You Are Not A Gadget

Sep 21, 2024 6:42 PM

Author:Jaron Lanier

In You are Not a Gadget digital guru and virtual reality pioneer Jaron Lanier reveals how the internet is deadening personal interaction, stifling genuine inventiveness and even changing us as people.

Something went wrong around the start of the twenty-first century. The crowd was wise. Social networks replaced individual creativity. There were more places to express ourselves than ever before... yet no one really had anything to say.

Does this have to be our future?

Showing us the way to a future where individuals mean more than machines, this is a searing manifesto against mass mediocrity, a creative call to arms - and an impassioned defence of the human.

'A provocative and sure-to-be-controversial book ... Lucid, powerful and persuasive'

  The New York Times

'There is hardly a page that does not contain some fascinating provocation'

  Guardian

'Short and frightening ... from a position of real knowledge and insight'

Zadie Smith, New York Review of Books

'Poetic and prophetic, this could be the most important book of the year'

  The Times

Jaron Lanier is a philosopher and computer scientist who has spent his career pushing the transformative power of modern technology to its limits. From coining the term 'Virtual Reality' and creating the world's first immersive avatars to developing cutting-edge medical imaging and surgical techniques, Lanier is one of the premier designers and engineers at work today.

A musician with a collection of over 700 instruments, he has been recognised by Encyclopedia Britannica (but certainly not Wikipedia) as one of history's greatest inventors and named one of the top one hundred public intellectuals in the world by Prospect and Foreign Policy.

Reviews

Fabulous - I couldn't put it down and shouted out Yes! Yes! on many pages . . . This is a landmark book that will have people talking and arguing for years into the future.

—— Lee Smolin

Lucid, powerful and persuasive . . . Necessary reading for anyone interested in how the Web and the software we use every day are reshaping culture and the marketplace

—— Michiko Kakutani, New York Times

There is hardly a page that does not contain some fascinating provocation

—— Guardian

Mind-bending, exuberant, brilliant

—— Washington Post

A pioneer in the development of virtual reality and a Silicon Valley veteran, Mr. Lanier is a digital-world insider concerned with the effect that online collectivism and the current enshrinement of "the wisdom of the crowd" is having on artists, intellectual property rights and the larger social and cultural landscape. In taking on such issues, he's written an illuminating book that is as provocative as it is impassioned.

—— Michiko Kakutani's Top 10 Books of the Year 2010 , New York Times

In the world of technologists, Jaron Lanier is that rare combination: a pioneer and a skeptic. A legendary computer scientist, he did crucial early work in the field of virtual reality (the phrase is his). But he now recoils at the way Web 2.0 and social media sell us short as human beings, both in our relationships and in our sense of who we are. In purposeful, reasoned steps, always informed by a profound understanding of how software really works, he lays out his vision of where it all went wrong and champions the power of the human brain in an age of ever smarter machines.

—— Lev Grossman , Time Magazine Top 10 Non-Fiction Books of 2010

Eye-opening and hugely enjoyable book ... overall this is an original, surprising and rather wonderful addition to our literature of place

—— Sunday Telegraph

A book that begs us to use our imaginations; to appreciate what we pass by every day but never really see

—— Metro

This is a delightful and important book. By focusing on the fringes, on the shabby reality of suburban life, these poets remind us that there are always new myths for old, that the 'edgelands' may even be our true centre

—— John Greening , Country Life

With chapters on paths, dens, wastelands, business parks and many other topics, this book has opened my eyes to all kinds of things I might not have noticed before

—— Wendy Cope , Daily Telegraph

A 2011 favourite

—— Wendy Cope , Observer, Books of the Year

The year's most unusual travel book

—— Tom Chesshyre , The Times

[An] eye-opening and hugely enjoyable book

—— Daily Telegraph

Written in a delectable prose that scatters flashes of poetry over a sardonic undertow of social comment, Edgelands is a lyrical triumph. On Britain’s grotty margins, the duo trace “desire paths” to find beauty and mystery in the rough darkness on the edge of town

—— Boyd Tonkin , Independent

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