One of the things I really enjoy as a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts (the RSA) is attending their thought-provoking talks and conversations. Last night Jaron Lanier was talking about his new book, "You Are Not A Gadget". He is a computer scientist, composer, visual artist, and author.
As the talk synopsis said, Jaron is worried that " Individual creativity has begun to go out of fashion. Machines, specifically computers, are no longer just tools to be used by the human mind - these days, we treat them as if they are altogether better than humans."
In essence he is saying that we should all be pro-internet, pro-technology - but there are certain myths (e.g. "everything that's best is free", "social networking is always a good thing") and certain problems (e.g. "our gadgets/technology drive us not the other way round") that we should fight against. Only by challenging these can we nurture individual creativity (and thus further develop our own humanity).
Jaron wrote an article for the WSJ earlier this month - and rather than try to further explain his proposition, let me extract a couple of paragraphs from that article ...
"Most people know me as the "father of Virtual Reality technology." In the 1980s and 1990s, I was a young computer scientist and entrepreneur working on how to apply virtual reality to things like surgical simulation. But I was also part of a circle of friends who tried to imagine how computers would fit into the peoples' lives, including how people might make a living in the future. Our dream came true, in part. It turns out that millions of people are ready to contribute instead of sitting passively on the couch watching television. On the other hand, we made a huge mistake in making those contributions unpaid, and often anonymous, because those bad decisions robbed people of dignity. I am appalled that our old fantasies have become so entrenched that it's hard to get anyone to remember that there are alternatives to a framework that isn't working.
Here's one problem with digital collectivism: We shouldn't want the whole world to take on the quality of having been designed by a committee. When you have everyone collaborate on everything, you generate a dull, average outcome in all things. You don't get innovation.
If you want to foster creativity and excellence, you have to introduce some boundaries. Teams need some privacy from one another to develop unique approaches to any kind of competition. Scientists need some time in private before publication to get their results in order. Making everything open all the time creates what I call a global mush.
There's a dominant dogma in the online culture of the moment that collectives make the best stuff, but it hasn't proven to be true. The most sophisticated, influential and lucrative examples of computer code—like the page-rank algorithms in the top search engines or Adobe's Flash— always turn out to be the results of proprietary development. Indeed, the adored iPhone came out of what many regard as the most closed, tyrannically managed software-development shop on Earth."
You can read in full Jaron's article here.
What was also interesting was that Nico Macdonald, the RSA's event moderator, encouraged the audience to comment and ask questions in real time via twitter, complete with its own hashtag. Here's a sample of the stream ....
@ThinkAboutArt Thanks to Jaron Lanier for stating that artists deserve the dignity of their own creative work!! http://bit.ly/8Q4CpP #rsalanier
@mahemoff "The Machine Stops" is one of the most prescient things ever written acc to Lanier #rsalanier
@milwardoliver Interesting thought out of #rsalanier that children on facebook have their growing up recorded in digital form without the ability to forget.
@mickyates "The geeks have created a world that benefits geeks - so others are denied chance for own personality formation" Jaron #rsalanier
@tomux @melex #rsalanier. It's like a health-food movement for the internet generation. We should eat more broccoli.
@petemarcus Economic model of 'free' doesn't work. Web does not provide bounty if you give your stuff away for free. #rsalanier
@petemarcus Originally PCs allowed consumers to also be creators. New devices like Kindles only make us consumers now. #rsalanier
@melex #rsalanier Lanier concludes that he's not anti-tech per se, but is against 'ritualistic, anti-human design'. Hear hear, sense at last.
@mickyates It's not a problem with the internet - that's brilliant - it's the dogma of the "open/free culture" of web 2.0 that's the issue! #rsalanier
So, quite an event - and an exercise in the new (social media) and the old (the RSA - or more completely the "Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce - a cradle of enlightenment thinking and a force for social progress", founded in 1754) that was fascinating in its own right.
The RSA's founder, William Shipley, would have been proud!
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