"The Lanier Effect" + Authors Sue HathiTrust Over Digitization

J's Theater is not turning into the Jaron Lanier blog, but I came across the text and video link below (I've posted a screen grab but I cannot embed it) of a conversation--a monologue, really--he engages in with Douglas Rushkoff at Edge, the online tech site.  Entitled "The Local-Global Flip, or the 'Lanier Effect'," Lanier touches upon and goes far beyond some of the issues I previously mentioned in my review of his last book, as well as in my Labor Day post, while also offering one of the more idiosyncratic and intriguing readings of the global economic crisis. I'm not sure I fully grasp, let alone buy, his account of it, but some of his comments, like his reading of the dangerous effects of global networking on magnifying and engulfing the banks involved in it offer a different insight than I've usually read, though as the 1930s Global Economic Collapse and prior ones demonstrated, global financial networking and interdependence aren't new.

His thoughts about what will happen to people who cannot fit into the economic scenario he suggests will arise seems especially bleak, and has a strange, biological-eugenic edge. There's also a bit about automated cars, and another about electronic bread and circuses to anesthetize the masses who will be cut off from the possibility to earn a living.  Ultimately he returns to Ted Nelson's original plan to monetize Net transactions to preserve a middle class, or at the very least, generate liveable earnings for everyone who won't control the digital levers of power, be directly serving them, or be fortunately to live in a society in which other options--like natural commodities--underwrite more widely distributed wealth.  But do listen for yourself!

The Edge: The Local-Global Flip, or, "The Lanier Effect": A Conversation with Jaron Lanier [8.29.11] 

A snippet:

Ted's idea was that there would be a universal market place where people could buy and sell bits from each other, where information would be paid for, and then you'd have a future where people could make a living and earn money from what they did with their hearts and heads in an information system, the Internet, thereby solving this problem of how to have a middle class, and how to have liberty. To expect liberty from democracy without a middle class is hopeless because without a middle class you can't have democracy. The whole thing falls a part.

I remember when I first met Ted as a teenager, we talked about how you need to have some system like this where people are making a living with their hearts and heads, and trading online, and this was before the word "online" even existed in the way we know it today. It's the only way to have a future of liberty.

Silicon Valley totally screwed up on this. We were doing a great job through the turn of the century. In the '80s and '90s, one of the things I liked about being in the Silicon Valley community was that we were growing the middle class. The personal computer revolution could have easily been mostly about enterprises. It could have been about just fighting IBM and getting computers on desks in big corporations or something, instead of this notion of the consumer, ordinary person having access to a computer, of a little mom and pop shop having a computer, and owning their own information. When you own information, you have power. Information is power. The personal computer gave people their own information, and it enabled a lot of lives.

***

Related to what Lanier says here and to my Labor Day post is a link Reggie H. sent today: Jennifer Howard's Chronicle of Higher Education article, "In Authors' Suit Against Libraries, an Attempt to Wrest Back Some Control Over Digitized Works." Boiling it down, a group of eight individual authors, including the prominent Shakespearean scholar James Shapiro, have joined with the Authors Guild, the Australian Society of Authors, and the Quebec writers' union to file a copyright-infringement lawsuit against the HathiTrust digital repository and a consortium of over 50 university libraries with which it is working. These libraries include Cornell University, Indiana University, the University of California, the University of Wisconsin, and the University of Michigan. The suit, which the guild and its co-litigants filed in US District Court, aims to stop the HathiTrust and library consortium from digitizing and releasing what are called "orphan" books, or works under copyright whose authors cannot be identified or located, until the US Congress passes guidelines to clarify the use of digital libraries and orphan works.

As things stand, HathiTrust can digitize the works and distribute them via participating libraries; anyone affiliated with those institutions will have access to them, at whatever cost they deem appropriate.  Indeed, the lawsuit states that the defendants, as well as Google, which produced most of the digital scans, have participated in "the systematic, concerted, widespread, and unauthorized reproduction and distribution" of about 7 million copyrighted works, of which the brief mentions only a few, without permission to do so.  It asks the court to impound and withdraw from circulation "all unauthorized copies" of copyright-protected works the defendants possess until Congress issues a law, and to stop them from working with Google to scan in more works. The suit asks that the University of Michigan's Orphan Works Project also be halted.

A major concern of the plaintiffs is an issue I discussed in the Labor Day post, the security of the digital copies. They fear that these versions of the books could distributed freely and without controls via the Internet. Should copyrighted works enter the filesharing mainstream, the authors could lose all control over their work, and apparently the state institutions could not be sued because they enjoy "sovereign-immunity" protection. I assume private institutions like my employer do not. (Cornell is both public and private, so I wonder where it stands legally in this regard.) The Authors Guild also believes that authors should have a say in what happens to the books in the HathiTrust's repository. For their part, HathiTrust and the libraries, which all participate both in the repository and the Orphan Works project, say they have done nothing wrong, and see themselves as engaging in the vital work of preservation and dissemination of knowledge, which certainly are the purview of libraries and universities, and a central aspect of the case will determine how far libraries can go in making materials available across non-print/codex platforms. HathiTrust and the libraries say they know of no security breaches thus far, and feel blindsided by the lawsuit, given that they have recently been in discussions with the Authors Guild over the digitization project. They nevertheless are planning to release the first run of 26 titles in the Orphan Works series on October 13, 2011. That is, if the court doesn't enjoin them before then.


The list of HathiTrust books is here.

A final note, Geoffrey James states in the article's comment section: "It took the Author's Guild exactly 2 minutes to find a living author, with an agent, who is currently making e-distribution deals, whose work is supposedly 'orphaned' and will be distributed for free by the thieves at HathiTrust." X. The author? J. R. Salamanca. The book? The Lost Country, which was made into a 1961 film, Wild in the Country, adapted into a screenplay by Clifford Odets and starring Elvis Presley! Salamanca, whose novel Lilith also became a major film (starring the young Warren Beatty, Jean Seberg, and Peter Fonda, in 1964), even has his own imdb.com page.

Labor's Days or, Are Books Dead and Can Authors Survive?

James Baldwin

As I was trying to winnow down the many things I wanted to write about for today, Labor Day, I realized that I could return to something I'd touched upon before, which was to explore the fate of writing as a career in the face of the economic, political, technological, and cultural changes currently underway. After starting a few drafts of what I wanted to say, I thought to myself, this sounds so dreary and such an awful way to start off the week, especially given the recent gloomy news about no new net jobs being created last month; the strong US and European consensus around policies that will only exacerbate the ongoing economic stagnation and unemployment crisis; and the looming "jobs speech" spectacle involving the President we'll see later this week. As a result I told myself that I'd instead post some pro-labor videos, links and so forth.

But in cleaning up some of my bookmarks, I came across one from a few days ago that made me think today would be a very good day to broach an aspect of the larger topic I'd explored in my review of Jaron Lanier's You Are Not a Gadget. One of the main threads in Lanier's book concerns the fate of all industries touched by digitization and, by extension, the fate of careers linked to those industries.  I won't rehearse my reading of Lanier's important tome except to say that I increasingly see what he discusses, and in some cases decries, coming to pass.

To give one example, I think of his concern about the widespread ceding of personal expression to more automated and systematized forms of commentary, and I consider all the bloggers I used to read regularly and would love to continue following, who have ditched even periodic, personalized posts--about all sorts of things--for Facebook and now Google+ entries, Twitter quips, Tumblr reposts, and the like. (I belog to all these services, though I really only frequently post on Twitter.) Many of these linked commentaries offer glimmers of the originality the bloggers once displayed on their own pages, but they are often severely boiled down versions of what they once posted. What they gain in time, and perhaps in readership, we lose in terms of the former depth and richness of their voices. I personally want to hear what they have to say, at some length, rather than just seeing links and "Likes" and short, witty responses, but I know I'm in the minority on this.

Julia Álvarez

Perhaps the larger and most pressing concern of Lanier's book is how digitization is leading to a hollowing out of the middle classes by technoogically and structurally destroying a series of industries. This sounds alarmist, but as he shows, it is occurring no matter how much we might want to deny it.  In considering his arguments, I have been mulling the funding and thus existential crisis the United States Postal Service, a necessary and public good, whatever its flaws, now faces because of the increasing use of digital mail services, from emails to billing.  The Post Office doesn't register in Lanier's book, but its technological challenge underlines and connects to something everyone should be thinking about and trying to address. Last month, at the Edinburgh International Book Festival, as part of a debate on the "End of Books?", writer and critic Ewan Morrison took up this particular thread of Lanier's when he delivered his bracing talk entitled "Are Books Dead, and Can Authors Survive?" and his conclusions, particularly for labor and "writing" as a profession, were quite serious.

I'll recap his talk below, which appeared in abridged form in the Guardian, but first let me say that despite his title Morrison (nor Lanier) is not arguing that "books" in any and all forms are dead; as the swift transition to and rise in publication of e-books shows, the book as a concept, as an artifact, even if only digital and virtual, as a commodity, is not going to disappear. People are still reading, people are still writing, and people will continue to acquire books, for pay or for free, for the foreseeable future.  The likelihood of those dystopias where books are burnt (Fahrenheit 411) or banished (Brave New World) seems increasingly unlikely.  (Though, I will say, and elaborate in a subsequent post, if we vest everything in technologies that require electricity, what happens if the lights go off?) Concerning "cloud" books and technological control, as Amazon now wields it, Lanier has posed some important questions that Morrison doesn't raise at all, among them: who really owns--and has complete access to--not just the rights or content, but what persists of the material aspects--the text itself, in whatever form--of digital works? For, as Amazon has already displayed, it can arbitrarily remove (and thus effectively ban the sales of) books from its site and e-readers at will, but shut down the possibility of lending them out.  You buy the "book," but...who owns it, really?  I'll also note that Morrison does not press the larger argument about contemporary late capitalism and its discontents, the endless corporate push for commoditization and monopolization, and the collusion of the governments and politicians it buys (and owns) to write laws that benefit these "persons," as the US Supreme Court again affirmed they were in their Citizens United v. Federal Elections Commission ruling last year.

The common issue that concerns both Lanier and Morrison is whether the economic and cultural ecology developed over the last 100 years with publishing, and in particular literary publishing, is sustainable in light of digitization. Morrison begins his comments by stating that

Yes, absolutely, within 25 years the digital revolution will bring about the end of paper books. But more importantly, ebooks and e-publishing will mean the end of "the writer" as a profession. Ebooks, in the future, will be written by first-timers, by teams, by speciality subject enthusiasts and by those who were already established in the era of the paper book. The digital revolution will not emancipate writers or open up a new era of creativity, it will mean that writers offer up their work for next to nothing or for free. Writing, as a profession, will cease to exist.

Gertrude Stein

As grave as that sounds, his argument unfolds like this: over the last 100 years, a fairly substantial number of writers in the United States, the UK, Canada, and other developed countries could live off writing as a career. Many could live off advances, though increasingly fewer over the last 15 years have been able to do so; they could live off freelance gigs; they could live off jobs in and around the publishing industry that were buoyed by it and related and contiguous fields (journalism, bookselling, etc.).  Perhaps the heyday was the period from the 1950s through the early 1990s, and this occurred despite various global and local economic shocks, conglomeration, the shifts in distribution and bookselling. In other words, a vibrant if ever-shifting publishing industry in the West ensured that many authors at least made something off their work.  Yet as e-books gain ground, however, publishers make less money, so advances have begun to fall and publishing as an industry shrinks.  Morrison notes the moment in 2009 when British publishers, already suffering from weak sales, started cutting author advances by as much as "80%."

One result has been a return of a concern from the late 1990s, which was the fate of "mid-list" authors. When I was lucky enough to enjoy a brief Yaddo residency in the late 1990s, I recall that the New York Times and other publications were issuing dire articles about the fate of mid-list writers, and some of the more senior mid-list writers at Yaddo were concerned about their books in the pipeline and their careers. Harper Collins infamously canceled 106 contracts, many of them by mid-list authors, as part of its brutal restructuring in 1997. But by the early 2000s, this problems appears to have abated. Now, as Morrison argues, it's worsening again. Midlist writers, he points out, have often proved to be "the Research and Development department of publishers in the 20th century."  He cites Don DeLillo, but one could name such authors as the acclaimed Jonathan Franzen, for example, or Terry McMillan, whose early books, while acclaimed, were not best-sellers, but who went on to claim that mantle.

One response has been that mid-list writers have turned to self-publishing e-books or working directly with agents to publish their works, embracing Chris Anderson's "long-tail" approach to sales. In practical and commercial terms, the long tail is "Amazon and iTunes, Netflix, LoveFilm and eBay," or 40%-60% of the market, the bounty of completed works that lay mostly hidden before the appearance of online stores and rental sites like the ones above.  This shift has empowered consumers while consequently blunting, and in some cases destroying, the old hierarchy of publishers and PR firms, working in collusion with booksellers and distributors, in pre-marketing and promotion, mass marketing, and "limited shelf space for 'best-sellers.'" This is not a good thing in some ways, or that industries no longer exist, but they have less impact than they once did, and will decreasingly so, except for those already well-capitalized publishers and authors who can dominate the new online sites.

Yet Morrison makes a crucial point that echoes Lanier: few authors and publishers can survive from earnings alone in the new "long-tail" world. Some will do very well, but most will not. Why? Because of a basic fact about digitization: there remains no way to ensure that digital works can be copy-protected, and thus freely distributed, and in a world in which millions of people increasingly expect digital products to be free or available at very low costs, it will be nearly impossible to protect most digital products, no matter what their content. He cites industry after industry that has fallen by the wayside, not only in terms of the physical product itself, but, I'd argue, the entire apparatus built up around it that provided jobs, from service to white collar.

There's the film and home video industry; even just released films are now often available online for free, no matter how doggedly Hollywood, the US and other governments crack down. The music industry, which has been transformed into a shell of itself; artists now make their money through touring rather than sales, and some once best-selling musicians are lucky if they sell 1,000 or 10,000 digital copies of their work, since they're almost always free online fairly quickly. Some areas like classical music can barely produce albums anymore without subsidies. The porn industry: once a billion-dollar money-maker, pornography of all sorts is also widely free online, with homemade porn and webcams displacing the free paid videos.  The computer game industry; the newspaper industry; the photographic industry; telecommunications; even the Internet itself, which is rife with (seemingly) free services, including this blog's host; though "free" is not exactly the case, as Google/Blogger do track and monetize every byte of information passing through J's Theater and every other service they offer.

Whitman, "The Unexpressed"
(from whitmanarchive)

Publishing, and digital e-books, then, are hardly immune. First, the established publishers must watch as Amazon, Google and Apple become the dominant players. Amazon is the master marketer and merchant; Google is a master quantifier and digitizer; and Apple is the master of proprietary hardware and software. Lawsuits have hardly set any of this trio back. Anyone publishing e-books, as my observation of C's experience has shown, must reckon with each of these three behemoths, and they are steadily making it harder to gain a toehold onto their sites.  Amazon in particular has been awash in self-published texts, as well as "spam books" and pirated works; so great are the numbers that it has had to take steps to control the flow of new "books" uploaded to its site. Apple, on the other, recommends working with "aggregators," or middlemen, to surmount the numerous hurdles you encounter publishing anything on iTunes or in the iBookstore on the iPad desktop.

Besides this there's another issue: a consumer's legal and innocent downloading of copies of digital works she has already purchased means they can unintentionally or intentionally but easily end up circulating electronically, and widely (think shared servers, flash drives, cloud services, sophistical digital recording, ripping and cracking technologies, etc.); filesharing services now traffic not just in the newest songs by hit artists, Hollywood blockbusters, or gangbang videos, but in books, including fairly obscure, scholarly ones.  Writer Daniel Alarcón has written about codex book piracy in Peru and other parts of Latin America, but a far more extensive form of book piracy is already underway.  Not only Google, but anyone with a scanner or access to one can transform a print book into digital form, and upload it as a .pdf, and even the most vigilant publisher is helpless if this ends up on a filesharing service. What Morrison also underlines is that every attempt to legally address the problem of digital piracy has led to drastic lowering of costs, which he says is the "slippery slope" to free content.

Ultimately, Morrison and others see a "race to the bottom" in place now. Apple and publishers have been fighting Amazon over pricing concerns, but overall, e-books sell for far less than hardcover books or trade paperbacks, and they are an increasingly larger share of overall book sales. Moreover, as more and more people move to digital reading--and this is already happening in school systems across the US--and younger people acclimate to reading electronic and digital texts, the market for print books will continue to fall.  So what can we do? Morrison notes some alternatives, like crowd-funding; advertising; and producing apps and paid blogs.  But the feasibility of this over the long term and for as large a group of writers (or people in any of the above fields) as has been the case is small. Exacerbating this is that authors many see great personal and immediate incentive to flee the established publishers, but ultimately it is the presence of a publishing ecology, of writers working with publishers and vice versa, that protects the value of writers' labor, at least to some extent, while also providing the larger network of jobs and opportunities that we think of in relation to publishing, some of which (like working in bookstores, independent, chain or otherwise) are rapidly disappearing.

There is also the possibility of a living wage for cultural producers, including writers, but as we have seen over the last 30 years, state-sponsored socialism, even in democratic socialist countries like the Scandinavian ones, is ever under assault, and there are the numerous real-world histories and examples of what occurs when the state underwrites: it wants a say in what's produced. Sometimes this is benign, but as the example of the Soviet Union demonstrated, it can be the exact opposite.  There is the much older patronage system, which will surely return as well: the rich, though no longer titled, will commission works as they see fit. The aesthetes among them may pay for works of the highest quality; the narcissists may seek works that flatter them most; the philistines may play at shocking their class; the ultramoralists and fanatics will try to bury anything that violates their creed.  We will also see what has already long been under way: children and people of privilege, who need not be concerned with or only tangentially worry about how they'll pay their bills, can choose whatever career they like, while those without a financial base can only play the lottery of career-making and hope some combination of talent, luck, charm, and appeal win them a space.

Murasaki Shikibu
紫式部
ukiyo-e by Suzuki
Harunobu (c.1767)

Morrison believes we have got a "generation" before the "writer" as a profession is completely done with, unless we take the political step of demanding that writers get paid a decent wage for their work. Lanier argues for a more subtle and potentially effective form of monetization. I look at both proposals and wonder how either, even if enacted in parts of Europe and Canada, say, could ever occur here. In a society now deeply suffused with neoliberal and libertarian ideology, no matter how much they've failed in reality, it will be very difficult to get people to consider anything of this sort. But perhaps not impossible. You--we--never know unless we try. The same is true for unions, for regulations in general, for any liberal--other than classical or neoliberal--and progressive approaches to the world around us. That is what I think. My conversations with scholars who attest to how difficult it is to publish their work in book form; with publishers who are quaking at the changes underway; and with fellow creative writers who are endlessly seeking out routes suggest that something is afoot.  In his response to Morrison, soon-to-be-published novelist Lloyd Shepard, disagrees with all of this depressing chatter. Some of what he says is true, and optimism is a better pill than pessimism, even facing what appears to be the worst.  Yet I agree with Morrison and Lanier that digitization will only increase as we go forward, and with it, the world as we've known it, including the world of books, will continue to change too.

He concludes plaintively:

I ask you to take the long view, to look a generation beyond where we are now, and to express concern for the future of the book. I ask you to vote that the end of "the book" as written by professional writers, is imminent; and not to be placated with short-term projections and enthusiasms intended to reduce fear in a confused market. I ask you to leave this place troubled, and to ask yourself and as many others as you can, what you can do if you truly value the work of the people formerly known as writers.

On this Labor Day, this is an important--you could say a crucial, but necessary, utterly necessary--charge. Let's get to it.

Computer Genius Arrested for Unauthorized Downloads of Scholarly Articles

Michael F. McElroy, Zuma Press, Newscom

Is "information" and "knowledge" on the internet ever free? Should it be, and what are the real costs to users, to people creating the information and knowledge, and to the systems that distribute it? Mores specifically, should access to specialized, valuable information and knowledge, of the kind you'd find in a scholarly journal hosted on a system like JSTOR, be free to everyone and not just subscribing institutions? If it's free, how are these journals and the people behind them stay afloat and receive adequate compensation for their efforts creating this knowledge and information? Beside all of this, if someone accesses this essentially privatized, walled-off information without permission, ostensibly for research, non-profitable purposes, should there be any penalties and if so, what should they be? If they access it to distribute it without permission and freely to others, should there be penalties and how harsh should they be?

There are only a few of the many questions raised by the case of Aaron Swartz, a young computer genius and former fellow at Harvard University's Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics, who, according to David Glenn's article in yesterday's Chronicle of Higher Education, is being investigated for having downloaded "4.8 million scholarly papers and other files from JSTOR." What complicates this issue, which might initially appear to be ethically complex depending upon your stance on "free internet/information" and "open culture" systems, is that Swartz allegedly downloaded the files via MIT's computer system, despite having no formal or informal affiliation with that institution. Swartz, who had access to JSTOR through his Harvard post, and who was arrested on January 6 of this year and could face 35 years imprisonment if convicted, allegedly entered MIT's Building 16 last fall and directly tapped into MIT's network via a wiring closet to access the articles. So heavy were his downloads, under the name "Gary Host" (i.e., GHost), that he tripped JSTOR's download monitor, eventually leading to a number of MIT IP addresses being blocked, and then, on October 9, to JSTOR's servers crashing because of the downloads' speed and volume. JSTOR subsequently cut off MIT's entire network for an unknown amount of time, before restoring it. Neither MIT nor JSTOR is giving specifics about this aspect of the case.

Further complicating the issue is that Lawrence Lessig, a leading legal scholar, critic of restrictive intellectual property laws, advocate of "open culture," directs the Safra Center, and in 2002 had employed Swartz, then 15, to help in the programming of Lessig's Creative Commons project (used by this blog and millions of others) to simplify copyrights for online work. Glenn notes that just this April Lessig, in a speech in Switzerland, decried publishers' paywalls, and has regularly lodged critiques of the legal delimitation of intellectual property, which is to say information and knowledge. Lessig even cited JSTOR in his April talk, pointing to a tweet "from a scholar who called JSTOR 'morally offensive' for charging $20 for a six-page 1932 article from the California Historical Society Quarterly."  He is not, however, commenting on Swartz's case but other figures like Boston-based computer scientist and MIT alum Richard Stallman, one of the major proponents of Open Source systems, have rallied to Swartz's defense.

It's still unclear what Swartz, who has since quit his Harvard post, planned to do with the huge cache of files. Was he planning to use them, as some of his peers suggest, for a research database that would have benefitted from that volume of documents, and if so, would it have been reasonable or just unfeasible for him to request financial research support from Harvard and outside sources, and permission from JSTOR? Was he planning to upload the files to unauthorized online repositories--"free" libraries, as it were--of scholarly materials, or analogous filesharing systems? Or might he have been planning both the public database project, which he has undertaken in the past, and free sharing of the files? Then there is the matter with MIT, with which, as I said, Swartz has no affiliation.  Though quite open with some of its resources--such as its Open Course modules, which make available syllabi, taped class sessions, podcasts, and other material free of charge to anyone who visits its website--MIT is a élite private university which like most private institutions does not allow unauthorized access to its research and other facilities or physical plant, so is it not reasonable for it to have taken steps to investigate and then have the authorities arrest someone who had broken into not just its computer system, but its physical plant? What's baffling is that at some point the Secret Service was called into the picture. I also wonder, as some of the people cited in the article do, whether MIT officials, many of whom have exceptional computer skills, might not have investigated and addressed the situation themselves, before calling in the authorities. Or did they?  And if they did, given the nature and scope of the crime, were their actions excessive, if they were involved in contacting the Secret Service?

A month or so ago I posted a review of Jaron Lanier's You Are Not a Gadget (Knopf, 2010), which is quite critical of the "free information"/"open culture" approach, which the book suggests negatively affects many people's ability to earn a living, among other things.  If nobody is willing to pay will anyone but a very few get paid?  Lanier, if I read him correctly, isn't an advocate of commercialization or mass paywalls, but contra Lessig he does worry about the effects of not having even a modest or moderate system and structure of monetization online, which would ensure compensation for intellectual work. Last December, I posted about Harvard University Librarian and historian Robert Darnton's critique of the exorbitant costs imposed by the current journal publishing system and its damaging financial effects on libraries. If a ultrarich institution like Harvard has to struggle with paying for access, and if scholars themselves are questioning the unaffordable and unsustainable system of access to knowledge in certain formats, what about others at institutions that cannot afford to pay or those without university or other private institutioanl affiliation?

As for Swartz, the young wunderkind has stated in a 2008 manifesto entitled "Guerilla Open Access," "We need to take information, wherever it is stored, make our copies and share them with the world....We need to download scientific journals and upload them to file sharing networks." This seems to be a hacktivist cri de coeur, a utopian perspective and approach I fully grasp and understand. It is part of the continuum that includes both Limewire and Wikileaks.  But it's a approach that puts him and many who have undertaken similar actions squarely in the crosshairs of the US and other federal governments, as well as private corporations, including publishers, and institutions that zealously seek to protect certain types of information, especially if classified or under copyrights. We know the penalties meted out against groups and individuals involved in unauthorized sharing of documents and downloading commercial music and films, but as MIT professor Chris Capozzola--who is also acting associate dean of the institute's School of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences--asks, was MIT response too much, and did it the Institute's "culture of breaking down barries"?  In the end between unauthorized filesharing with the threat of severe prosecution and rigid, unaffordable paywalls, aren't there other ways to proceed?

Lanier's arguments, like Darnton's articles and book on libraries, suggest there are, and perhaps the discussions around this particular case will lead to larger and more broadly engaged public discussions and debates that lead eventually to the development and implementation of alternate systems permitting both affordable monetization and the widest possible public access to the vital forms of knowledge contained in those articles Swartz downloaded. Meanwhile, Swartz's case continues.

Book Review: Jaron Lanier, "You Are Not a Gadget"

Jaron Lanier (Wikipedia)

If I were to summarize Jaron Lanier's You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2010), in a sentence, it might be: Freedom is more than the freedom to post your current meal on Facebook. To be fair, Lanier's book is a far more complex and nuanced reading of the contemporary digital world and social communications media than my epigram implies, but at the same time, it epitomizes at least part of his argument, which is that as computer hardware and software develop and advance, and social communications media grow ever more omnipresent, we are increasingly surrendering key aspects of our humanity, often without recognizing that we are doing so and far too often without resistance. Or, to put it another way, Lanier, one of the pioneering computer scientists of the late 20th century and a major figure in the field of virtual reality (VR), suggests that an anti-humanist perspective, which he does identifies as integral to the open culture/free internet ethos and cloud computing/hive mind approaches, has increasingly taken hold, to that extent that we are conforming ourselves to the whims of computers and computer software—and anti-humanist designs and perspectives—rather than the other way around.  We do not have to be gadgets or be unduly influenced by them, in other words.  Yet computers and social media are shaping us more so than vice versa, and Lanier, who takes frequent pains to note that he is not only not a Luddite or technophobe, but deeply embedded and implicated in the digital world's development, stresses repeatedly: this is a very serious problem.

One analogy Lanier gives for this is the development of the MIDI technology, which has revolutionized musical production over the last 30 years. It would be hard to imagine the digital music we listen to today without MIDI's foundation, yet Lanier suggests that this program, which developed based on the limitations of the piano keyboard, which is to say, a particular percussive instrument, cannot capture the auditory and sonic shadings of a violin, let alone a human voice, and it is hard to imagine the digital and digitized music that might be possible if MIDI had not become "locked in" as the dominant musical technology when it did.  The dangers of lock-in, not just in technological terms, but in social, political and economic terms, which are all intimately interlinked, underpins Lanier's larger argument. We are told constantly that Net's democratizing power is good thing, as it has opened up possibilities for far more people than ever to express themselves in ways they could not before to audiences they could not reach before. This undoubtedly is true. Lanier returns to the notion of the lock-in, however, in suggesting that as certain technologies—like Facebook, say, or Twitter or Wikipedia—become dominant, the alternative forms die off, standardizing, systematizing and normalizing certain types of expression in favor of others. The announcement earlier this year that blogging was falling off might provide an example, in that some creative bloggers had forsaken the expressive possibilities of that form for the more succinct—and standardized, and also firewall-privatized—spaces provided by Facebook, or even less text-heavy and more image-dominant blogging formats like Tumblr. Lanier, as a hortatory counterweight, presents a short list of recommendations that in one sense might serve to challenge the trends above, but at a more basic level imply a perhaps naïve, but I think necessary, spur towards a humanity that at times appears to be vanishing before our eyes.

The issue is not so much users—which is to say, consumers—as it is the people and corporations behind the cloud/free/open culture approach. Lanier offers series of cautionary thought experiments, beginning with the Turing Test, which I would boil down to our mistaken belief that computers can be human, or that we might not be able to tell the difference between the two—and MIT's Sherry Turkle, a longtime advocate of computer technology, has begun to sound warning bells of late about this very issue—and moves into related areas, invoking Franz Kafka and others, to argue that the cloud approach may appear superior to more individualistic and autonomous approaches, but history and reality suggests the converse. The cloud/hive mind, he points out, despite all its advocates' rhetoric, cannot resolve certain problems better than collective efforts led by skilled and talented individuals. Though he does not cite them, I thought immediately of countless literary works that no hive production could create (see again Kafka's "A Report to the Academy"), as well as triumphs like Andrew Wiles' solution of Fermat's Last Theorem or Grigori Perelman's brilliant proof of the Poincaré conjecture, which is not to say that computers cannot carry out calculations that it would take humans centuries to solve, but that the most powerful computers still cannot equal the human brain or human brains in concerted but structured effort. It also results, he suggests, in the sort of intellectually and philosophically muddled discourse of Wikipedia, which has become the preponderant online encyclopedia resource.

In its worst guises, Lanier argues the hive mind approach can spur or provide the conditions for the sort of anonymous contumely and cyberbullying that many critics have decried. Alongside these problems, the open culture approach taken to its extreme has resulted in the sort of piracy and demonetization of, and thus devastation of certain fields, some of which, like the music industry, have provided vital entertainment for decades, though others, like journalism, are key to our democracy and civic culture. At the same time, nostalgic reappropriation and recycling predominate over original aesthetic invention. In other words, as the open culture approach has negatively affected middle-class employment, we have increasingly rationalized theft and plagiarism, as well as artistic mediocrity, and, as we cede more information and individuality to the cloud and the corporations and wealthy, fortunate individuals who control them, we cede more social, economic and political power as well. The private has become public and privatized.

More than once Lanier describes the hardcore advocates of cloud and open culture approaches as "Maoist," which marked one of the places I most took issue with his argument. This line of argument arises out of his 2006 Edge article, "Digital Maoism," which critiqued the authority of collective wisdom and the erasure of individuality. On the one hand, he argues that a certain kind of Utopianism, though not exclusively leftist, has underpinned the conceptualizations of what we call the Internet and Web. On the other hand, however, he repeatedly discusses the role of corporations and their capacity to concentrate wealth, which is to say, capitalism, in the determining how we ultimately have come to experience the Net and Web. To Lanier the dogmatism of many key open culture advocates resembles Maoism, but as I read the almost continuous merging of the corporate and the individual, the commodification of every aspect of our lives and of our subjectivities, the reduction or transformation of our humanity into bytes geared primarily to be monetized on behalf of a very few, I think of something more along the lines of technofascism. What does it mean when corporations and the government are fused and working in cahoots to extract more and more information from us to convert it into greater powers both of surveillance and capitalization, the latter not to our individual or even collective benefit?

Lanier's fear is the old one of collectivization, whose multiple meanings he unfortunately fails to disarticulate. This leads him to push for political and economic approaches that would counter the trendlines we are now on, but it strikes me that many of these, such as Net neutrality and government support for and regulation of monetization, are progressive, rather than conservative or neoliberal. I wonder sometimes if we have gone too far, if it is ever going to be possible to, say, remonetize the net and regulate net use at a level that would make it truly affordable to everyone, prevent monopolization via cloud control by a few corporations or corporate-government entities, preserve privacy while also ending the worst aspects of anonymity, and champion the range of expressive, and most importantly, aesthetic, social and political possibilities, that the net promises. Lanier's book provides more than a few suggestions and thus marks a crucial starting point which all our government policy makers, as well as corporate net titans, should reference, and from which they should proceed.