Actually I thought I knew what Lanier was going to say in this book and wasn’t going to read it. Then I listened to a podcast with him with Ezra Klein, and beginning about the 60-minute mark, Lanier speaks of how we should be ‘lone wolves’ instead of ‘pack wolves’ in our social lives and I stopped cold. Wait. I kind of understand he is saying “think for yourselves,” but aren’t we supposed to be working together to achieve something bigger than any one of us could do alone? I thought he might expand on those ideas in this book.
He didn’t, but the book is well worth reading anyway. In all the ways you will have noticed as you spent time online, sometimes online interactions push us toward less civility and less sense of responsibility. The thing I like so much about Lanier is that he seems to recognize that even close friends and family are individuals outside of himself who will have different points of view and attitudes. He seems perfectly willing to entertain, refute, condemn those points of view but he will actually listen to them first. That doesn’t happen always in marriages or families I have seen.
Anyway, this small book had so many moments of insight that I won’t be able to share them all. He speaks of algorithms:
“One of the secrets of present-day Silicon Valley is that some people seem to be better than others at getting machine learning schemes to work, and no one understands why. The most mechanistic method of manipulating human behavior turns out to be a surprisingly intuitive art. Those who are good at massaging the latest algorithms become stars and earn spectacular salaries.”One of the things Lanier despises most about social media as it has developed is that we are watched constantly and can’t experiment without constant judgment. How can we be authentic, knowing we are being watched, even corralled? Without being authentic, how can we be happy?
Lanier reminds us that when the web was being invented, many libertarian voices wanted everything to be free. At the same time, tech business leaders were considered visionary when they got rich. How can those two ideas be reconciled? Advertising was chosen to become the dominant business model. “This didn’t feel dystopian at first,” Lanier writes. “But as the internet, the devices, and the algorithms advanced, advertising morphed into mass behavior modification….The purpose…was to earn money. The process was automatic, routine, sterile, and ruthless.”
Yikes. Lanier kindly creates an acronym for us to remember what happens when we allow the machine to take over our decision-making: BUMMER. Lanier suggests it may mean “Behaviors of Users Modified, and Made into an Empire for Rent,” but it can mean anything you want it to mean as long as you get the point that BUMMER
“is a machine, a statistical machine that lives in the computing clouds….Even at their best, BUMMER algorithms can only calculate the chances that a person will act in a particular way. But what might be only a chance for each person approaches being a certainty on the average for large numbers of people. The overall population can be affected with greater predictability than can any single person. Since BUMMER’s influence is statistical, the menace is a little like climate change. You can’t say climate change is responsible for a particular storm, flood, or drought, but you can say it changes the odds they’ll happen.”Drop mike.
Lanier stopped using social media because it made him an asshole, or so he thought. He was happy when he got ‘likes,’ boiled with rage at some comments, and had to give up his connection to context. “BUMMER replaces your context with its context.” All this is true. He suggests ways to get around using the big platforms like Google, Facebook, Twitter. He suggests that we give them up until a time comes when we can pay for the interaction, get paid for our content, and have some regulation.
I will still be looking for him to clarify the ‘lone wolf’ statement, maybe in his next book.
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