Books by Jaron Lanier
You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto
by Jaron Lanier
Jaron Lanier, a Silicon Valley visionary since the 1980s, was among the first to predict the revolutionary changes the World Wide Web would bring to commerce and culture. Now, in his first book, written more than two decades after the web was created, Lanier offers this provocative and cautionary look at the way it is transforming our lives for better and for worse.
The current design and function of the web have become so familiar that it is easy to forget that they grew out of programming decisions made decades ago. The web’s first designers made crucial choices (such as making one’s presence anonymous) that have had enormous—and often unintended—consequences. What’s more, these designs quickly became “locked in,” a permanent part of the web’s very structure.
Lanier discusses the technical and cultural problems that can grow out of poorly considered digital design and warns that our financial markets and sites like Wikipedia, Facebook, and Twitter are elevating the “wisdom” of mobs and computer algorithms over the intelligence and judgment of individuals.
Lanier also shows:
How 1960s antigovernment paranoia influenced the design of the online world and enabled trolling and trivialization in online discourse
How file sharing is killing the artistic middle class;
How a belief in a technological “rapture” motivates some of the most influential technologists
Why a new humanistic technology is necessary.
Controversial and fascinating, You Are Not a Gadget is a deeply felt defense of the individual from an author uniquely qualified to comment on the way technology interacts with our culture.
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You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto
by Jaron Lanier
A NATIONAL BESTSELLER
A programmer, musician, and father of virtual reality technology, Jaron Lanier was a pioneer in digital media, and among the first to predict the revolutionary changes it would bring to our commerce and culture. Now, with the Web influencing virtually every aspect of our lives, he offers this provocative critique of how digital design is shaping society, for better and for worse.
Informed by Lanier’s experience and expertise as a computer scientist, You Are Not a Gadget discusses the technical and cultural problems that have unwittingly risen from programming choices—such as the nature of user identity—that were “locked-in” at the birth of digital media and considers what a future based on current design philosophies will bring. With the proliferation of social networks, cloud-based data storage systems, and Web 2.0 designs that elevate the “wisdom” of mobs and computer algorithms over the intelligence and wisdom of individuals, his message has never been more urgent.
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Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now
by Jaron Lanier
AS SEEN IN THE NETFLIX DOCUMENTARY THE SOCIAL DILEMMA
A WIRED "ALL-TIME FAVORITE BOOK"
A FINANCIAL TIMES BEST BOOK
"THE CONSCIENCE OF SILICON VALLEY"- GQ
“Profound . . . Lanier shows the tactical value of appealing to the conscience of the individual. In the face of his earnest argument, I felt a piercing shame about my own presence on Facebook. I heeded his plea and deleted my account.”
- Franklin Foer, The New York Times Book Review
“Mixes prophetic wisdom with a simple practicality . . . Essential reading.”
- The New York Times (Summer Reading Preview)
You might have trouble imagining life without your social media accounts, but virtual reality pioneer Jaron Lanier insists that we’re better off without them. In Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now, Lanier, who participates in no social media, offers powerful and personal reasons for all of us to leave these dangerous online platforms.
Lanier’s reasons for freeing ourselves from social media’s poisonous grip include its tendency to bring out the worst in us, to make politics terrifying, to trick us with illusions of popularity and success, to twist our relationship with the truth, to disconnect us from other people even as we are more “connected” than ever, to rob us of our free will with relentless targeted ads. How can we remain autonomous in a world where we are under continual surveillance and are constantly being prodded by algorithms run by some of the richest corporations in history that have no way of making money other than being paid to manipulate our behavior? How could the benefits of social media possibly outweigh the catastrophic losses to our personal dignity, happiness, and freedom? Lanier remains a tech optimist, so while demonstrating the evil that rules social media business models today, he also envisions a humanistic setting for social networking that can direct us toward a richer and fuller way of living and connecting with our world.
Copies
No copies available.
Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now
by Jaron Lanier
AS SEEN IN THE NETFLIX DOCUMENTARY THE SOCIAL DILEMMA
A WIRED "ALL-TIME FAVORITE BOOK"
A FINANCIAL TIMES BEST BOOK
"THE CONSCIENCE OF SILICON VALLEY"- GQ
“Profound . . . Lanier shows the tactical value of appealing to the conscience of the individual. In the face of his earnest argument, I felt a piercing shame about my own presence on Facebook. I heeded his plea and deleted my account.”
- Franklin Foer, The New York Times Book Review
“Mixes prophetic wisdom with a simple practicality . . . Essential reading.”
- The New York Times (Summer Reading Preview)
You might have trouble imagining life without your social media accounts, but virtual reality pioneer Jaron Lanier insists that we’re better off without them. In Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now, Lanier, who participates in no social media, offers powerful and personal reasons for all of us to leave these dangerous online platforms.
Lanier’s reasons for freeing ourselves from social media’s poisonous grip include its tendency to bring out the worst in us, to make politics terrifying, to trick us with illusions of popularity and success, to twist our relationship with the truth, to disconnect us from other people even as we are more “connected” than ever, to rob us of our free will with relentless targeted ads. How can we remain autonomous in a world where we are under continual surveillance and are constantly being prodded by algorithms run by some of the richest corporations in history that have no way of making money other than being paid to manipulate our behavior? How could the benefits of social media possibly outweigh the catastrophic losses to our personal dignity, happiness, and freedom? Lanier remains a tech optimist, so while demonstrating the evil that rules social media business models today, he also envisions a humanistic setting for social networking that can direct us toward a richer and fuller way of living and connecting with our world.
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$17.99
Who Owns the Future?
by Jaron Lanier
The “brilliant” and “daringly original” (The New York Times) critique of digital networks from the “David Foster Wallace of tech” (London Evening Standard)—asserting that to fix our economy, we must fix our information economy.
Jaron Lanier is the father of virtual reality and one of the world’s most brilliant thinkers. Who Owns the Future? is his visionary reckoning with the most urgent economic and social trend of our age: the poisonous concentration of money and power in our digital networks.
Lanier has predicted how technology will transform our humanity for decades, and his insight has never been more urgently needed. He shows how Siren Servers, which exploit big data and the free sharing of information, led our economy into recession, imperiled personal privacy, and hollowed out the middle class. The networks that define our world—including social media, financial institutions, and intelligence agencies—now threaten to destroy it.
But there is an alternative. In this provocative, poetic, and deeply humane book, Lanier charts a path toward a brighter future: an information economy that rewards ordinary people for what they do and share on the web.
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No copies available.
The Future of Public Space: SOM Thinkers Series
by China Miéville, Jaron Lanier, Michelle Nijhuis, Rachel Monroe, Christopher DeWolf, Ben Davis, Sarah Fecht
Routine discussions on public space typically omit a gamut of possibilities ripe for critical discussion.
This book, the latest in the SOM Thinkers series, aims to address these questions. Here, Rachel Monroe challenges American preconceptions of the wild, wide-open West by addressing issues of surveillance; the series’ first fictional piece, by China Miéville, covers an under-examined area of public space under the guise of detective fiction; a study of public art by Ben Davis sheds light on the myths and stigmas that have accrued to public art, also asking what it can become; Christopher DeWolf shares a sensory navigation trip through a directionless Hong Kong; Michelle Nijhuis writes on the shifting ecologies of national parks; Sarah Fecht explores architecture and social life beyond Earth; while Jaron Lanier meditates on the idea of public space online, linking the prevailing, free-for-all model of the internet with a characteristically American yearning for freedom and repudiation of rules and structure. Also included are examples of public art works by Lawrence Weiner.
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No copies available.
Dawn of the New Everything: Encounters with Reality and Virtual Reality
by Jaron Lanier
Named one of the best books of 2017 by The Economist, The Wall Street Journal, & Vox
The father of virtual reality explains its dazzling possibilities by reflecting on his own lifelong relationship with technology
Bridging the gap between tech mania and the experience of being inside the human body, Dawn of the New Everything is a look at what it means to be human at a moment of unprecedented technological possibility.
Through a fascinating look back over his life in technology, Jaron Lanier, an interdisciplinary scientist and father of the term “virtual reality,” exposes VR’s ability to illuminate and amplify our understanding of our species, and gives readers a new perspective on how the brain and body connect to the world. An inventive blend of autobiography, science writing, philosophy and advice, this book tells the wild story of his personal and professional life as a scientist, from his childhood in the UFO territory of New Mexico, to the loss of his mother, the founding of the first start-up, and finally becoming a world-renowned technological guru.
Understanding virtual reality as being both a scientific and cultural adventure, Lanier demonstrates it to be a humanistic setting for technology. While his previous books offered a more critical view of social media and other manifestations of technology, in this book he argues that virtual reality can actually make our lives richer and fuller.
Copies
No copies available.
Dawn of the New Everything: Encounters with Reality and Virtual Reality
by Jaron Lanier
Named one of the best books of 2017 by The Economist, The Wall Street Journal, & Vox
The father of virtual reality explains its dazzling possibilities by reflecting on his own lifelong relationship with technology
Bridging the gap between tech mania and the experience of being inside the human body, Dawn of the New Everything is a look at what it means to be human at a moment of unprecedented technological possibility.
Through a fascinating look back over his life in technology, Jaron Lanier, an interdisciplinary scientist and father of the term “virtual reality,” exposes VR’s ability to illuminate and amplify our understanding of our species, and gives readers a new perspective on how the brain and body connect to the world. An inventive blend of autobiography, science writing, philosophy and advice, this book tells the wild story of his personal and professional life as a scientist, from his childhood in the UFO territory of New Mexico, to the loss of his mother, the founding of the first start-up, and finally becoming a world-renowned technological guru.
Understanding virtual reality as being both a scientific and cultural adventure, Lanier demonstrates it to be a humanistic setting for technology. While his previous books offered a more critical view of social media and other manifestations of technology, in this book he argues that virtual reality can actually make our lives richer and fuller.
Copies
No copies available.