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ok i finished the book (Patreon)

Published:
2024-05-09 04:10:25
Edited:
2024-05-29 18:32:42
Imported:
2026-06
Tags:

Content

wat can i say im a bizy bee!!!!!

didn't love this book in the end as much as I thought I would, I admit I'm glad when book club pulls me through something I otherwise might have wandered from. I really wanted to have read this one in addition to Ten Arguments For Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now. Makes me feel more like an ummmmmm a person.

There are pieces of this that I will keep with me in my heart but there is also a lot of Lanier going on his little adventures that I am not sure are relevant to the task at hand. Some of the intellectual exercises and his ideas about things that would be good things I find a little lacking. However the ground must be trod!!! You don't finish reading books because you get head pats, you finish reading books to accrue status in the CJ The X Patreon Book Club discussion threads!!!!

----{{{{{{{{{-----

{i will say nothing here about my private life except that it has been suddenly momentous and emotional and wonderful, spirits of risk and reward and romance and rejuvenation in the air}

Octopus VR Chapter:

Separation anxiety is assuaged by constant connection. Young people announce every detail of their lives on services like Twitter not to show off, but to avoid the closed door at bedtime, the empty room, the screaming vacuum of an isolated mind. (p. 180)

its true officer I've seen them do it

There's almost nothing duller than listening to people talk about indescribable, deeply personal, revelatory experiences: the LSD trip, the vision on the mountaintop." (p. 184)

I'm gonna be honest w you guys i don't find VR as interesting as Jaron Lanier does and im too sleepy writing this to pretend I do

Self Directed Q&A Afterward:

This was LONG! I honestly felt like hmmmmm is this book hmmmm over yet

But as per usual there were golden strands woven throughout:

"You are not a victim! Don't think in terms of what you are and are not allowed to do. You are an adult. Think about the world you want and how to get there." (p. 195)

I like this! If you're not an adult dont worry about it, cover your eyes walk away and go play race cars

"If online activity is ever to support a middle class, then there has to be peer-to-peer commerce, not just fluke commerce for the few who become the very most famous. I am optimistic we'll get there, but there might be a lost generation or more along the way." (p. 195)

I'm hopeful for Patreon to continue developing in this Middle Class direction

"The ideas criticized in this book (that one should give one's creative bits away, and that it is just as well to generate trivial bits online, since mob action counts as much as personal creativity) are suitable only to the role of dependent child, not to the role of supporting parent." (p. 196)

I found this really stirring!~ Something about how being an influencer necessarily reduces you to childlike behaviours and emotions. There's something so achingly kid-like about wanting more likes. There's something much more private and mature and measured about not giving a fuck what happens online. Given the juvenile aesthetics that are always fuelling these things, is it weird they take on an immature feel?

...dignity is the opposite of real time. Dignity means, in part, that you don't have to wonder if you'll successfully sing for your supper for every meal. Dignity ought to be something you can earn." (p. 197)

I have a friend who just hatched a good scheme to do art on Tik Tok and they're getting their little numbers and are laughing at how immediately overpowering the dopamine is. YyESSSS

"Strategic forgetting is part of personhood, and it is threatened. To be a person you have to find a sweet spot in which you both invent yourself and are real." (p. 200)

My mother speaks to me about this a lot. When people graduated high school, that generally meant some of them would go to a new place and lose contact with old friends and make entirely new connections. They could reinvent their whole identity. That is... kind of dead now? Sins follow us from life to life, former acquaintances linger in the background. It's like life used to be a live improv show and now it's a movie that never stops filming.

"There is a little darkness, a little risk, in any real life. A homeopathic dose of murkiness must be taken if people are to find themselves. The trace of that dose can be sniffed whenever someone grows up and leaves home, or reinvents herself. Whenever people fall in love, there is always a touch of manipulation, a little imperfection. A life entirely without shadows cannot be real. (p. 200)

Needed this tonight.

"The pirate Bay and the like and Apple's iTunes store create each other. Walled gardens create most of the content to be pirated and piracy forces the walls to go up." (p. 205)

This made me laugh

Fortunately, you rarely have to fully 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. It's one of the most honorable and difficult things a person can accomplish." (p. 207)

Enjoyed these final words. Very honourable and lovely I think. Has been my experience exactly.

[05/10/24 EDIT: I quite enjoy how the culture of general value seeking & generous additive enthusiasm for texts is self perpetuating here now even when I go a little cold on something! I think that's a vastly superior standard temperature and I like having the freedom to not feel things 100% of the time. ur doing good down there]

+++_+++

Hey okay so next I wanna do a book I've already read half of and yes it is another tech book but it's a collection of essays by Ellen Ullman called Life In Code and after I finished part 2 in a bar in the lower east side i burst into tears. So I can vouch for its emotional resonance and intrigue more readily.

Lets do a book club town hall on uhhhhh can we do the end of the month like May 31st? I have a lot to do and I'd like to provide us with plenty to talk about and I don't wanna start the next book until like June so we're a lil refreshed so let's do the last day of the month on that final friday okay I'll put it in big letters at the top of an update / rec list thing sometime alright? Alright you all? ok??? are we ok?????? we're gonna be ok

Make sure to be honest with people I'm finding lately that honesty is helping with things

Files

Comments

Josh Foreman

Your expression perfectly mirrored my feelings as this book went off the rails at the end. Sllllooooogggg. But fine. Small price to pay for a lot of good stuff at the beginning.

Max Rhineer

I read the bulk of this book while trying to keep myself awake during a full month of all-night film shoots so that may have affected my view of the piece as a whole. That being said, I’ve had more resonance interacting with it as a collection of proverbs than I have as a book or even a manifesto. Reading the isolated passages quoted in these book clubs generally made me feel more favorably towards Lanier’s writing as a whole. Which is to say that his good nuggets are too frequently buried in large swaths of nuthin’. With this, it’s interesting that each chapter is split up into short sub-chapters, splicing each thought into their own little couple-page bursts. Buuuutttt I think even those could’ve been a lot shorter at times. I must confess I didn’t finish the book. Torch me! Sue me! Whatever punishment you deem fit! I petered in the last two chapters because at a certain point, the text stopped servicing me [{and I had to return my library copy}]. I really enjoyed the opening chapter and much of what was posited there has severely altered the way I think (MIDI!!! The preface!!!!!!!) but very slowly it lost me. I’m sure people with similar backgrounds as Lanier would be entertained throughout but alas, I was not. The highs were high but the lows were ehhaahhh whatever ig

D.S Films

Being my first book in the book club, I really enjoyed this last section, and read it fairly easily in one sitting on a train journey. I didn't get bored and was probably more excited as I realised how all of these ideas sound so much like CJ's and we are all following the same throughline and will inevitably come to the same thesis. I particularly loved the quote about being an adult, and behaving in a way that would create the world you desire. I found this to be extremely motivational. Also, I really enjoyed the Yin and Yangness of having 'darkness in any real life'. Extremely profound. I look forward to 'Life in Code' to continue on this journey, and I honestly don't mind waiting till the end of the month for the town hall!

emm-soph

I am not a big fan of VR personally, I think it's fascinating that it exists and what it can teach us about our brains, but it does not interest me experientially or ideologically. I'm too interested in actual lived experience in reality to care much for it at this time. But as for the book as a whole: YANaG has been a wonderful exploration of humanism in a time ruled by Web 2.0 and a religious devotion to tech supremacy. I adored it, though I did not always agree with him entirely. The notes of discussions on what it is that makes us feel Human and how our tech today makes this harder were important, and I found numerous moments of spiritual joy reading how he shows that the internet in all that it is to us now was *created*, by *humans*, and that we are free to make our own decisions rather than to simply passively take on what we are told is the only way. The same feeling was induced in me whenever he discussed that we are Creatures, not, in fact, machines, programs, gadgets. **Our bodies and souls are real**. The internet is not, not in the same way. I found this incredibly moving. I wrote down so much in my mini pocket notebook which I now actually use to note down thoughts I want to remember or reflect more on, and it has been such a beautifully present experience. It meant a lot to me to reflect on this book throughout our reading time, and much changed for me in the meantime. I de-gamified my reading life (thanks to C. Thi Nguyen), I got into crocheting, I learned that I am much more people-focused than I previously believed, that being outside is my favourite thing, and that nothing, NOTHING that exists is obvious. In fact, everything that exists is almost IMPOSSIBLE. Only through the creativity and hard work of real people (not to mention an incomprehensible amount of years of evolution and the chance development of this planet which managed to engender and foster life) does ANYTHING exist. It is all an incredible gift, and when it comes to things such as technology, yes, it is MADE, so it can always be changed. **It is up to us to look at the world and decide how we would like it to be. And then do that.** I'm so happy to have joined this book club. It has been a joy to read everybody’s comments each week, even though I didn’t contribute much yet. It's very special to me having found this community of people as dedicated as I am to the goal of living a life of Quality, a life in Reality, as much as we possibly can. I cannot wait to keep going!

azalea water

it all got a bit vibey near the end, but most of it was solid - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - I’m glad Lanier talked about kids, it feels like the perfect note to end on. At the end of the day, none of us are going to be the ones dealing with the aftermath of the internet, our kids are: “Children want attention. Therefore, young adults, in their newly extended childhood, can now perceive themselves to be finally getting enough attention, through social networks and blogs. Lately, the design of online technology has moved from answering this desire for attention to addressing an even earlier developmental stage.” - page 204 I’m still blown away by the fact nobody in big tech lets their kids use the internet. It's the one thing they got right. I have little cousins, and while “Bluey” and “Hey Duggee” are teaching them to be amazing little people, I’m worried about the effect the internet’s going to have on them. I’m worried for the world they’re going to grow up in, the teenagers and young adults they're gonna become in a climate-cooked world of digital psychosis. They’re kids, they deserve better than this. There’s a short story by Ray Bradbury called “The Veldt”, in which a family instals a nursery that magically creates anything the kids can think of. They imagine lions, giraffes, and the kids start spending all their time in there. The parents worry their kids are getting lost in this infinite, imagination-room they can’t control. The parents swear to lock the nursery and the children protest, but they do it anyway. The kids then break in, and when the parents jump into the nursery to find them, the door locks shut. The aformentioned lions approach, now very much real. The story ends with a child psychologist entering the nursery, seeing a group of satisfied lions, the two children drinking tea and no parents to be seen. Bradbury wrote that story in 1951, clearly as a response to TV. It reads a lot like he’s screaming “these damn kids and their black and white box don’t know how good they got it!”. But reading it in 2024, it’s mental that Bradbury wasn’t writing about the internet. We kinda knew this was coming, or at least a few of us did, way back when. We knew the effects social media would have, but we just couldn’t have predicted it’s spread. I don’t think eliminating social media is the right idea. It would be impossible in the current climate. Kids are going to have to use social media because of the simple existence of FOMO and the absolute grip it has on our culture. We just need to teach them moderation. A bit here, a bit there, that’s all. Social media and the internet are tools, we just have to teach them to be used in the right way. And that’s on us, not them. Maybe we can get them through this. A little hope never hurt anyone.

Evelyn G

I will forget a lot of this book. There were many strange tangents, asides and specifics for it to be a canonized manifesto. But I did love it. Maybe not all of it, but those golden slivers. I'll forever be grateful to him for reframing the touring test, and I'll remember that forever. After finishing the book, I went to a VR Arcade and played a few games. I had done VR before, but I was paying more attention this time. It really is incredible technology and the immersion is unmatched. Walls that were in front of me truly felt like objects I could not pass. However, it is so far and will always be so far from the nuisances of reality. In a very Jenny Odell way, there is so much to the ecology of the real tangible world than no game designer - no matter how good - will ever be able to replicate. To (very loosely) paraphrase some youtuber and infamous pragmatist, CJ the X, 'the outside is the gold standard of worldbuilding'. There is so much fucking lore to a tree! (Sorry Savannah Brown, but sometimes trees do sometimes have a lot of facts.) I've been saving this for the end, but throughout the book I've been thinking about Nietszche's Master/Slave morality and how easily that framework hugs around the philosophy of Web 2.0 Open Culture. (I understand the problem with using the terms master and slave, I'm sure there's replacement terms coined by more modern philosophers but Nietzsche is the guy I'm most familiar with.) In talking to people - even smart people - I've realized that there is free flowing animosity toward questioning Open Culture's assumptions. The digital middle class believes in digital Reaganomics. Truly nothing I could say would make them challenge their position. Even the critique of digo-corporate coagulations like Reddit and Twitter ends with blame on the people who enact their 'freedom of expression' and not the design and incentive structures. There's very basic economic thinking going on in Jaron Lanier's philosophy. Put money where people put value. It's not that strange of an idea. But the internet is perceived as a weird limbo where typical rules don't apply. But people still FEEL that SOMETHING is wrong, they just don't know what to do yet. And I am afraid this book doesn't yet solve that problem. The Community Pill beats the VR Pill any day of the week. We need to revolt, we need to divest, we need to be real and touch things and people and taste sweet fruit and aromatic wine and just be. You can't do that in VR, I'm sorry.

benedict.m

ok I kinda feel like the afterward was the best part of this book. yes it was a little long, but Lanier manages to distill so many of the crucial ideas in this book into much clearer, more direct language than he’s done thus far that I found myself underlining at least one thing in pretty much all of his answers. that did also make me feel a little retroactively frustrated with the book though, like he could have said everything he wanted to say in a little disjointed chapter like this and saved us all some time. but i’m getting ahead of myself. ~homuncular flexibility~ I am also not very into VR, I guess I just prefer regular human experience which is already incredibly weird and wonderful and constantly perception-altering. but I’ve never been closer to *getting* VR than I was while reading this chapter. “Early VR in 1980s had a charm to it that is almost lost today.” [I’m reminded of “The web had flavor” from like the very first chapter.] “The imagery was minimalist...But our optical design tended to create a saturated and soft effect, instead of the blocky one usually associated with early computer graphics. And we were forced to use our minimal graphic powers very carefully, so there was an *enforced elegance* to the multihued geometric designs that filled our earliest virtual worlds. I remember looking at the deeply blue virtual sky and at the first immersive, live virtual hand, a brass-colored cubist sculpture of cylinders and cones, which moved with my thoughts and *was* me.” (185, emphasis mine) beautiful. makes me feel nostalgic. I’ve essentially never used VR, but from the outside it does seem like now it’s mostly used for very practical training stuff and making games as “immersive” as possible, which is a quality I don’t really value in and of itself. I wish there were more room for just making weird shit in VR. pure play. maybe if VR ever becomes more widely accessible we’ll see a rise in avant-garde creativity for its own sake in this medium. BUT with that said, I also really love some of the more practical uses Lanier imagines. “In the future, I fully expect children to turn into molecules and triangles in order to learn about them with a somatic, ‘gut’ feeling.” (187) like this is a cool practical learning tool, but I also see the deeper value in this. if you can experience turning into a molecule, a cuttlefish, a “virtual lobster” (name another book where you’re gonna find that phrase, I dare you), and find that your mind can actually make sense of it, that can do a lot for expanding your circle of empathy. that could show you in a deep and profound way that you could be anyone or anything, and anything or anyone could be you. of course this is also just empathy, and I don’t think we need fancy technology to teach us that. but I’d love to have some somatic experience of being a bird flying around a strange hyperreal virtual sky. “Any part of reality might just as well be a part of your body if you happen to hook up the software elements so that your brain can control it easily. Maybe if you wiggle your toes, the clouds in the sky will wiggle too. Then the clouds would start to feel like part of your body.” (187) I’m also enamored with how Lanier describes solving the problem of programming the controls for extra limbs in VR: “The answer was to extract a little influence from each of many parts of the physical body and merge those data streams...A touch of human elbow twist, a dash of human knee flex; a dozen such movements might be mixed to control the middle joint of little left limb #3 (186).” the overall idea of “homuncular flexibility” feels crucial to discussions about people and technology, and I kind of wish Lanier had gone more into it earlier in the book. as I understand it, this term refers to the human ability to extend our minds outside of ourselves, to include things that are not part of our body as part of our body. it’s the way that musicians can use their instrument instinctively, as naturally as you’d manipulate your own hand. it’s the way that you get good at parking your car because you develop a sense of its size and feel it as an extension of yourself. it’s the way we learn to elegantly use tools. I’d argue this particular kind of neuroplasticity is among the biggest strength of people. but it’s also what allows us to extend our souls into virtual social worlds and feel them as intensely as we feel physical interpersonal interaction. so we have to be careful with it. “The body and the rest of reality no longer have a prescribed boundary. So what are you at this point? You’re floating in there, as a center of experience. You notice you exist, because what else could be going on?” (187) Descartes??? what are you doing here?? so lots of cool stuff here, but I do fundamentally find it kinda silly that the note he chose to end this book on was basically “VR will save us by improving communication.” but before I go on I wanna say I strongly disagree with Lanier here: “There's almost nothing duller than listening to people talk about indescribable, deeply personal, revelatory experiences: the LSD trip, the vision on the mountaintop." (184) can someone explain to me why people always talk about how boring other people’s dreams are? like do you find your own dreams boring? no?? you find them mysterious and funny and horrifying and beautiful and strange and learn things about your subconscious from them??? then why would other people’s be boring? I think that you don’t get to be interested in your own dreams if you show no interest in the dreams of people you care about. dreams and trips and visions are fascinating as long as you actually know the person who’s experiencing them, and as long as you’re not totally self-absorbed. SORRY if that’s rude but I feel weirdly strongly about this. care about people’s dreams!! they’re cool and revealing!!! if u do find your own dreams boring then...idk do your thing i don’t understand u ~fetuses in air~ the concept of neoteny felt kind of slippery and vague and irrelevant in the final chapter. I *kind of* got what he was talking about, something about how humans are born half-cooked and that leads to good stuff and bad stuff, but then he started talking about how that slows down generational progress and lost me. BUT somehow reading the afterward made this concept click for me. I’ve heard and even shared the idea that, because human brains are so big relative to our body, human babies have to be born when they’re only like 2/3 of the way done developing, and that’s why we’re dependent on parental care for so much longer than most other mammals. but the concept of neoteny (as I’m starting to understand it) is suggesting that that period of being born but not done cooking yet is actually evolutionarily beneficial in and of itself, because it lets new members of the species interface with the world while still in the early development phases that most mammals spend in the womb. it lets our environment more directly influence our development!! I feel like this has a lot to do with why humans are so adaptable. it ties back to something Lanier said earlier in the book about how humans aren’t optimized for any one evolutionary niche, we’re optimized for fitting into and moving between a huge array of different niches. maybe we wouldn’t be as good at this if we came out of the womb already self-sufficient. Lanier’s arguments about the increasing neoteny of modern humans gets a little dicey especially when he approaches economic reasons for this (I think economic systems aren’t his strong suit), but as is often the case with him, his overall point is salient: “The good includes a numinous imagination, unbounded hope, innocence, and sweetness. Childhood is the very essence of magic, optimism, creativity, and open innovation of self and the world. It is the heart of tenderness and connection between people, of continuity between generations, of trust, of play, and mutuality. It is the time in life when we learn to use our imaginations without the constraints of life lessons. The bad is more obvious, and includes bullying, voracious irritability, and selfishness. The net provides copious examples of both aspects of neoteny.” (183) (side note, just read this quote instead of Kill All Normies.) I wonder why the internet fosters this extended period of both positive and negative childlike behaviors. is it just because it’s still a new medium of expression / engagement? is it because of how relatively open and big and formless it is? I’m not sure, but both of these traits are decreasing over time as both the structure of the internet and its place in culture become more and more locked in. I think you could make an argument that the internet also turns people into adults earlier than ever before. maybe both things are happening at the same time and that’s why everything’s so fucking weird: the internet allows us to be children and also forces us to be adults. it makes everything silly and makes everything serious. it tells you there are no limitations, while also enabling extreme policing of behavior. idk it’s weird. ~the end~ I was gonna highlight some quotes from the afterward but CJ hit most of the good ones and honestly I don’t feel like it. while I disagree with Lanier that “postsymbolic communication”—i.e. being able to *be* things rather than just say them—is the next great leap of human technology, I appreciate his reasons for thinking this, particularly this line: “A fluid kind of concreteness might turn out to be more expressive than abstraction.” (190) I’ve liked this book. I mostly haven’t loved it, it’s bored and frustrated me at times, it’s excited me at others, but I don’t feel that it’s really changed me or my perspective in the way I hoped it would. it’s provided some useful new ideas and made me reflect a lot on my relationship to the internet and that definitely feels valuable. as usual it’s this lil community that made this book feel truly valuable. all the different things it brought out of people, all the different areas of interest & expertise people brought to it. it’s been beautiful to read a book about all the bad parts of the modern internet, from within a space that exemplifies all the good. hopefully I’ll be able to participate in the town hall at the end of the month since I haven’t been able to make any of the others. hope ur all embracing fluid concreteness and concrete fluidity today (can we please do some fiction soon tho my little english major heart is suffocating) <3

Stephen Folkerts

this is my first bookclub book (manifesto), so I have less perspective and am still in the honeymoon phase with tech criticism. I find it weird that most of my comments on this are defending Lanier, and I kinda feel like I have a highly impressionable mind in terms of seeing the positives in writing-- charitable reading is my main mode. But idk I kinda like it that way, it makes reading more enjoyable and I can let other people be more critical. not that I'm incapable of criticism, but it's about as much critical thinking to defend something as to criticize it if you do it well generally speaking. I didn't find the conclusion to be as much as a slog as others, but maybe it's because my expectation wasn't necessarily a big wrap-up conclusion that helps tie up loose ends. I also have a weird fetish for conclusions that introduce totally new ideas, and I found the neoteny subject a helpful framing of humanism. I think as artists it's interesting to consider and extended sense of childhood as intrinsic to expression and exploration. I did find the octopus stuff tangential, but interesting nonetheless as an example of neoteny's power and what it's absence produces. I guess the question is, what happens if necessity dissipates and people remain in the logical extension of neoteny as a worldview? will artistic proliferation in this childhood utopia be actually valuable? or is it only judged as valuable in opposition to the hard and meaningful responsibilities we take on as adults. is this a bad dichotomy, and is there a better one to be found? (life and death drive does seem to work quite well as shown in cjs lecture) maybe there's a more fleshed out way to incorporate the neoteny into this framing of art/existence/teleology? too lazy to think of it though. also a bit skeptical of the idea about post-symbolic communication, prbly because I like rhetoric and logology and I think that (symbols) might be what fundamentally connects us to God! like at what point does post-symbolic cease to be a humanistic argument, because the way it's described sounds pretty post-human to me, but maybe someone can convince me otherwise. there's a reason why morphing creatures in myth are depicted as deceitful and are usually diabolical and bad. how do you engage in post-symbolic communication that is genuine?? whatever that means but someone might know what I'm trying to say overall, I really enjoyed this manifesto. gave me a lot to think about and I'm always bringing it up in convos, so that means it's probably applicable to our lives in various ways. totally excited for whatever comes next in kti!!

Teageen

I see. My copy did not have an afterword.

reva

i do agree with yall that this book has wandered pretty far from the initial chapters, which were definitely the most interesting and like "holy shit" chapters to me. that being said i have a very hard time actively disliking things so i will find what i liked and talk about it! neoteny is such an interesting concept to me. i guess i don't really know how much of what lanier says about the connection between neoteny and learning-beyond-instinct is definitely true and how much is speculation, but it is at least interesting speculation. i think it is compelling to me because it feels like a little contradiction, which makes it feel inherently True to me. like if you are born with the knowledge to live your whole life at your fingertips then you are forever limited to that knowledge, but if you are born stupid and helpless then you have the capacity to grow to greater heights of competence and intelligence. so true. "young people announce every detail of their lives on services like Twitter not to show off, but to avoid the closed door at bedtime, the empty room, the screaming vacuum of an isolated mind" shoutout to how to do nothing! after reading that book i do my best to face the screaming vacuum of my isolated mind as often as i can. i think you need to do this to really keep in touch with yourself. honestly i find lanier talking about his personal beloved experiences endearing, his care for his experience makes me care more about it too. i think i just like the way lanier creates a mental image of the scene with him and his friends inventing vr. he did a similar narration-type thing in the section titled "rage" in chapter 9. it's very evocative i like it. i did not have the afterward in my copy BUT i do have an almost totally unrelated thing to talk about! i just couldn't stop thinking about the bouba-kiki and juliet-sun dichotomies from the last few chapters and i went a liiiittle overboard and created an interactive spreadsheet personality chart for KTI to fill out . enjoy! https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1lF69rF6uaYy2t3lv9zfaARuu2cdtdjZFFRQmfNwU5sk

lucidzen

Tech bros will literally bend over backwards to invent VR to experience what’s it’s like to be something(body) else INSTEAD of just talking to people irl. The irony poisoned part of my brain literally wants to tell Jaron to touch grass. It’s sad that that chapter starts out with him describing how parts of Silicon Valley still had nature and life to it in the 80s.

lucidzen

I also found a direct contradiction In this last chapter. I will also be referencing Contrapoints’s tangents here (on her Patreon, specifically the one on Nostalgia and Generations) In short, Jaron speaks about how people are living longer and living longer more youth, we have extended out childlike behavior. The paradox lies in the fact that youth is associated with revolution, novelty and the breaking of tradition, yet due to the fact that people in generations are living in a childlike state for longer (and dominate the current culture even with a new generation underway) it becomes a form of conservatism. As a result, culture is moving at a slower pace (I think that’s true in some ways outside of the internet). Then Jaron gets nostalgic about his VR days with his friends, which in a way is him desiring for a time in which he was in that same childlike state. He then wants to bring that kind of childlike wonder and technology to the present as a remedy to his initial concerns (he got lost in the sauce by this point so I even forgot what the concern was). There lies the contradiction: his reference to nostalgia is inherently conservative. There are other issues with it as well, for instance, his desire to get rid of abstractions and symbols between people through shape shifting with VR (he really matched the cybernetic totalists here imo). Like in contrapoints video about nostalgia, there is something sinister about nostalgia - it’s hope for a future that never happened. It seems as if nostalgia is an agent against progress and of extending the childlike state in individuals. With her Generations tangent, one theory is that human struggle is cyclical and goes through four seasons (~80 years in total like a human life) and I am wondering how the extension of the childhood stage could offset or disrupt these cycles. Will we be stuck in the “crisis” part of the cycle for longer than we should be?

Robert Lasica

Final book club location: I'm writing from my cubicle over my lunch break, listening to keyboard clickity clacks in the distance. Pg 180"Young people announce every detail of their life on services like Twitter not to show off, but to avoid the closed door at bedtime, the empty room, the screaming vacuum of an isolated mind" This is interesting and I can kinda see myself in it. At some point growing up as an only child I stopped experiencing the sensation of "Loneliness", but I've always been buzzing with the connection to the social via the internet. Even as a lurker there has been comfort in bouncing around in the ideas of the world and other people's conversations. 187"Maybe if you wiggle your toes, the clouds in the sky will wiggle too. Then the clouds would start to feel like part of your body. All items of experience become more fungible than in the physical world. " Hell yeah. Early video game history had quite a few experiments like this, but they mostly faded away. This reminds me of Alt.Ctrl.GDC, a kind of contest/showcase of video games with experimental controls. This year I got to see people use game controllers like garden hoses, TV remotes, and window blinds+wine glasses. The reinvention of household items as game objects is a standard lesson in game design classes, and this opening up of the possibility space could also include some kind of abstracted controls using the body. Brings to mind "before your eyes", a game controlled by blinking. 191 evolving humanity in VR as a project of escaping the "lock-in MIDIs of human affairs" is promising in concept, and while I don't want to crush his productive imagining of a better future I have my reservations. I think individual transformational momentary experiences or small changes to the way we interact with things won't break the "Lock-in". Jaron's phenotropic programming is a clear break from the current programming paradigms we exist under, but I don't think the other propositions are breaks in the humanities in the way he thinks. I've had hints of these transcendent moments that could be transformative, but I don't see them shifting any paradigms. I think the transcendent exists in new media and tech in similar ways as old media, the art moment can have different beats but the same impacts as previous human experiences, so it's hard for me to see these new technogical affordances as somehow creating transformational breaks. Paradigms and often shift due to more actionable ideas about systems and your relationship to the world that have popped up in stories since the dawn of writing. We are hopelessly tied to our bodies and societies, and what we currently have in VR and AR don't seem revolutionary enough, but maybe something more dramatic like brain implants could make that change. Here I would also like to put this in conversation with playful early Surrealism, the book "surrealism at play", and the absorption of transcendent moments into the mainstream. Surrealism's pitch is that certain art and communal experiences can break you from normal thought processes, creating moments where the unconscious can break through to the surface in ways similar to Freudian slips. "For (Walter)Benjamin, as for the surrealists, rendering technology useless through play opened it to infinite and unforseen possibilities- and to new, critically engaged paths for perception and consciousness. " Page 10. I feel like this lines up well with how Jaron talks about the possibilities of VR and AR. Towards the end of the primary surrealist movement people's relationship with the unconscious art moment changed. "Surrealist play was moving away from its original characterization as a spontaneous field of actions where ludic activity generated experiences on the spot, and towards revaluation as a site to be mined for the production of surrealist things"249-250. Partially this involved mass production or the creation of art objects that merely follow the aesthetics of the surreal, but it also involved changes in social relationships and practices in the space. The exquisite corpse was a technique that involved drawing on a piece of paper that was folded to obscure what others have drawn, so the revelatory unfolding would show the discontinuities and unexpected synergies in the drawing. From page 250,"The objectification of the game began when the players started smoothing the composite images into unified figure drawings, and was effectively completed with a recession of the surrealists' commitment to collective practice," By removing the moment of unfolding and revelation the unintentionality disappeared, so it becomes just like any other drawing process. I believe a transcendent moment in VR has to exist under specific technical and social circumstances that could quickly get lost during the commondification or distribution processes. The surrealists had something they believed could break the "lock-in MIDIs of human affairs", and now the exquisite corpse is a corporate party game. Overall this was a neat book, but I don't plan to read another book like this any time soon. I think the book club format has helped me practice writing and shown me the moments in my life that I can do this kinda of note taking and thinking, but I feel like the book itself wasn't more expansive or meaningfully in depth than the articles or lectures Jaron has previously given. This feeling mostly comes down to the fact that I've developed a preference for a different kind of book that has more emphasis on intertextuality and constructively developing ideas that others can directly build on intellectually. Going from this book to "Anthropology as Cultural Critique" and "The World is Born from Zero" has helped clarify that feeling for me. In my book club posts I've referenced a few books that I've read, books with arguments that I come back to over and over again that seep into my daily thoughts in ways that "You are not a gadget" hasn't for me, It's not the kind of thing I would cite. Looking through excerpts from the next book I probably won't take part in the next book club(I'll tackle my backlog instead), but I hope you all have fun with it! Kill the Internet probably isn't a project for me, but CJ will have my 2$ a month for the foreseeable future.

Ajey Pandey

Hi all completely off topic but a group chat of mine posted a tumblr screenshot that said pokkin ••• They should make an alternate version of boba tea called kiki tea and its filled with spikes It reminded me of all of you

Chandler Sterling

I'm honestly not sure what to do here. I almost wrote a few paragraphs defending Lanier's discussions of VR, but I don't think anything I'd say would change anyone's mind because my reasons for agreeing with him are too personal to translate. I really resonate with his idea that VR has potential as a "consciousness-noticing machine" (pg. 187) I would call that a soul, but semantics aren't really important in this case. Regardless of the name, I do think there's something more tangible about the way VR can shape your understanding of where your body stops and You begin. That particular experience isn't as marketable as gaming, so there maybe aren't tons of clear paths to this experience, but it's out there and it's something we can't do as easily without VR. I am curious about if it would be useful to incorporate Esther Dyson's "online postage" (pg. 202) idea that Lanier brings up in the afterword. I think a lot of issues with the Internet are caused by how massive and free everything has become. Taking a picture used to cost you tangible money in the form of film. You wouldn't even know what it looked like until after you developed it. There were more opportunities to tie value directly to these tangible things, and scrapbooks were a place to return to the MOST valuable ones in a smaller form of worldbuilding/storytelling. In the same sense, I thought about what might happen if you had to pay for digital stamps on Twitter from the start. It would kill the desire to shoot out random thoughts just because you could. Everything would cost maybe a dime at most, but it would cost something. Value would be tied up in it in a very real and recognizable way. I don't think it would save the platform, and it probably can't be implemented now that we've locked in what Twitter is, but I believe there would be noticeable improvements in a lot of areas. I recognize that there are plenty of cons to this idea as well, and I don't think that we should remove cameras from phones in order to "get back to the good old days", but I can't help but remember how precious every click of the shutter was when I used a disposable camera as a kid. I never feel that rush of having made a Decision when I take pictures on my phone. If that one didn't turn out, I can just take it again. It eats at the perfectionist in me that will never be happy with anything I do. The disposable camera brought out more beautiful thoughts, and the pictures taken in that mindset were therefore more beautiful. I think weirdly enough, the main impressions this book left me with are that I wish I could play D&D with Jaron Lanier in VR. I feel like the way his brain works would make for very interesting characters, and he would probably design a bespoke VR character creation that would let you create and inhabit your character with an avatar and let the DM create physical manifestations of a dungeon. I also just always want to play D&D, so there's that too. If you haven't played before, you probably should, I strongly believe it will actually improve the life of anyone who plays. At the very least, it teaches you how to get good at scheduling. Alright, so long to my fellow boubas/kikis-Juliets/Suns. I will see you at the end of the month!

Beth Barton

IMHO sifting through the “drudge” will make the gems shine all the more (and you get that little dopamine hit we all crave); also everyone is different and I love finding out what parts inspired others when they may not have had the same effect on me. This is why book club is so enriching.

Louis-Antoine LeBel

I’m late sorry!! This was my first bookclub here and I’m very happy to have joined. I’m not used to reading non-fiction, so I often felt like I was interacting with the text at a pretty surface level (especially when compared to the amazing replies people were leaving on here). But I’ll trust I’ll sharpen my thinking and writing as I continue participating in the book club. Ok, enough about me. Hearing Lanier talk about early VR was pretty cool. Pre-rendered 3D graphics already looked rough in the 80’s, I can’t imagine how bad it looked in real-time with a bulky headset strapped to your head. It’s endearing to hear Lanier talk about VR a few years before the oculus rift was released, before we realized it was kind of another gimmick. He wrote an article for the New Yorker in February where he still talks about how VR could create a space where we could create without barriers, but I don’t buy it. It’s all too idealistic still. If anything, this last chapter made me realize Jaron Lanier could make for a decent science fiction writer. I think some of his ideas would hit harder if surrounded by a narrative. I’m really happy I read this book (despite its many flaws). It’s not life-changing, but I’ll be thinking about the storm-consciousness thing for a while at least.

phil e the theyby

Ok, so my reaction to chapter 14 was “this didn’t age well.” It felt very out of touch to me, so I’m trying to explore why it felt that way. I think that, generationally speaking, Lanier grew up in a time where the message people were getting is that things are generally OK and that history is on a mostly positive path. And while he clearly sees some issues in where things are going and is trying to divert the course, this chapter had this very utopian vision that “things can be so much better and more beautiful!” It’s worth noting that it was written in the Obama era, where a LOT of folks in the U.S. felt that way. And when you’ve been raised to see things like that, this kind of unbridled joy and optimism and belief in using the power of technology for a radical transformation of consciousness seems very compelling. Contrast that to 2024. That concern that “oh no Millenials might be the first generation to be worse off than their parents, I hope that doesn’t end up happening”? Yeah, that’s been our reality for a decade. Gen Z has grown up in a world that seems like it’s on a clock due to (almost completely unmanaged) threat of climate catastrophe and the rise of fascism globally. You can’t look at the genocide in Gaza and think that VR technology is the answer. And while the consolidation of corporate power around tech and a lot of the things he’s talked about in this book feel super relevant to the things we’re all struggling with now, this last chapter seemed deeply out of touch with the life we’ve all lived since it was written. I wonder if that’s where this “not relevant to the task at hand” feeling CJ had is coming from. That said, I do think it’s super interesting as a thought experiment, and agree with other people here around the possibilities on using it to expand the circle of empathy. It just doesn’t seem like a PRACTICAL solution to the problems of the world, especially with so few market incentives to focus the technology in that direction. I enjoyed the book and riding the waves of it. I think there are some really cool things to take away from it, and I’ve really valued hearing everyone’s perspectives. The end of the month (and specifically the 31st) works great for me, and I look forward to it!

halley

hi! so I quite liked the book experience but again, mostly for the discussions it sparked and interesting perspectives everyone shared. it didn't feel like a manifesto as much as I was expecting from the first few chapters. I got some good stuff out of it but there were also lots of personal meanderings and speculations, which were interesting because of his background and perspective but still. I think he was best at diagnosing how and why the internet hurts but in a sympathetic way. his excited ideas of potential possibilities were fun and hopeful at best but fell short of being enough to counterbalance the problems he laid out. reading about neotony I was thinking back on a conversation I had with an older bulgarian woman about political & social issues a few years ago and I remember her telling me bluntly how she thought the world would improve: 'here's how things can change. first, my mother needs die. then I need to die, then probably you too, and then maybe just maybe the next generation will be a little bit better'. I've found that my personal antidote to despair and hopelessness has been spending time with and listening to people much younger than me. but I also notice how much everyone is struggling with this phone addiction and no one seems to know what to do about it or how to talk about it seriously. lately the word I keep thinking of in regards to my phone is that it's a trap. I'm still gonna use it, but it helps to remind myself as much as possible what it is and what its for. I'm starting to wonder if I should read 10 arguments for deleting your social media accounts even though I know I won't. I can empathize with Lanier's interest in 'post symbolic communication' in that it made me think of my (autistic) husband explaining how hard it is to translate thoughts the way he sees and feels them into language, and also remembering my neighbor's nonverbal autistic daughter having a breakthrough in communication when she was given a phone app that used symbols and images she could select to form sentences without using language- though I suppose that would be more like post-language hyper-symbolic communication? it's as if we need a multitude of options for communicating to get closer to our truths.. what I'm finding funny about this term though is that the more I think about it, it seems like post-symbolic communication is just.. art, right? he's been part of inventing this new medium of expression which can communicate in a transcendental new way. it reminds me of when Dewey wrote about how language/literature conjurs what does not exist in present experience- we use words to conjure an idea in another's mind because we can't just point to it. I don't think its necessary to compare the experience/potential of VR to language bc they're kind of opposites in this sense and doing so feels like a disservice to both. "a word... refers to something absent for which it stands. when things are present it is enough to ignore them, or to use them and point to them... the most realistic presentation of a scene by words puts before us things that for direct contact are but possibilities. every idea is by its nature indicative of a possibility not of present actuality... the possibility that is impossible... if animals are strict realists, it is because they lack the signs that language confers on humans." (AAE p.243) this "consciousness noticing machine" (the noticing being done by the humans, of course) is yet another portal to the numinous. In CJ's latest lecture they listed maybe 5 ways of getting there but it reminded me of this book I once had listing 255 ways to alter your consciousness (without drugs): https://bookofhighs.com/contents/ sadly I lost this book to an ex before getting the chance to explore it but the TOC stuck with me, I really liked seeing all these exciting things listed and organized in that way. I was curious if VR was on the list and sure enough, it's right there at no. 246! Lanier's jealousy of cephalopods reminds me of Kimmerer's envy of photosynthesizing plants- it's a longing for an impossible way of experiencing the world but an understandable desire to become that which they devote their time to understanding and what they find beauty in, taken to its extreme. lastly, something I think was missing but deserves some more attention from people with Lanier's kind of expertise is the social-political implications of technology. maybe its because this book is directed more toward individuals, but I think its important to look at how tech developments benefit the military/police state especially because that's what those with the most power are paying attention to! the possibilities expressed by VR+AI+robotics/drones combined with a generation trained in first-person shooter games in a country sustaining wars worldwide at the very least warrants some attention. there was a point in ch 13 where he mentioned how facial scanning technology will make us "have to rethink public policy relating to privacy" but then he immediately pivots to "other extraordinary possibilities". I'm just wishing people in Lanier's position took the weight and responsibility of this more earnestly. it feels like a utopian tech bro fantasy bubble of how cool and fun the potential is but the tech is rapidly outpacing policy and I'm afraid people are going to get hurt and be more repressed by these innovations creeping into daily life without realizing until its too late, or assumed as collateral for cool toys and games.