“Resist the easy grooves [digital creative materials] guide you into. If you love a medium made of software, there’s a danger you will become entrapped in someone else’s recent careless thoughts. Struggle against that!”

Book Review:

Review by Devon Shepherd  (APR 18, 2011)

You Are Not A Gadget is a passionate and thought-provoking critique of Silicon Valley from behind its ramparts, and a must-read for anyone interested in the ways technology is affecting our culture. In his first book, Jaron Lanier, a visionary leader in the development of virtual reality technology (and the man who popularized the term), sounds the alarm: our humanity is under digital attack as the software that increasingly governs our lives impoverishes what it is to be a person.

Not only does software express ideas, making it “impossible to work with information technology without engaging in social engineering,” technology extends “your being, like remote eyes and ears (web cams and mobile phones ) and expanded memory (the world of details you can search online). These become the structures by which you connect to the world and other people. These structures in turn can change how you conceive of yourself and the world.” This need not be a bad thing, however, if these structures expand what it is to be a person. However, Lanier argues, the ideas and philosophies implied by the code, by the software – anonymity, the wisdom of crowds, the emergent intelligence of networks, be they the neural networks of the brain or the networks of cyberspace and the noosphere- undermine the “quest,” the “mystery,” the “leap of faith” that it is to be a person.

The Web 2.0, with the rigidity of Facebook profiles, Blogger templates, and Twitter’s 140-characters, effectively restricts our range of expression. As our online presence becomes our social, economic and professional avatars, as we carry out more and more of our lives online, there is a danger of defining ourselves “downward.” Just as the entrenchment of the MIDI format, originally developed to “express the tile mosaic world of the keyboardist, not the watercolor world of the violin,” reduced the richness of musical expression, and just as UNIX’s command-line interface (and the influence this structure had on all subsequent operating systems) artificially divides and parcels time, our Web 2.0 identities are impoverished versions of ourselves, a reduction with increasingly dire consequences as our world becomes increasingly digital and our online personas increasingly us.

Moreover, the economics of software development means that design decisions are often subject to “lock-in.” As a piece of software grows, it becomes increasingly difficult to make changes, especially if other programs are relying on it to run.

So software presents what often feels like an unfair level of responsibility for technologists. Because computers are growing more powerful at an exponential rate, the designers and programmers of technology must be extremely careful when they make design choices. The consequences of tiny, initially inconsequential decisions are often amplified to become defining unchangeable rules of our lives.

However, Lanier suspects, some of these same computer scientists might actually want to degrade our personhood in order to reduce the distance between human consciousness and computers. On considering Alan Turing’s famous test for machine consciousness – if a computer could fool a human to believing they were conversing with an actual person, that computer should be considered conscious – Lanier brilliantly writes:

“But the Turing test cuts both ways. You can’t tell if a machine has gotten smarter or if you’ve just lowered your standards of intelligence to such a degree that the machine seems smart. If you can have a conversation with a simulated person presented by an AI program, can you tell how far you let your personhood degrade in order to make the illusion work for you?”

Considering that many technologists eagerly await the Singularity, a time when computers begin to design themselves, producing machines with capabilities far exceeding our own, a time which “would involve dying in the flesh and being uploaded into a computer and remaining conscious,” they might “cease to design technology to serve humans, and prepare instead for the grand events it will bring.” Whether they realize it or not, many technologists have transferred their faith and fear of death to the machines they work with, hoping “to make the transition from the old religion, where you hope God will give you an afterlife, to the new religion where you hope to become immortal by being uploaded into a computer.”

As humans just become another element in the all-important network, troubling cultural and economic effects emerge. Online anonymity has bred cyber bullying and trolls. The reduction in individual responsibility allowed by the digital world likely contributed to the nesting of abstract financial products implicated in the financial meltdown. Authorship is devalued with the ascendance of the open-source movement and the popularity of crowd-sourcing. The result is that it becomes increasingly difficult to convince consumers that producers of culture should be paid for their work. Some of Lanier’s ideas on how to reintroduce compensation for digital expression – 3-D video-conferencing gigs – are more interesting, and likely more obtainable than, others –music embedded objects, such as jewelry, called songles.

Lanier excels in the depths of philosophy, rather than in shallows of practicalities. His “realistic” approach to computationalism, that the “cybernetic structure of a person has been refined by a very large, very long, very deep encounter with reality” so that the information processes that create consciousness are a part of reality, their “pattern hewn out of so many encounters with reality that they aren’t really abstractable bits anymore, but are instead a nonabstract continuation of reality,” are fascinating and feel to me to be right on the mark, and his hopes for post-symbolic communication in a virtual-reality world, where one might morph to express an idea, exciting to think about, although one has to wonder how hoping for a virtual-reality world doesn’t show as least some of the contempt for human reality as the futurist, who hopes of having his consciousness uploaded into a computer.

Jaron Lanier is a deep and original thinker, and no doubt, you won’t agree with everything he says here, but if you’ve ever thought (or worried) about the cultural effects of our rapidly progressing technology, you won’t be disappointed by this book.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 50 readers
PUBLISHER:	Vintage; Reprint edition (February 8, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Devon Shepherd
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Jaron Lanier
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	A look at some of these ideas through fiction: The Terrible Privacy of Maxwell Sims by Jonathan Coe And the classic novel in which most of us encountered an uploaded personality: Neuromancer by William Gibson

Bibliography:

• You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto (January 2010)

“Mankind as you may have noticed, has become very inventive about devising new ways for people to avoid talking to each other, and I’d been taking full advantage of the recent ones. I would always send a text message rather than speak to someone on the phone. Instead of meeting with any of my friends, I would post cheerful, ironically worded status updates on Facebook, to show them all what a busy life I was leading. And presumably people had been enjoying them, because I’d got more than seventy friends on Facebook now, most of them complete strangers.”

Book Review:

Review by Guy Savage  (MAR 11, 2011)

A couple of weeks ago, I watched the film The Social Network. I expect most of us know what the film is about, but for those who don’t, it’s the fictionalized account of the creation of the social networking internet site: Facebook. I liked the film a lot, and one of the things that remained with me after the credits rolled is the changing idea of friendship. In the age of the internet, what does friendship mean? It used to be that we made friends in school, at work or at university, but now many of us have friendships with people online that we’ve never actually met in person. Are these relationships real? Are they substitutes, or are they a facsimile of the “real” thing.

The authenticity of relationships is just one of the many things that trouble the protagonist of Jonathan Coe’s latest novel, The Terrible Privacy of Maxwell Sim. Maxwell or Max is 48 years old, and while he struggles with many of the issues that have concerned people for decades (divorce, loneliness, and intimacy), Max seems downright confused by the additional element of social networking that’s reared its head thanks to the internet. Throughout the novel, Max confuses the real and the virtual to great comic results; he misinterprets the smallest gestures and at one point, his most significant relationship is with the female voice of his GPS navigator.

When the novel begins, Max, who’s suffering from depression and is on leave from his job, is on holiday in Australia to visit his father. Since both men have problems with intimacy, it’s a drab lonely visit. The trip is a gift from Max’s ex-wife, Caroline, and while her intentions are murky, nothing seems to come from the trip except an emphasis on Max’s isolation. Max’s return to Britain underscores this isolation. In spite of having 70 friends on Facebook, there are no messages indicating that he’s been missed, and while the junk e-mails pile in, only one appears to have been written from friendship; it’s a request from an old workmate, Trevor, to join him for a drink when he’s in town. The irony here is that the evening with Trevor is based on a job offer and is not extended from friendship at all.

As the novel continues, Max begins a journey–both literal and figurative–a journey to solve his relationship issues and a journey to the Hebrides on a mission to sell toothbrushes. On his journey north, he makes stops at various locations that are connected to his past, and the assumptions he made about his past undergo renovation. As he goes father north, Max begins to unravel as he compares his journey to the notorious and bogus around-the-world yacht trip of Donald Crowhurst, but whereas Crowhurst’s story is tragic, Max’s journey is comic.

The Terrible Privacy of Maxwell Sim is great fun to read, and it’s stuffed full of lively, fascinating characters who all seem to slot into Max’s problems in one way or another. He meets Poppy, a professional “adultery facilitator” –a young girl who finds plenty of work cooking up alibis for adulterers who need help covering their tracks, and Miss Erith, an elderly socialist who loathes the capitalist face of the New Britain. This is a novel that deals lightly with a number of big issues: the changing landscape of Britain, the Americanization of British society, outsourcing, and the growing isolation of the individual as many aspects of everyday life become replaced by virtual alternatives.

There are many, many hilarious scenes here as clueless Max misinterprets actions–reading romance into text messages and reading friendship into work meetings, for example. He even, at one point, assumes a female identity in order to maintain an online correspondence with his ex-wife. Lest it should seem that forty-eight-year-old Max is just “past it” when it comes to social etiquette of the internet age, as the plot continues, it’s clear that Max also misinterpreted childhood events. Max’s very real childhood experiences seem as confused and as open to interpretation as Max’s 21st century virtual encounters, and indeed this is the premise that author Jonathan Coe toys with right up to the very last pages. Max seems cartoonish at times, a sad sack at forty-eight, and while we root for Max’s epiphany, the novel’s disappointing conclusion instead pulls the novel into another direction entirely.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 8 readers
PUBLISHER:	Knopf (March 8, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Guy Savage
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Jonathan Coe
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: The Rain Before It Falls

Bibliography:

• The Accidental Woman (1987)
• A Touch of Love (1989)
• The Dwarves of Death (1990)
• What a Carve Up !  (1994) (US title: The Winshaw Legacy)
• The House of Sleep (1997)
• The Rotters’ Club (2001)
• The Closed Circle (2004)
• The Rain Before It Falls (2007; Jan 2009 in pb)
• The Terrible Privacy of Maxwell Sim (March 2011)

“Then Edeard’s farsight caught someone running down the slipway on the other side of the warehouse. He jumped off the side of the canal, holding the surface of the water firm as he landed. It held his weight with only a slight dent under each foot as he ran around to the slipway. People on the other side of the wide canal stopped and stared. Fingers were pointed. Cheers echoed across the icy water. Children called their friends to watch. It was the Waterwalker, they cried; he was doing it again. ”

Book Review:

Reviewed by Ann Wilkes (JUN 19, 2009)

Rich world-building is hard enough, but in The Temporal Void, Peter F. Hamilton has created not one, but two universes that intersect each other. The lives of the people in the Void are dreamt about by people in the Commonwealth Universe through the gaiafield. The journey of Edeard, an egg shaper from Ashwell to the crystal city of Makkathran and the headway he makes as an outsider to clean up the city’s gangs is the subject of the dreams in the first volume, The Dreaming Void.

Now, Edeard, having revealed some of the extent of his incredible telekinetic and telepathic power that goes beyond the average Makkathran citizen, makes still more inroads. He shakes up the city’s political system while learning some hard lessons along the way.

The story of Edeard and his friends as experienced through Inigo’s (the first dreamer’s) dreams is woven throughout each of the books These dreams are shared by all through the gaiafield and have re-shaped Commonwealth philosophy and religion. The dreams become more important still when the Void threatens to once again devour more of the outside universe. The Living Dream movement wants to enter the Void, which they see as an idyllic setting and a refuge from the cares of the universe and their lives’ ultimate goal. A second dreamer has added new dreams which are shared with the populace through gaiamotes that most Commonwealth citizens have within them to filter and share their emotions with others.

The second dreamer, Araminta, is unaware for some time that the dreams belong to her, that she is the one channeling them. When the Skylord contacts her in the dream, beckoning her to come to the Void where it will guide her to the heart, she tells it to take a hike. Ironically, she is not one of the Living Dream and is opposed to their plan to find a way into the Void. Living Dream’s plan to enter the Void is the worst of all the many dangers that the various factions and peoples, aliens and otherwise, face. It could wake the dormant inscrutable Void, which has, off and on, been swallowing nearby star systems. Araminta’s rebuttal sets off the devourment phase as though the Skylord is throwing a tantrum.

And now everyone is after Araminta or Inigo, who some believe to still be alive and in seclusion. One of the agents doesn’t remember who he is or know what he will do tomorrow. He is a bionicly modified human whose mission plays out in his brain as needed. Another ruthless agent, The Cat, who has been cloned from penal deep freeze, (with the original’s memories transferred in), has an altogether different agenda. One agent destroys an entire world looking for Inigo.

Yet another faction within ANA (Advanced Neural Activity system — into which people have uploaded their consciousness to continue living in virtual reality) has pulled Paula Myo out of retirement to find the second dreamer to protect her from being controlled by any one faction, giving her the choice to decide independently. Paula hires Oscar who looks to an ancient cult of neo-ninjas who idolize The Cat for their unique skills. Meanwhile another faction agent has gone rogue who has a device that can move an entire world in the cargo hold of his ship.

The Commonwealth universe is full of politics, infighting, and intrigue. The world-building, or should I say universe-building, in this novel was such that I missed those universes terribly after I finished the book, in spite of the satisfying ending. In spite of the scope of the universe and the large cast of characters, I never felt lost and was genuinely invested in all the main characters and could easily picture the villains and wished them their comeuppance. I appreciated the complex motivations, uncertainties and contradictions that all of Hamilton’s characters possessed.

I look forward to the next novel in this exciting, ambitious and entertaining trilogy.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 51 readers
PUBLISHER:	Del Rey (March 24, 2009)
REVIEWER:	Ann Wilkes
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Peter F. Hamilton
EXTRAS:	Excerpt Ann Wilke’s interview with Peter F. Hamilton
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: Evolutionary Void

Bibliography:

Greg Mandel books:

• Mindstar Rising (1993)
• A Quantum Murder
• The Nano Flower

Night’s Dawn Trilogy

• The Reality Dysfunction (1996)
• The Neutronium Alchemist (1998)
• The Naked God (2000)

The Commonwealth Trilogy

• Misspent Youth (2002)
• Pandora’s Star (2004)
• Judas Unchained (2005)

The Void Trilogy (also in the Commonwealth)

• The Dreaming Void (2007; March 2008 US)
• The Temporal Void (2008; March 2009 US)
• The Evolutionary Void (August 2010)

Other Novels:

• The Web: Lightstorm (1998; 2005)
• Fallen Dragon (2002; December 2009 in US)