Michael: Alright Kevin, I'm going to say the title of a book, and you give me your gut-reaction, one-liner roast. Ready? You Are Not a Gadget. Kevin: Sounds like something my phone would tell me after I've spent three hours scrolling through TikTok. Michael: That's not far off, actually. Today we're diving into You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto by Jaron Lanier. And what makes his critique so powerful is that he's not some outsider yelling at the clouds. Lanier is a Silicon Valley legend—he literally coined the term "virtual reality" and was a pioneer in the field. Kevin: Wait, so the guy who basically invented VR wrote a book warning us about technology? That's like the chef telling you not to eat the food. Michael: Exactly. And that's what makes it so compelling. He saw the utopian dream of the early internet, and this book, which came out around 2010, was his alarm bell on where it all started to go wrong. He argues that our tools are not just passive objects; they're actively shaping us, and not always for the better. Kevin: Okay, that's a big claim. I tend to think of my laptop as just a laptop. It does what I tell it to do. How can it be shaping me? Michael: Well, that's the starting point for his entire argument. He introduces this powerful idea he calls "lock-in." It's the notion that early, often completely arbitrary, design choices in technology become permanent. They get baked into the infrastructure, and then we're stuck with them for generations. Kevin: Hold on, isn't that just how standards work? We need common formats, right? Like, we all agreed on what a PDF is. Is he saying files and folders are a bad idea? Michael: It's deeper than that. He's not against standards, he's against bad standards that limit human potential and then become impossible to change. He gives a great physical-world example: the London Underground. The tunnels were built over a century ago, and they were built too narrow. Kevin: I think I've been on those trains. It gets unbelievably hot in the summer. Michael: Right! And that's because there's no room to install modern air-conditioning systems. Tens of thousands of Londoners suffer a stifling commute every day because of an inflexible design choice made a hundred years ago. That is lock-in. And Lanier’s point is that software lock-in is even more powerful and insidious.

Kevin: Okay, the tube analogy makes sense. But how does that apply to software? It’s just code, can’t we rewrite it? Michael: You'd think so, but it's incredibly difficult once a system becomes ubiquitous. And his killer example, the one that really makes this idea click, is from his own world: music. He talks about MIDI. Kevin: MIDI... I know that term. It’s like the language digital instruments use to talk to each other, right? The sound of every 90s video game. Michael: Precisely. MIDI—the Musical Instrument Digital Interface—was created in the early 1980s by a guy named Dave Smith. He just wanted a simple way to connect a couple of synthesizers together. It was a quick, pragmatic solution. It represents music as a series of simple events: "key down," "key up," "how hard did you press it." It’s a very rigid, grid-like way of thinking about music. Kevin: So it’s like digital sheet music. What’s the problem? Michael: The problem is that music is so much more than that! Think about a blues guitarist bending a note, or a vocalist sliding between pitches. Those fluid, expressive, in-between sounds don't fit neatly into the MIDI grid. Before MIDI, digital music could have gone in a million different directions. But because MIDI was simple and it worked, it became the standard. It got locked in. Kevin: Wow. So the very structure of most digital music is a ghost from the 80s? Michael: It's a ghost from the 80s that haunts us today! Herculean efforts have been made to create better, more expressive systems, but they've all failed because the entire ecosystem—from keyboards to software to sound cards—is built around MIDI. Lanier argues this has "flattened" our musical imagination. We've been conditioned to think of music in this discrete, note-by-note way. Kevin: That's actually kind of terrifying. It’s not just a tool, it’s a cage that we don't even see because we were born inside it. Michael: You just perfectly summarized Lanier's entire argument. And here's the leap he makes: What if our social media profiles, our online identities, are the new MIDI? Kevin: Whoa. Explain that. Michael: Think about it. Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn... they all present you with a template. A profile picture, a short bio, a list of interests, a stream of short posts. It’s a very specific, very flattened definition of a person. It reduces the infinite complexity of a human being into a few database fields. Kevin: And it’s locked in. You can't have a Facebook profile that works completely differently from everyone else's. Michael: Exactly. You are encouraged to define yourself downward to fit the template. And Lanier's fear is that a generation is growing up believing that this flattened, data-friendly version of a person is what a person is. We're conforming to the machine's limitations, not the other way around. We're becoming gadgets.

Kevin: Okay, that idea of being trapped is unsettling. But a lot of this 'flattening' comes from the 'free culture' movement, right? The idea that information wants to be free! Isn't that a good thing for us, the users? I love that I can listen to almost any song or read any article without paying. Michael: Lanier would say that's a dangerous fantasy, and it's at the heart of the economic disaster he describes. He has this great line: "If you want to know what’s really going on in a society or ideology, follow the money." Kevin: And where is the money flowing in our 'free' digital world? Michael: It's flowing to a tiny group of companies he calls the "Lords of the Clouds." Google, Facebook, Amazon. These are giant servers in the sky that don't create content themselves. They aggregate it. They take the music, the articles, the videos, the personal expressions that other people create, and they surround it with advertising. Kevin: So what does that look like in practice? Give me the real-world impact. Michael: The impact is what he calls "Digital Maoism." It's a system that elevates the collective and devalues the individual. Think about musicians. In the old world, they could make a middle-class living selling records. Now, their music is expected to be free. The money isn't in the music anymore; it's in the data collected about the people who listen to the music. Kevin: And that data is sold to advertisers. Michael: Precisely. So the musician, the actual creator, is forced to become a "digital peasant." They have to constantly tour, sell t-shirts, or do speaking gigs to make money. Their creative work has been devalued into a form of advertising for their other hustles. Meanwhile, the Lords of the Clouds, the aggregators, become billionaires. Kevin: So, we're not the customers of these free platforms, we're the product being sold to advertisers. And the actual creators, the people making the culture, are getting squeezed out. We've created a system that values manipulation over art. Michael: That's it. Lanier argues that when advertising becomes the center of the economic universe, society becomes more concerned with manipulation than with truth or beauty. And it creates this perverse incentive. The most successful content is often the most outrageous, the most emotionally manipulative, because that's what gets the most clicks and generates the most ad revenue. Kevin: Which leads directly to the toxic, troll-filled comment sections and mob behavior he talks about. Because anonymity and outrage are profitable. Michael: Exactly. He says that when you emphasize the crowd over the individual, "people revert to bad moblike behaviors." The design of the system, driven by the economics of "free," ends up bringing out the worst in us. It creates what he calls the "Noosphere," this supposed global brain, which he says is just another name for "everyone's inner troll."

Michael: It sounds bleak, I know. And the book is a manifesto, it's meant to be provocative. But Lanier isn't just a critic. He's a builder, a dreamer. The second half of the book is about finding a way out, about building a more humanistic technology. Kevin: Okay, I'm ready for some hope. But after all that, what does a 'humanistic' technology even look like? It sounds a bit abstract. Michael: It gets wonderfully weird. And this is where his background as an artist and musician really shines through. He talks about his envy for cephalopods—octopuses and cuttlefish. Kevin: His envy for... octopuses? Okay, you have my full attention. Michael: He describes watching a video of an octopus morphing its skin, changing its color and texture in real-time to perfectly mimic a rock covered in algae. It's not just camouflage; it's a form of expression. Cephalopods don't communicate with abstract symbols like we do with words. They literally become their meaning. Their body is their argument. Kevin: That's incredible. They're like living, breathing Photoshop. Michael: Right! And Lanier calls this "post-symbolic communication." He's jealous because for us to do that in virtual reality, we have to painstakingly design an avatar in advance. The octopus just does it. He imagines a future where our technology allows for this kind of direct, fluid, and deeply meaningful communication, where we can share experiences instead of just words. Kevin: Wait, he wants us to be... octopuses? I'm not sure I'm ready for that. What's the actual idea here? Michael: The idea is to build technology that enriches the depth of communication, rather than just making it faster or wider. It's about re-introducing what he calls "romance" into the digital world. Instead of a free MP3 file that's infinitely copyable and therefore valueless, he imagines things like "Songles"—physical objects, like a piece of jewelry or a coffee mug, that act as a unique key to a piece of music. It creates artificial scarcity, yes, but it also re-links the digital to the physical, the meaningful, the romantic. Kevin: Huh. So it's about making our digital lives less flat, less abstract. Giving them texture again. Michael: Exactly. And this all ties into his concept of "Bachelardian Neoteny." Neoteny is the retention of juvenile traits into adulthood. Humans are the most neotenous species; we have the longest childhoods, which is what allows us to learn and be creative. He argues digital culture is a form of cultural neoteny—it's playful, experimental, and a bit childish. Kevin: I can see that. A lot of the internet feels like a giant, chaotic playground. Michael: And he says that has two sides. There's the "Goldingesque" side, from Lord of the Flies—the bullying, the mobs, the trolls. But there's also the "Bachelardian" side, named after the philosopher Gaston Bachelard—the side of wonder, imagination, hope, and creativity. The goal of a humanistic technology is to design systems that encourage the Bachelardian side and discourage the Goldingesque. It's about designing for our better angels.

Kevin: So, from MIDI to octopuses, what's the one big idea we should walk away with? If we're not gadgets, what are we? Michael: Lanier's ultimate message is that personhood is not a given; it's something we must constantly define and defend. Technology can either expand it or shrink it. Right now, by prioritizing the machine, the network, the 'hive mind,' we are choosing to shrink. He has this beautiful, simple quote that sums it all up: "You have to be somebody before you can share yourself." Kevin: Wow. That hits hard. So all this focus on sharing, on being part of the collective, is meaningless if we haven't first developed a self worth sharing. Michael: That's the core of it. The fight isn't against technology itself. Lanier is a technologist! The fight is for a technology that celebrates, rather than erases, that "somebody." A technology that values individual, creative expression, that provides a path for creators to make a living, and that deepens meaning instead of flattening it into a stream of data. Kevin: It makes you look at your phone differently. Every time you post, are you expressing your unique self, or are you just feeding the machine a pre-approved, flattened version of you? It's a question worth asking. Michael: A question worth asking indeed. He’s not telling us to throw away our gadgets, but to be profoundly skeptical of the easy grooves they guide us into. Kevin: To resist becoming the ghost in their machine. Michael: This is Aibrary, signing off.