Asked
Questions
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Q: Do I really need to read your book as a whole? Don't the reviews, interviews, and reports about it give me an accurate report of what it says?
A: There's a lot more in there than you might think, and it makes an overall argument that is spiritual, or metaphysical, in nature. Here's a quiz about ideas in the book, and I bet you wouldn't know about these things without reading it:
Q1) Which of these common sensations is proposed as the origin of the mental representation of words in the brain?
a) Tickles
b) Smells
c) Déjà Vu
Q2) These three Silicon Valley business startup ideas are proposed in the book. Which of them is a serious proposal instead of a parody? What does it propose?
a) Ublibudly
b) Songles
c) Metickly
Q3) Which species did Jaron's friend design a haptic telepresence suit for, so that individuals of that species could be safely hugged at a distance?
a) Dophins
b) Bonobos
c) Chickens
Q: How do you feel about the book's reception?
A: It's been wonderful, way beyond my expectations.
However, there is a common source of confusion that is worth mentioning. A central thesis of the book is that it ought to be possible by now to criticize aspects of digital experience without criticizing the whole of it. Unfortunately, it is not always easy to get that point across.
Non-technical readers can easily come to a misunderstanding about the scope of my criticism, because they aren't used to differentiating the things I criticize from the things I praise. Even some of the book's positive reviews have given the wrong impression. It can be confusing even for technical people to keep in mind the differences between things like the Internet, the Web, cloud computing, and Web 2.0. I am critical of Web 2.0 but am thrilled and delighted by all the other things on this list.
(My geeky critics often add to the confusion when they claim to carry the one true banner of technological progress, thus suppressing the distinctions between different technological directions.)
Here's a quick guide to some digital things that are worth distinguishing:
The Internet is what allows computers, smart phones, and other devices to connect to anything at all. Before the Internet, your computer was stuck with a fixed body of information unless you inserted a physical disk or typed something on the keyboard to add to the information that was present. Now your computer can connect to information resources directly, either through a cable or on WiFi. That's the Internet.
The Web is the way that different computers can receive the same information from the Internet and have it come out looking approximately the same on their screens. Before the Web, you couldn't create something like the web page you are reading now and be confident that it would appear on the screens of different computers in a comprehensible way. The Web could only come about after the Internet was established.
Browsers, like Firefox, Internet Explorer, Chrome, or Safari, are all similar programs that run on specific computers that show what's on the Web.
Cloud computing means using the Internet to create the illusion of a giant computer that is actually a composite of many computers. It is a crucial tool in understanding global complex phenomena like climate change, and is also what makes services like XBOX Live, Amazon, search engines, or social networking possible. Without clouds, each computer would just connect to other individual computers and large scale central services could not come about.
Search Engines, like Google and Bing, are programs that run on computing clouds, instead of on individual computers. They show up for your use within your browser, of course, but they get their work done in the cloud.
(I know these distinctions can become confusing, but it is important to get clear about this stuff because it's consequential these days. Geeks have created a world that favors geeks. A geek can understand the changing privacy settings in Facebook, for instance, while a non-Geek often can't. This puts non-Geeks at a significant disadvantage. If we technical folk aren't making the new world clear enough for everyone to understand we have to do a better job.)
The digital things defined above are all examples that I celebrate (even though I hope search engines will become decoupled from advertising in the future.)
The only thing I criticize is the confusion of people with machines. This happens as a side effect of certain designs that depend on all of the above- designs like Web 2.0/Creative Commons/etc. And even in those cases, I have tried to make clear that I am not saying you shouldn't ever use any of the tools I criticize.
Instead I am trying to make you aware of ways these tools can be used badly that can sneak up on you gradually. I am not attempting to invalidate good experiences anyone is having with any particular tool since, after all, they are only tools. Your experience is ultimately up to you, not the tools. That's the point of the book.
Q: Aren't appropriation and reuse central to culture? What's wrong with doing those things on the Internet?
A: Appropriation and reuse are central to culture, of course. I have had a few questions at talks about Hip Hop culture, and I always say I wish Web 2.0 was more like Hip Hop. Imagine if you usually didn't get to know who was rapping, or if you could only know a name, but not the person's story? Would that be culture? Hip Hop is about people - some vastly more talented or ethical than others - but the actors are humans with character and history, not information fragments.
If you are being expressive and want to do some appropriating of your own, may I suggest some ways to do it that you will probably find rewarding, even though some effort is involved?
a) Internalize what you want to appropriate first, so that it comes out of you as both an appropriation and as your personal expression. A golden example would be Thelonious Monk learning stride piano and then turning out his Monkified stride entwinement- and I realize it might be intimidating to bring up a stellar example like that... but that's the path to meaningful culture.
b) Don't appropriate something just because there's some hit of novelty in it, even though you have no idea what it meant to the people who made it originally. That's what missionaries do to the cultures of native peoples. Connect, understand, or empathize with the people you appropriate from, to the degree you can. It's often hard to understand or connect with other people, even in the best of circumstances, just because that's the human condition. Any little bit of awareness across mysterious interpersonal chasms you achieve is a triumph, and the only source of meaning. (That doesn't mean that all appropriation has to be based on sympathy. What I'm saying applies equally well to such things as satire and criticism.)
c) Be financially fair to your sources.
Aware appropriation and denatured, sterile appropriation are opposites.
Q: You make a fuss about musicians losing the chance to sell music recordings, but aren't they able to sell tickets to live concerts instead? Similarly, aren't authors able to give away their writing to promote tickets to live lectures?
A: Please read my answer here.
Q: Are you on Facebook or Twitter?
A: No. I think some of my music might be, though. The good folks who sell the album Proof of Consciousness might use those tools from time to time, for instance.
Q: Does it bother you that the people who sell your music and books sometimes use Twitter, Facebook, and MySpace to do so?
A: Maybe a little, but I'm not a fanatic. I don't like using those tools personally, but I don't ask business partners or friends to pass a purity test. I'd rather someone spend all day thoughtfully using the software I criticize than lazily emulate my personal choices.
Q: I'm a formerly successful writer, illustrator, songwriter, software developer, etc. and am having trouble making enough money to support my family. What's your advice?
A: These are tough times, and you have my sympathy. Don't worry at all about ideology. Don't listen to the people telling to give your stuff away, or to the people telling you not to give your stuff away. (There are a tiny number of people doing ok by giving stuff away, and if you're one of them, more power to you.) The important thing is for you to assess what can work for you in your particular situation. I wish you well.
Q: The ideas you criticize are more than just abstract ideas to me. They are touchstones of the way I think about goodness in the world and part of the shared experience I have with my best friends. How can you even think of trying to take them down?
A: This is not easy. In my own experience, I clung to ideas that mattered to me for years even after I didn't really believe in them any more. In my case, it was some late neo-Marxism, some over-the-top feminism, some unbalanced anti-Americanism, and other colorful, consoling explanations for the strange, tricky phenomenon of being alive in my particular time and place. My sense is that when ideas are more than ideas - when they are touchstones of identity, solace, or happiness - then it can take a rational person 10 to 20 years to accept that they might not be entirely correct.
Fortunately, you rarely have to entirely reject beloved ideas, only parts of them. Once you dissect cherished ideas in your head to become more discerning, you lose a little, but gain much more.
A lot of people believe things today that they'll have to learn to fine tune if either America the nation or humanity the species is to survive. The troublesome ideas these days often have to do with religious fundamentalism or extremist nationalism. The abandonment of cherished thoughts is a hard process that a great many people will have to somehow endure. It's one of the most honorable and difficult things a person can accomplish.
Q: Someone online said that you think Facebook is irredeemably stupid and that there's no good music these days. Can the whole world be wrong?
A: Of course I didn't say those things, but I did say some things that are harder to summarize. Please don't accept the summaries in reviews or comments about the book as substitutes for reading it.
In hearing from people about Facebook, there seems to be a generational divide. People old enough to have jobs and kids use Facebook in part to connect to their own pasts, and generally have good experiences. It's the younger ones who more often find themselves trapped or challenged by cartoon versions of themselves on Facebook. So, contrary to what you might expect, thus far it's the "Facebook Generation" readers who seem to enjoy talking trash about Facebook, and tend to come down on the service harder than I do, even though they use it religiously.
I make clear in the book that I'm not condemning or demanding a halt to the use of any particular software, but I am suggesting that we approach software more consciously and conscientiously, especially before it's "locked in". That might not make sense if you haven't read the book- so please consider reading it.
And as for music, what I actually say is something subtle about the nature of changing musical culture. I make clear that I think there is great music in the air these days. Right now I'm excited by Thomas Ades' absolutely kick-ass violin concerto; HaBanot Nechama, who have the most penetrating and warm female vocal harmonies of all time; Jai Uttal's Thunder Love- Brazilian/Indian pop fusion, and a hundred other things. There are incredible older voices now: It's amazing to hear where Leonard Cohen is on his journey. There are amazing young voices. Listen to Ben Sollee. (As I say in the book, I also enjoy pop culture, despite everything; Lady Gaga's wardrobe is fun and every once in a while a preening rap video can sneakily turn out to have significant depth.)
Q: Are you really sure enough people would be able to earn money from their brains in a future where intellectual property is valued? Isn't it more important to meet the desires of the larger number of less creative or more lazy people who would enjoy having access to stuff for free? Isn't the majority more important than the minority?
A: It is apparent that humanity has already used the Internet to definitively prove that we are better than we used to think we are. We are not always couch potatoes waiting to be passively entertained. The Open Culture/Hive ideology prioritizes getting stuff for free over creators being able to survive by making stuff. This prioritization conceives of the average person as a consumer instead of a producer, even though on the surface the rhetoric seems to state the opposite. If it's really true that only a tiny minority of people have anything to offer, then perhaps we do need to create institutions to support a creative minority for the benefit of the majority. That's the future we are headed to if outfits like ProPublica eventually become the only means left for supporting full-time investigative journalists, for instance. As I argue in the book, there are significant advantages to having a more diverse long term economy of expression.
The ratio of passivity to creativity in people is what will determine the ratio of socialism to capitalism in the long term future, as technology gets better and better. There's more liberty, dignity, and liveliness under capitalism, and in a high tech future, there ought to be enough wealth to go around for everyone. Let's be optimistic about ourselves, in case we turn out to deserve it.
Q: What can be done about information overload? We're drowning in the stuff!
A: The usual answer these days, arising from the type of computer science I criticize in the book, is that we need to create "intelligent" filter technology that will serve up only the best information for you. The problem with that is that we don't have adequate scientific understandings of meaning or thought, so we can't actually write software that does the job. We can only pretend to write such software, so that you can pretend it's working, thus lowering your standards and lessening your personhood.
Fortunately, however, mankind has already invented a filtering technology that fixes the problem. It's called money. The reason there's so much spam, for instance, is that it doesn't cost anything to send it. When Esther Dyson and others have proposed creating a tiny, homeopathic dose of postage, an incremental cost to send information around, the proposals have been shouted down by fanatics who think information must be free, even if that means most information will be crap.
This is just another statement of the argument I make about why cultural expression should be monetized through a universal micropayment system, as was proposed in Ted Nelson's initial vision of hypertext.
Q: Are you ready to pass the baton to younger generations? Or are you an older techie who is hanging on, trying to hog influence?
A: If I didn't trust and respect younger generations, I would try to manipulate them with flattery. That's how the game is played. I am showing them trust and respect by speaking my mind.
Q: Aren't you trying to predict social change, even though that's impossible, due to complexity?
A: Am sounding an alarm, since I think that's the responsible thing to do. Of course the topic is complex and it's likely that I've made some mistakes even if I am right in the big picture. Technical people have a responsibility to talk publicly about problems they see in large scale trends. That's the flip side of the privilege of getting early glimpses. If I am wrong, I'll be so happy that I won't care if people who disagree with me now have some fun saying "I told you so."
Acquiescing to the notion that it is impossible to say anything at all anything about social change is just a way of avoiding social responsibility.
Q:
You make so many negative and cautionary arguments about so many things.
Are you just trying to be a contrarian in every possible way? What
happened to the cherubic positive fellow who got so many people
interested in Virtual Reality and other technologies?
A:
Am still positive in outlook and cherubic by nature. Am not sour
on a hundred things, as I might sometimes seem to be. There is
really only one thing I am criticizing; the degradation of what it is to
be a person, caused by a way we can mistakenly treat digital technology.
To put it that way is to make a broad, abstract argument, however, and I
find that a lot of readers don't respond to generalities. So I work with
specific examples instead, and there are a lot of them.
Underneath, they are all connected. I try to find a particular
balance where my honest optimism and cheerful nature come through even
as I am savaging something I don’t like.
Q: OK, then, how are you optimistic?
A: My arguments are fundamentally optimistic. I argue that we
should expect the most from human potential. We should leave open
the possibilities that people are different and better than machines -
and that most people will turn out to be creative and competent enough
to invent themselves and make their livings by the achievements of their
brains and hearts. My critics are often stealthy pessimists,
because they assume the least from people. This happens when the
lazy desires of the file sharer are preferred over the file producer's
need for sustenance, for instance, because this argument suggests that
the average person is more like a passive consumer than an active
producer.
Q: If specificity in your criticisms is so important, isn't it absurd to release
You Are Not a Gadget as a book? How can you be part of the present
conversation when you can only talk about things that took place in the
past? People who have become used to the fast-changing nature of
online culture must find it unbearable to think about things that
happened a year or two ago as examples.
A:
You Are Not a Gadget is a book on paper, which means that it was
finalized quite a while before it was available to read. To some
readers, that will mean it is condemned to be out-of-date and irrelevant
to the Internet, because of how quickly things change in the online
world.
So far as I can tell, however, the important things don't really change
all that fast. The details change, like froth on a waterfall, but
slower-changing large-scale patterns can be discerned if you stand back
for a moment and take it all in. The instant-refresh style of
communication that has become popular online, including practices like
blogging and tweeting, can easily make you blind in important ways.
As an example of how social networking schemes like Facebook would
inevitably try to sneak a tolerance for a one-sided assault on privacy
into the habits of humanity, I used "Beacon,"
which motivated a somewhat successful user
rebellion.
If I was writing the book today, I would
instead criticize Facebook's latest move to
change
the way default settings are managed. Does it really matter?
It's all froth on the same waterfall.
Quote from the book: "The only hope for social networking sites from a
business point of view is for a magic formula to appear in which some
method of violating privacy and dignity becomes acceptable. The Beacon
episode proved that this cannot happen too quickly, so the question now
is whether .. Facebook users can be lulled into accepting it gradually."
If the book's minor anachronisms bother you, please take some time to
consider that you might be missing the bigger picture.
(Whether a decline in privacy that wasn't one-sided would be so bad is a
different question. If we could peer into the hearts of Google,
Facebook, hedge fund computers, and the other machines that aggregate
us, that might actually lead to an attractive and plausible future of
radical transparency. Here's how I would make the point to Open
Source advocates: It doesn't matter if the code that you use
directly is open source if you the code that pulls strings in your life
is kept from you in a vault in someone else's cloud.)
If you don't allow your thinking to be completely dominated by the
concerns of the moment, you have a better shot at guessing the future.
When the book was mostly written, Twitter was still obscure. I
decided to take a chance and feature Twitter as an example, since it
seemed likely that it would take off, even though I personally disliked
it. The term "Tweeting" hadn't been coined yet, so I used
"Twittering."
The financial collapse hadn't happened yet- and I barely had time to add
some references to Bernie Maddoff before the book left my hands.
(I had also discussed the possibility of a cloud-based banking disaster
scenario in an earlier interview in this
book.)
A book ought to be something you can still
read even after it has gotten dusty. It's an example of the
principle of "punctuated encapsulation" which I advocate in You Are Not
a Gadget.
Q: What's the balance between personal responsibility on the part of each individual software user and the responsibilities of software designers?
A: In order to make progress in human affairs, both levels of responsibility have to be taken. You might say there has to be more than 100% responsibility taken in order for things to get better. It's like preventing traffic accidents. On the one hand, each driver has to be responsible. On the other, it makes a huge difference to design streets, laws, and traffic signs well. I am addressing both levels in this book.
On the personal level, I don't tell people not to use any particular software or service, but instead suggest some specific ways to become a more responsible and vibrant Internet participant. On the level of design, I am attempting to persuade my colleagues in the tech world to question some common assumptions.
It's worth mentioning that on the internet it can be harder to resist the grooves a design tries to pull you into than is so in other settings. One reason for this is the cost of choice. No one has the time or ability to evaluate a million options and choose between them, so we really only look at the initial results of a search, for example. The overall effect is that convenience is more of an influence in online affairs than it is elsewhere. And this is why online design matters so much.
Q: Have you done some of the things you criticize, like pirating media content?
A: Yes of course I have pirated and all the rest. I wrote the book to change my own mind as much as anyone else's. It's infuriating when some DRM system tells me what to do with some content I've paid for - and frustrating when something I want isn't available when I want it online, because it is rarely a tech problem, just a policy problem. It's natural to be drawn to piracy under these circumstance. I would like to see a world with a better online design because it would help bring out better behavior in me.
Q: Are we really sure that "lock in" is such a powerful force in technology? Don't markets eventually work their way out of lock in?
A: Maybe markets can do that, at least in some instances, but it's a different dynamic than what I'm addressing in the book. I used to use a different word for what I'm talking about. In older essays like Karma Vertigo I asserted that "Digitally-amplified Idea Sedimentation" was a distinct phenomenon from technological lock-in. In the book I decided to use the term "lock-in" for both cases, in order to keep things simple. Based on feedback I've been getting, I now wish I had continued to use a distinguishing term. There is a coupling between lock-in and "sedimentation" but they are not the same thing. Sedimentation happens when digital representations of ideas become causal forces in the evolution of those ideas. That means that the ideas become more flat and bland in addition to stagnating.
Q: Would you review my technical proposal/paper/patent?
A: Am so sorry to say I am truly fully booked up with my existing commitments. I know it can be hard to get a good idea noticed, but the world is large and diverse, and if you are determined, you will find a way. Wish I could help, but at the moment, I just can't.
Q: Did you get my email? Will you answer?
A: Thanks so much for writing. Some of the emails have been extraordinary. Am attempting to answer all the mail I get, but there's been a whole lot lately, and it will take some serious time to catch up. Please remember I do a lot of stuff plus I'm a dad, etc. Please be patient.
Q: You looked a little odd in photos and on TV during part of 2009. What was going on?
A: I had a Bell's Palsy. It's better now. I had it during the photo shoot for the book, and you'll notice that in all the photos, I'm either holding up half my face or turned away. It was kind of like having a buggy avatar in the physical plane.