No, Jaron Lanier, The Internet Did Not Destroy The Middle Class

An interview with Jaron Lanier: The Internet destroyed the middle class:

I was in a cafe this morning where I heard some stuff I was interested in, and nobody could figure out. It was Spotify or one of these … so they knew what stream they were getting, but they didn’t know what music it was. Then it changed to other music, and they didn’t know what that was. And I tried to use one of the services that determines what music you’re listening to, but it was a noisy place and that didn’t work. So what’s supposed to be an open information system serves to obscure the source of the musician. It serves as a closed information system. It actually loses the information.

I basically found Lanier through reading about Evgeny Morozov. I think it was specifically “Some Thoughts on Evgeny Morozov” (and The Awl article referenced within) that lead me there. I’ll start by saying I definitely appreciate both of them, at least at a minimum for challenging orthodoxy on a number of issues. But with Lanier, I’m far less convinced of his ideas.

I pulled the above quote specifically because as I was reading the interview with him, I generally had a feeling like “I don’t really buy this,” but I couldn’t quite put my finger on why. I think it starts with the Kodak/Instagram comparison – the idea that Instagram “replaced” Kodak in any meaningful sense is silly, considering people were taking digital pictures with their phones (and thus destroying Kodak’s business model) long before Instagram came along. And I don’t know specifically how many jobs are created through this, but leaving out all the third-party contractors involved in making Instagram work (hosting companies, system admins, advertisers, etc. – they’re certainly not managing a server farm with 13 people) is just a bad way of analyzing the situation.

So to get back to the above quote, this was the first time I could point to something and go “no, your idea(s) has(ve) a real hole in them.” If we just talk about the specific example, any idiot could have gone back to the computer and looked at what was playing to answer his question. It’s not like if he had the actual radio playing in the cafe it would’ve been any easier. His whole point about “technology divorcing people from context” is poorly made by this example, and points towards the overall issue with the argument because you’re not necessarily getting more/better context when we were reading a newspaper or watching television.

There’s somewhat of a point to be made regarding CDs, but again, he’s only pointing to a subset of behaviors surrounding the consumption of music. Personally, I use Spotify[1. Well, I don’t use Spotify – I use Google Play Music All Access, which is basically the same thing.] to be able to listen to a wider range of music and discover bands/music that I haven’t heard of before, especially stuff related to what I already like. While you can’t generalize from my experience, I can’t imagine I’m the only one that uses these services for discovery. So I don’t buy that at all.

The other quote that really struck me was this:

Well, it’s an orthodoxy now. I have 14-year-old kids who come to my talks who say, “But isn’t open source software the best thing in life? Isn’t it the future?” It’s a perfect thought system. It reminds me of communists I knew when growing up or Ayn Rand libertarians. It’s one of these things where you have a simplistic model that suggests this perfect society so you just believe in it totally. These perfect societies don’t work. We’ve already seen hyper-communism come to tears. And hyper-capitalism come to tears. And I just don’t want to have to see that for cyber-hacker culture. We should have learned that these perfect simple systems are illusions.

I have to laugh a little, without being too mean, because if you contrast his critique of their cyberutopianism with his own idea of micropayments to people who contribute to the network, who’s really the one living the illusion? There’s absolutely no way on earth we’re going to be able to redesign things to include this micropayment system back into the internet’s structure, so for him, it’s really just a thought exercise, or something.

I’m not even going to get into the example of Jenna Marbles – I don’t really know who he thinks she replaces in the “pre-tech” economy (the way he thinks Instagram replaced Kodak) but I don’t think that’s another example either.

Overall, Lanier comes off as kind of an aging, stoned hippe.[2. This isn’t to imply he actually does drugs – I have no idea – it’s just a metaphor for how he thinks.] He’s obviously bright, has done some thinking, and has some interesting ideas, but it seems like he’s just taking bits and pieces of things and doing a poor job of organizing them into a complete narrative or worldview. I appreciate the bits and pieces, and I appreciate his challenge of internet orthodoxy, but I don’t think he ends up with a worldview that’s as coherent as would be useful.