
This was an utterly typical idea. But if there were anything actionable, it would be in the realm of engineering. Could you really sever and then reattach a head?
After the rise of Google, the tenor of these speculations changed in Silicon Valley. Now the top-priority action item was perfecting one’s mentality, one’s perspective and self-confidence. Are you really enlightened enough to “get” accelerating change? Are you really awake and aware, preparing for the Singularity?
The engineering will come about automatically, after all. Remember, the new attitude is that technology is self-determined, that it is a giant supernatural c
reature growing on its own, soon to overtake people. The new cliché is that today’s “disruptions” will deterministically lead to tomorrow’s “Singularity.”
The strange inheritance of ideas has induced a number of comic reversals. Now I find myself arguing that human agency is the better way to interpret events. Doesn’t that make me sound a little like the kind of motivational speaker I used to make fun of? We must take responsibility for our own successes and failures, I declare.
CHILDHOOD AND APOCALYPSE
Even the most ambitious outcomes in the most fabulous futures articulated in the moneyed dreamspace of Silicon Valley, those where the world isn’t utterly wrecked by nuclear war or some other disaster, tend to leave people behind. Even the optimism is dismal for people. People will be surpassed and left behind.
And yet Silicon Valley engineers, venture capitalists, and pundits continue to go about their days, zipping up to Napa to frolic in the wine country from time to time, having children, generally living as if nothing unusual is happening.
Do we really believe we are on the cusp of disrupting the human world? Are we on the verge of destroying the cycles of life as we know them, or is that just shtick? Are we just making up stories to get by, to romanticize our own little fog atop the chasm of mortality?
Denial is the human baseline. Fantasy of insulation is our most common habit. We are mortal and can’t possibly be expected to fully grasp death, so we inhabit just enough insanity to keep the absurdity manageable. Pretending to be able to deal with mortality sanely makes room for life.
But in the matters of fantasy and madness, technology is different, just as it is always different. Technology works. It really does change the world.