Jaron Lanier: The Internet Destroyed the Middle Class
12th May 2013
I am not inclined to trust in the intellectual capacity of a white guy who wears his hair like he wishes he were a black guy, but you never know.
Jaron Lanier is a computer science pioneer who has grown gradually disenchanted with the online world since his early days popularizing the idea of virtual reality. “Lanier is often described as ‘visionary,’ ” Jennifer Kahn wrote in a 2011 New Yorker profile, “a word that manages to convey both a capacity for mercurial insight and a lack of practical job skills.”
Perhaps that’s why I’ve never heard of him.
Raised mostly in Texas and New Mexico by bohemian parents who’d escaped anti-Semitic violence in Europe, he’s been a young disciple of Richard Feynman, an employee at Atari, a scholar at Columbia, a visiting artist at New York University, and a columnist for Discover magazine. He’s also a longtime composer and musician, and a collector of antique and archaic instruments, many of them Asian.
In other words, a Child of the Crust. I dislike him already.
His book continues his war on digital utopianism and his assertion of humanist and individualistic values in a hive-mind world.
And of course nothing says ‘I’m an individualist and war against a hive-mind world’ like a white guy wearing dreadlocks. No shit.