by Jaron Lanier
First published 2010
Jaron Lanier, a Silicon Valley visionary active since the 1980s, examines how the World Wide Web transforms our lives in his first book. Writing more than twenty years after the web's creation, Lanier argues that early programming choices made decades ago became permanently locked into the web's structure. These decisions, including anonymous user presence, produced massive unintended consequences. Lanier identifies technical and cultural problems stemming from poor digital design. He contends that financial markets and platforms like Wikipedia, Facebook, and Twitter prioritize mob wisdom and computer algorithms over individual intelligence and judgment. The book explores how 1960s antigovernment paranoia shaped online world design, enabling trolling and discourse trivialization. Lanier demonstrates how file sharing destroys the artistic middle class and examines how belief in technological rapture drives influential technologists. He advocates for new humanistic technology as a solution. This controversial work defends individual value against technological mob rule from an author uniquely positioned to analyze technology's cultural impact.
Genres: computers, non-fiction, 21st-century, artificial-intelligence, academic, cultural-studies
Vibes: critical, intimate, thought-provoking
Tropes: social-commentary, technological-critique
Period: 1980s, 2000s
221 pages · Hardcover · Alfred A. Knopf