Home
Creators
Search Recent Random
Posts
Search DMs Popular Hash Lookup Tags Random
Importer
Import FAQ
Register Favorites Keys Review DMs Logout
Community
Telegram ThePornDude
Home Creators Posts Import Register Favorites Logout

You Are Not A Gadget - Chapter 11 (Patreon)

Published:
2024-04-21 13:18:27
Edited:
2024-05-29 18:27:56
Imported:
2026-06
Tags:

Content

Lanier is kind of going on a bit of an abstract gardening imagination collage journey a la Jenny Odell, which can be a very hit or miss process, however I realize that this is a kind of necessary pro/con as he has been consistently thinking outside of the internet box since before I even knew that was important to do. Since before I was born.

An actual iconoclast in a world full of faux rebels. Deserves his flowers, and it's such a fucking flex that every once in a while it organically comes up that he personally knows these people and has worked on these things.

The problems that I worry about are perhaps subtle, but I think they are important nonetheless. (p. 141)

Also coming from an undeniably genuine place of genuine adoration and reverence for the major figures of his culture:

"I can't express the degree to which I admire Freeman Dyson, but in this case, we see things differently." (p. 139)

I laughed when he described a shape like this

"a hendecachoron, which is a four-dimensional shape I love," (p. 146)

But then shortly after:

"None other than Freeman Dyson made me aware of the hendecachoron, and Carlo Sequin and I worked on producing the first-ever image of one."

Damn. Everytime I wanna laugh and dismiss, he gets me back in somehow.

..--..--..--..--..--..--..--..

Adore this bit here, something I talk about on the Creative Culture Podcast:

"The interval of nonopenness - the time before publication - functions like the walls of a cell." (p. 141)

Neeeeed that interval of non-openness. Helps with boundaries and mental health and honesty and thinking and feeling and the Quality of art objects. Or at least I think it does.....

[[{[[[[[[{{=+++==+===+]}]}}}]]]}}]]

Wikipedia stans seeeeething

I find his critique of Wikipedia to be somewhat analogous to my critique of social media in general. This passage in particular if abstracted works both ways:

"It seems to me that if Wikipedia suddenly disappeared, similar information would still be available for the most part, but in more contextualized forms, with more visibility for the authors and with a greater sense of style and presence - though some might counter that the non-Wikipedia information is not organized in as consistent and convenient a way. The convenience factor is real, but part of the reason is that Wikipedia provides search engines with a way to be lazy." (p. 143)

This speaks to thatfucking fuckin thing where even if you're not on Twitter journalists constantly feature and source tweets in their articles. The convenience is real but the laziness is the primary manifesting spirit. Subscribe to a newspaper ladies gentlemen and thems!!!!!!! (in Canada if you subscribe to domestic news sources you can claim an up to 500 dollar tax credit on them, Ontarians look at the Staycation credit too)

__-----_||||||\\\\\\--------

There's this very tragic moment under the 'Where Search Was Hogged' section where Lanier suggests that search engine results have been better recently, showing a variety of sources instead of just Wikipedia.

I don't know if yall have noticed this but I realized a little while ago when I'm looking for reviews of different products to compare what headphones/software/espresso machine I want to invest in, the top 10 lists seemed similar and like they weren't written by people... no author listed on any of these sites.... I did some clicking around and realized 50% of them where algorithmically autofilling from the Amazon most bought highest rated and promoted selections. Literally just like 20 different sites that are just Amazon. You can have WAY more content on your site if you can just autofill from somewhere else. Like YouTubers who just read an article verbatim or describe the plot of a TV show with barely any value add.

I admit I just tried googling a few reviews for some products and have found authored articles at the top. Maybe search engine results have been better recently!

__&&&oooo&&&__

Final point, between reading this and Ellen Ullman's book and Nadia Aparouhova's I am starting to feel like... I need to learn... a little bit of coding....

JUST TO KNOW WHAT"S GOIN ON YOU KNOW?!

I feel similarly about languages and math. Like I really SHOULD learn a LITTLE bit of that, right?!?!

My question for the fucking nerds in the chat is if The Symmetries of Things by Conway, Burgiel and Goodman-Strauss is any good? How does one casually start to reactivate their grade 9 math brain? Does anyone in my Patreon community know math???

I have been going beast mode on taxes, I really believe it's empowering for left leaning people, self employed gig contractors and artists in general to know their logistics and finances. Have become convicted that believing art is subjective and tech/finance is objective just allows for creative humanitarian people to be exploited by the value captured gameplay of number games, and allows people in the "objective" sector to convince themselves they are doing something devoid of ethics.

Financial literacy is part of Kill The Internet! Individual empowerment, cultural identification and community building baby! Requires organization of resources and the fluency to discuss specific different pragmatic options! Enough transcendental shrugging!!!

++++(((++++

k thanks for all your support, something coming on the main channel soon that you will be happy about

Objectivity & Subjectivity Below!

Files

Comments

Loc

dw I gotchu, y=mx+c, ur welcome

azalea water

i'm starting to realise how little i know about coding - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - For the first time in this book club, I have basically nothing to say. This chapter was more of a summary of the book so far. Namely… - Individual Creativity > Communal, Soulless Xerox-ing - Wikipedia Can Go Fuck Itself - Coding Stuff That Went Way Over My Head I appreciate what he’s trying to do here, but I kinda wish he’d lay down his ideology a bit more instead of going all vibey every three paragraphs. But, Lanier is a damn good non-fiction writer, so I’m willing to stick with him through the mists of anecdotes. Happy belated 4/20, call your mother, kill the internet!

Ajey Pandey

Lanier’s discussion on membranes and encapsulation is getting me thinking about my Absolute Favorite and Most Read news source…Sustainable Energy Advantage. It’s an industry newsletter by and for professionals in renewable energy in New England, funded by an invoice sent to my employer. It’s not just encapsulation in terms of cost, and a limitation of voices, but also a limitation of scope. The narrowing on scope sidesteps a lot of concerns people have about news sources—ideological commitments, expertise from the writers, lack of time to read, the underlying dread of reading bad news you can do nothing about. Would it be nice to know more? In theory, but plugging into the national-politics (or even the state-politics) hivemind has historically made my life worse. (Another example of scope-limited news is Perun. He’s a defense economy YouTuber doing detailed, kinda dry breakdowns of defense policy and its effects on global events. Again, the limitation of scope limits the discussion of his ideology and limits concerns that he’s talking out his ass. It also helps that he absolutely refuses to play clickbait games.) And yet I’m more sympathetic to the hivemind than Lanier, if only because I no longer trust the encapsulation strategy to work for most. Wikipedia is a flawed repository for information, but it’s better than QAnon.

dmxnlss

Hi CJ! I a̶m̶ ̶a̶ ̶f̶u̶c̶k̶i̶n̶g̶ ̶n̶e̶r̶d̶ know math! I'm a thermal engineer by day, and took a few introductory college-level computer science classes a whole 8 years ago (before settling on mechanical engineering for my undergraduate degree instead). I do do some very basic coding for work, but I primarily use coding to automate simple computer busy work (MATLAB/Python/VBA). With the exception of Python, most software or even firmware work will use a different, "higher level" language (e.g. Javascript) and/or a different, "lower level" language (e.g. C++). However, many (most?) of my friends are software engineers, mathematicians, or physicists, and I've asked them for recommendations for you, specifically for 1) whether they'd recommend the book you mention, 2) an introductory reader on Math for Computer Science (which is a specific field of math), and 3) a good online resource for starting to code. If you'd like, you can tell me if you'd like a different type of recommendation, or whether you'd like to just chat with one of them (at least a couple of them watch your videos but aren't Patreons). From my limited knowledge, a good starting place--if you'd like to learn how a "coding language" interfaces with the actual, physical computer machine--is to read through some basic guides of what's called "assembly languages", or ASM. ASM are typically the very lowest level of "code" that a human can write for a computational device to give it commands. However, most articles/explanations for ASM may be still be too in-media-res for you to not get immediately frustrating--but you're probably not as far away from learning to code as you think! Generally speaking, the pedagogical sequence for teaching computer science theory actually does not require much of the math taught in most high schools; i.e. algebra/calculus (although, having an understanding of calculus is usually helpful). Instead, most computer science tracks start with the basics of "Discrete Math", as well as the physics behind computational circuitry. Discrete math includes areas like logic structures, algorithms for scheduling and optimization, graph theory, and geometry. "Learning how to code", on the other hand, does not actually "require" much math background at all--although, in order to learn to code *quickly*, math certainly helps. The best way to learn to code for folks who don't have a technical background is to find a fun electronics or basic software project that requires some coding--LED art, RC vehicles, building a simple video game (like Snake or virtual tic tac toe), a spreadsheet that solves sudokus for you, etc. There are also some languages (some with native GUIs) built specifically for music production, which might be more up your alley--for example, Sonic Pi, Pure Data, and SuperCollider (in order of difficulty to learn). There are also languages used specifically for visual media generation, like Processing (https://processing.org/). I'll wait on my friends to recommend a good starting resource for discrete math. But, in the meantime, I'm happy to say that discrete math is often quite a bit more intuitive for people than algebra (it's really unfortunate that it's rarely taught in high schools). Let me know, again, if you'd like to chat with one of them directly or if you'd like a specific type of book recc. Lastly, here's one of my favorite websites in the world: an online version of Byrne's Euclid (a colorful, visual explanation of many Euclidean Geometry proofs). https://www.c82.net/euclid/book1/

Louis-Antoine LeBel

Regarding maths & coding: I’ve never heard of The Symmetries of Things, so I don’t have anything to say about it. However I do have a degree in Computer Science, so I know about programming. There’s a lot of diverging opinions on this, but imo Python is the best language to learn coding basics. It’s great to develop small, fun applications and the syntax is pretty straightforward. Libraries like numpy are great to do mathematics and you can even do some machine learning with PyTorch if you want to see what the fuss is all about. Chapter 11: I don’t have much to say honestly. If anything, this chapter made me rethink my relationship with Wikipedia. It’s been useful plenty of times at work or at school to get some basic information. But whenever I go on Wikipedia just because I’m curious about a subject, I forget what I read within a day and my curiosity for the topic is gone. I wasn’t convinced by Lanier’s attacks on Wikipedia in the first few chapters, but now I understand him better. The same information exists elsewhere, but in a more engaging format. I checked out a few ThinkQuest entries on the wayback machine and they’re pretty endearing. It’s obviously written by high schoolers and each page has a lot of personality. I wonder what Lanier would think of youtube nowadays. Obviously it’s filled with slop, but there’s great educational videos on there. Subjects like mathematics or computer graphics lend themselves very well to the online video format. Creators such as 3blue1brown are able to create beautiful visualizations that are not possible with standard textbooks and the information is presented creatively.

Caitlestial

for mathy books i've been reading The Outer Limits of Reason by Yanofsky as recommended by michael stevens of vsauce fame. it explores paradoxes and limitations across the different domains of math, science, language, and philosophy. It's been a nice reintroduction to proofs and set-theory, very beginner friendly in that regard

Robert Lasica

I'm doing some of the writing/editing this week at my cousin's wedding. A bridesmaid just called the groom ratchet to thunderous chears. As I'm writing this I have been poisoned by the knowledge of the rest of the book, so I feel like Jaron's musings in this chapter are down to earth. I respect the dreaming, and I'm fond of some of the words in this chapter. On pg 143"because of how its entries are created, the process can result in a softening of ambition, or more specifically, a substitution of idealogy for achievement". I've definitely gotten the sense from the wiki pages of books that I've read that the objectives of Wikipedia aren't exactly a "clear conveyance of information". Rather they often feel like a tidy network of hyperlinks that will give you just the information you are looking for, with the human cruft removed. Over time you get the sense that some wiki pages exist just to be referenced in other places (I'm almost positive the 1965 book "Reading Capital"'s wiki article author didn't read the book). So we may ask ourselves, is the valorization and search engine prioritization of Wikipedia "good" when it so heavily prioritizes information networks over discrete knowledge? From my vantage point the perspectiveless hivemind feels less helpful than the informed individual when it comes to learning about a book. Jaron's bit on Wikipedia pages around Media is also fun when you think about their attempts at perspectiveless apoloticism. Recently I read a transcribed conversation from a fan zine by some Japanese Animation Directors talking about 1988's Mobile Suit Gundam: Char's Counterattack. They talked about how the film not only wears its heart on its sleeve, but it's politics. In the media ecosystem of 80s animation you could have radical politics as long as they were antagonists being defeated by "forces of good" or you could also depict vague politics in kids media. Alluding to broad concepts was fine, but pointing at a specific idealogy would lead to conflict with the higher ups. So when these two directors saw this film, were surprised by how direct it was with its allusions to Imperial Japan, revolutionary groups, colonialism, and the February 26th incident. By being thinly veiled by a sci Fi narrative these allusions were missed by critics, fans, media companies, and eventually the film's Wikipedia page. I wouldn't expect this kind of information to make it into fandom wikis, and I don't expect all perspectives in a piece of media to make It into the wiki article, but these kinds of ommisions speak to this gap in media wikis and media discourse more broadly. Imo In an ideal world this kind of thing would fit in a wiki page.

Emrys

I've been working through John Verveake's series on Awakening from the meaning crisis. I think this chapter can be summarized by the concept of combinatorial explosion. Our consciousness can only take in so much information at once, so we have the cognitive capacity to parse information coming in and select the relevant data for the task at hand. Any organism that tries to take in all data present in a situation at any one point in time will suffer from the overwhelming and crushing weight of the entirety of experience. That's not productive, nor is it healthy. This is what Verveake refers to as combinatorial explosion. Our orientation/compartmentalization of our attention is a critical part of us as people. This extends to existence itself in the form of different species and organisms. The orientation of attention and energy manifests itself as a specialization, whether mentally or biologically. I understand Laniers frustration with the nature of Wikipedia. He compares it to think quest which sounds a lot to me like a more blog oriented way of presenting concepts. The emphasis is on pedagogy, not presentation and organization of data. Both of these things can coexist. Wikipedia is a useful tool exactly because it's a formatted presentation of data that's easily indexed by search engines, which makes it easy for us as people to access the specific data we're looking for through clunky search engine queries. He seems to be more pro pedagogy and mentorship above access to data. I can't fault that at all. Mentorship is a dying practice unfortunately, and we need some kind of return to it imo. But the way I see it, Wikipedia is a useful tool because of the way it's structured. Changing that container would also alter the way that we interact with it. To close off for this week, I want to highlight that the majority of Wikipedia pages have to have external (ideally primary) sources that are listed as bibliography for every entry. These sources have been so much more informative and entertaining in my experience instead of going down the Wikipedia rabbit holes by clicking through related wiki entries. Often times you will find in those sources, the kind of curated expert opinion and research that Lanier is talking about in this chapter. Cheers everybody, wishing you all a good week!!

Stephen Folkerts

I've been trying to learn html/css to design a homepage recently, inspired by Lanier's discussion of design and some other rhetoric-related work on the topic --> https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S8755461509000863 anyway, yeah I took a java course and up through linear alg in college despite having an English degree but I wanna get back a little more into math/coding. The technological landscape and direction of culture seems to demand artists with some semblance of an understanding of this shit. I enjoyed most of the discussion of wikipedia-- i can certainly see its totalizing nature despite some of many convenience/standardization benefits. he kinda lost me when it came to the economics portion tho bc I'm dumb.

Chandler Sterling

Sorry I'm late to class, but I've had quite possibly the most chaotic and unexpected week possible. Enough excuses though, let’s get down to the nitty gritty because if I can’t turn 10 pages into a 30-paragraph long post describing as much as I can about math, coding, and the Metaphysics of Quality then I didn’t do something right. Starting with math and language because they sort of combine into coding itself -------------------------------------- Math is a subject that gets a really bad shake because absolutely no one seems to know how to teach it (myself included, this is not a diss at teachers). It is not solving problems, solving problems are just the best possible way to demonstrate you understand the concepts. That’s kind of like saying music isn’t a song, but I also think that’s true, sooooooo… It’s an outlandish thing to say on the face of it. Math is obviously about problem-solving, the reason we create these abstract concepts is because we want to create a structure that we can then use to define otherwise distant concepts. Addition is useful for understanding the accumulation of things, and multiplication is just a way of simplifying long strings of addition. Every block builds on itself, and Lanier is right to call high-level mathematics aesthetic. “Albert Einstein called it ‘the poetry of logical ideas’.” (pg. 144) I think comparing math to poetry captures exactly what I like about getting into a flow with a tough math problem. It has a very particular rhythm to the frustration and the breakthroughs. There’s something very beautiful about watching math come full circle from short problems, to really complex strings of number and letters, all the way back to short strings of symbols that are abstracting paragraphs of logic. It becomes a sort of language that we have to learn to speak, but one based in logic rather than the much more common emotion that comes with traditional language. The thing that makes math change from a chore to a passion is the realization that math isn’t the problems you’re solving, it’s the process of putting together your own solution. The more complex math classes get, the less likely you are to find that a problem has one way of approaching it. Math classes with grades have to be about memorizing formulas because they aren’t given the time or attention needed to teach the deeper lesson which is more about using logic to take an incomplete set of information and learning something useful from it. I may never use the Pythagorean Theorem, but I was able to take that building block and realize that you can use it to find the distance formula. That had its own reward. I don’t know of many resources to easily learn math from the ground up because everyone has to start from somewhere different, but Khan Academy has always been a great resource in my experience. I think for coding, Discrete Math is an excellent building block to add to your tool belt, so for anyone interested in a somewhat intermediate level introduction to that, here’s a link: https://math.berkeley.edu/~hutching/teach/proofs.pdf It’s more about math proofs than anything, but I think those are similar enough to logic puzzles to feel like what math is supposed to be. Maybe you’ll hate it, I dunno, but I do think there is something worthwhile to learning about this mathematical language of logic. Speaking of Language: that stuff is crazy huh? I have a Jack of All Trades mindset when it comes to life, so I consistently regret not becoming a linguist when I start learning a language. To give an idea of my inability to stick to a path, I took Latin 1 and 2 in high school, I briefly minored in Russian in college before switching my Major, minor, and college, and I am currently learning French and Japanese in Duolingo. I know that there are some gamification issues on that app, but I never really felt the negative effects that some people describe. Maybe I've just got a blindspot I'm not aware of. I know it’s not for everyone, and I’m the first to admit that it is a poor way to become fluent. I think wanting fluency is the wrong thing to ask of language learning though. Fluency is a lofty goal, and it makes for a great excuse to never start learning. I don’t speak any of the aforementioned languages fluently, but I speak them a hell of a lot better than I did before I started trying. My approach to language is this: if I can learn the basic grammar rules, all I would need is some time with a dictionary or some flashcards to pick up the words. A language is less about memorizing 500 different phrases, and more about understanding why they’re phrased just that way. Learning grammar is not just great for learning new languages, it makes your understanding of your native language more nuanced as well. When you have to learn the 5 different declensions for Russian nouns, you get a whole lot better and understanding the basics of any language’s sentence structure. When you realize that literally every other language seems to conjugate their verbs so that the ending depends on the plurality and point of view of the subject, you start to gain a deeper appreciation for the relationship between subjects and objects in sentences. All this to say, I think that learning math and languages are hard because the initial goal tends to be, “I want to know math,” or “I want to speak [insert language here] fluently,” and it should really be, “I want to see how this thing was put together.” Starting from the bottom is a strange paradox because you can’t know enough to know what questions you actually want to ask. You just have to start looking somewhere, and you’ll find that the benefit to everything coming from Quality first, is that it’s all pointing back to the same place. Follow the strings long enough, and you end up where you wanted to go all along. “All roads lead to Rome” and all that jazz. So hey, where are all of my crazy strings leading to??? Coding is just that weird math language translated into computer. If my previous paragraphs were not a good enough claim to ethos, then here’s my second claim, I have a degree in Computer Science with a minor in Accounting. It doesn’t mean I know what I’m talking about, just that I’m supposed to know where to look if I don’t already have the answers. A lot of my classmates joked that we weren’t learning how to code, we were just learning the best places to look for someone else to tell us how to code. If you start learning coding and you’re insecure about how often you’re looking up help on Google, I’ve got good/bad news for you. It never stops, you just get much more efficient at it. Coding itself is mostly just theory, and coding languages are different ways those theories are put into practice. For instance, loops are the theory that if we want to do the same thing a whole bunch of times, we should have a way to tell a computer to do it once, then just ask it to repeat that step a bunch. Python, Java, C, and every other language will go about doing that in different ways, but the underlying theory stays the same. My recommendation would be to find a language that suits your interests and dig deep. Look up simple projects for that language and follow them step by step. Feel free to experiment as you work, but don’t get self-conscious about repeating after someone else. They’re called languages for a reason, you wouldn’t expect to write full academic essays after just a few weeks of reading a textbook on grammar and syntax. You need to start speaking it before things click, and the best way to start speaking is repeating after someone already fluent in the language. After you get comfortable with easier projects, you can look up something intermediate and start figuring that out without the step-by-step guide. When you hit a wall, you’ll start to learn where to look for solutions. There is almost never a “correct” way to code, and only professionals really care about doing it in the most efficient manner possible. This is going to suck to hear, but sometimes trial-and-error is the best teacher for coding. Trying an idea that popped into your head during lunch and realizing 2 hours later why it didn’t work how you thought will be far more illuminating than being told that was never going to work. ZMM talks about a similar concept when discussing motorcycle maintenance. Failure is an unfortunately powerful teacher, and trial-and-error creates a lot of room for failure. If you want a good beginner language, I would recommend Java. Python is everyone’s go-to because it’s designed to have a very common sense syntax, but I think that is actually antithetical to learning how to code, especially if you want to know what people lake Jaron Lanier were working with in the older days. Java is a bit tough to get started on, but it is also a good intermediary between a lot of other languages. Python is still available, and it will feel like a breeze after learning Java. C is just Java with some of the more convenient stuff pulled out. It is a pretty low-level language, so it is probably the best way to get an idea of the frustrations of the early Computer Scientists. If you think computers are smarter than people, try writing something in C. You will find that computers actually need EVERYTHING spelled out for them to the point of feeling like you’re talking to a toddler. If you’re interested in coding, but don’t want to learn all the ins-and-outs of a language, I would recommend using the following link: https://www.w3schools.com/java/default.asp I don’t swear by w3schools, but I think they break down the theory behind computer science concepts really well for most of the popular languages. They have a lot of pre-written code examples to show you what this stuff looks like in the wild, but you don’t need to write any of it yourself! I have used their website to learn VBA for Excel from the ground up, so I think it is somewhat beginner friendly. If you’re still stumped, feel free to reach out, I can probably pull together some resources if I know more specifics about what you’re looking to learn. And yeah, that’s pretty much the best I can do without taking up a lecture’s worth of time talking about coding. I think a desire to learn about coding, languages, and math are all leading to the same place, so if you just pick one, you’ll find it all starts to bleed together really quickly. The key, for me at least, is to avoid the overstimulation of options and just make a choice arbitrarily. Japanese was just a choice I made one day because I liked haiku. It’s really not that deep sometimes. Ummmm…. this wasn’t about the book at all huh? Luckily, 10 pages meant I could ramble on about that and still have time for a YANaG epilogue that covers most of it. Lanier’s appreciation for encapsulation is very programmer of him. It’s a very important concept in coding, and yet it also can bleed into the issue of lock in. Something that is encapsulated is, by nature, not always available to everyone. By localizing it, you have made it possible for it to lose its meaning, but Lanier kills it once again when he says, “…encapsulation serves a purpose.” (pg. 140 aside) It really does, and we should consider why it was locked in at all before we try to find something better. No need to toss the baby with the bath water. Hierarchical encapsulation in particular rings my alarm bells because that sounds an awful lot like the Metaphysics of Quality. Lanier’s relation of it to natural evolution even parallels the way Pirsig approached his pyramid of static quality. We start with inorganic matter, then it Dynamically makes its way into biological groups which start to Dynamically decide to socialize, and before you know it, those societies Dynamically come upon Intellectual ideals. Knowing that Dynamic Quality is still floating free and ready to tear it all down the second it stops serving itself sort of bridges the gaps Lanier sees. Yes encapsulation is important, and yes, it can lead to a loss of the original context it was made in. We build things and lock them in with static qualities. If they cease to function correctly, then when they erode away, the original Dynamic Quality is still there. Boom, I brought Lila up again for another paragraph. Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy mentioned on page 142!!!! I almost want to believe it’s on purpose that 42 is in the page number given that this is the answer to Life, the Universe, and Everything, but I’ve already had my Lila rant. I can only grasp at so many straws a day. I am so awestruck by the emotional turmoil this reference brings me because like any good Computer Scientist, Lanier has read all 5 books (or he better have because Earth doesn’t get updated to Mostly Harmless until the 5th and final book, “Mostly Harmless”), but he also shouldn’t have compared the Guide to Wikipedia! That doesn’t seem accurate at all. The Guide isn’t a conglomeration of facts made by a nonprofit committee of volunteers, it’s an e-book written by a team of intergalactic travel writers. The Guide is published by a company, seemingly for-profit, because it is based off of real-life travel guides that Douglas Adams used to read while hitchhiking through Europe when he was younger. The whole joke of updating Earth from “Harmless” to “Mostly Harmless” is that the writer, Ford Prefect, spent decades learning about Earth and submitting updates to the company just for them to summarize his years of work with a one-word change. It’s a mockery of design by committee under space capitalism which seems to argue against Lanier’s more, “We need capitalism to foster creativity!” ideals. I also find it hilarious because in a separate series by Douglas Adams, “Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency” there is a computer scientist character who designs a program that turns accounting spreadsheets into music. I think with his distaste for MIDI turning music into very static chunks, Lanier would be absolutely tearing this program apart if it really existed. Sorry, I never get to talk about Dirk Gently or its weird BBC show that has nothing to do with the books and stars Elijah Wood, so I’m gonna make it work here. To end it all, I just have to gush about the last sentence of this chapter. “Individual voice—the opposite of wikiness—might not matter to mathematical truth, but it is the core of mathematical communication.” (pg. 147) This is what makes me so passionate about language! If we were all one big communal, glob, hivemind thing, we wouldn’t need a language. You have to recognize what makes you AND the person you’re speaking to an individual before you can properly communicate with them. At the end of the day, miscommunication is usually a misunderstanding of what makes you different from someone else. You assumed something went without saying, and it DID NOT. Community is grand and all, but you need to recognize the individual to understand and appreciate the whole. Without spiraling into another tangential topic, that’s what I love about the Trinity in Christianity. I think that it’s a wonderful conception of an individualized community working in perfect Oneness. I hate when science fiction tries to make telepathy into some sign of universal improvement for an alien species. The kinks in our inability to get an idea from one brain to the other is exactly what makes language so beautiful. It makes space for art. You have to get creative with how you present some ideas because not everything divides itself into a tidy little word. If you’ve read this far, thank you for indulging me, and here’s a special little secret as a treat! I was so late this week because I just took in a stray kitten! I don’t know a good way to get a picture in this post, so I can’t share one yet, but I will do my best to get this fuzzball in my selfie for YANaG’s book report, so look forward to that if you're into that kind of thing. This is our little secret, don’t go telling anybody about it, ya hear??!

D.S Films

I'm really glad Lanier now has explained his full distaste for Wikipedia, as I have seen some of us have been a little confused by that! I googled the phrase "Narkomindel" for my revision on Soviet History, and I really paid attention to how the first few results were wikipedia and variations thereupon. It makes me sad that individual knowledge and speciality has died down in this space, thought maybe we should all enquire with 'Google Scholar' instead. Maybe next time I am having debate with my friends about something silly like "Whether turtles have ears", instead of googling it and reading the wikipedia page for turtles, I should read an actual book someone has written on the subject, and is readily available in the infiniteness of the interweb. I always think about how it's very easy to criticise the internet when looking at the mainstream, but if you dig a little further you can find value and beauty, and if you are reading this then you have done so.

Sol

Frustrating chapter- there's good points to be made that Lanier seems unequipped to deliver. Two years after Gadget, Byung-Chul Han would be publishing The Transparency Society, and Han goes in hard as a motherfucker on this topic. Lanier's own immersion in "cybernetic totalism" shows when he uses biology. "...There is even a tendency to want to think of nature as if she were a hive mind... nature could not maximize the meaning of genes without species." When I read this I wanted to shout What?! like Stone Cold. Nature as some sort of mind if not a hivemind, and one that is trying to "maximize the meaning of genes", then "species" taken as something that exists not as a post-facto categorization but some sort of tool that this nature can use as leverage. "You put [something complicated] through tests, and the results of the tests influence how the design should be changed. That can happen either in natural evolution or in a lab." How Lanier is imagining evolution here is as a cybernetic process: there is an observation and a command to adjust based on its evaluation, like the gunner and spotter honing in on a target. Evolution is aleatory, there is no lab or hypothesis or target that we know of. It's frustrating because his conclusion is not terrible, that striation is a part of creation, but he baffles the argument for it. Deleuze and Guattari and all the writing that has come up around them have great language and concepts for describing this stuff. When it comes to creating concepts, especially if what you want is some sort of humanism, accept no substitutes to the humanities.

margaret (formerly Samson)

Hello everyone! I'm here, I'm just lurking! I don't have a ton to say! I think it's cause I feel so out of my depth - I read his proposals on what should be done and think "well something seems off but I don't know what", and I just don't have the energy right now to explore better ideas. My stupid fake job has shifted into being a stupid real job over the past couple of months, so I have much less time to sit and think and write and stuff. Also I subscribed to my local NPR's email newsletter, and to aeon's daily newsletter, so I have a lot more to read in the morning anyway (and it's good!! A much healthier replacement for Instagram, which I had previously been using to boot up my brain!) So like... In the real world I'm doing well, it's just i seem to have evacuated out of the online world entirely (except for the standing YouTube addiction) and it's like I've lost energy to think about how the Web could be better. Perhaps the pendulum is just swinging way the fuck over, to "there is no good to be gained on the Internet and real life is all that we should try to engage with", and I don't feel like that's actually correct, and also I miss TikTok a little bit (mainly because I miss sharing memes with my husband) and also I don't know how to have a more moderate approach, probably because I don't know how to live out a more moderate habit of Online Content Consumption. Idk. Not feeling like myself right now, but I'm keeping up in the background. Sending all of you strawberries and roses ♥️♥️♥️

reva

lanier and i seem to have the same core interests (music and math). i am a physics major so math is my shit. but i guess i mostly do physics math, which may seem analogous to Math, but it isn't necessarily. like i love math and do it every day but i'm not at all familiar with Math, the highly specialized part of math that lanier is talking about here. anyway i care deeply about making math and physics more accessible to people, and i do think that looking at a wikipedia article about complex math is one of the quickest ways to feel unable to understand the topic. it would be really awesome if more weird, experimental efforts to communicate math were out there. and maybe they are out there being made right now, but i don't know if i would ever hear about them if they were. side note i have never heard of synthetic biology before that concept seems wild. feels like a tech thing people rave about that will never happen, like the metaverse functioning as a second world for people to live in and not just boring vr chat. that's about all i have to say about this chapter. on to the next!

Seoyoung Park

The whole part about thinkquest sites delivering far more interesting portrayals of information kind of blew my mind. While i get Lanier's obsession with wikipedia as a Grand Evil of informational lock-in, it is also true that as a zoomer who grew up with wikipedia as an information source, I have never used wikipedia as my sole bit of research, and it's only a useful starting off point. What i found myself thinking about with the thinkquest and the creativity involved in informational delivery was video essays, actually. I feel like they're probably some of the most interesting vessels of epistemic deliverance tm-- in particular Contrapoints, who is always putting on whole production to deliver information. I am at a cafe sitting near a pair of friends who are talking shit abt literally everyone and everything, and being really really mean, and it's making it hard for me to think bcus of the vibes of cruelty surrounding me. please god... please.... let me get back to YANaG.... i have finally caught up to the KTI book club though! i deserve a medal <3