It's difficult to imagine the ways that the internet, and computers themselves, could have been different if it wasn't for the preferences of a handful of designers a few decades ago. Jaron Lanier, currently a researcher for Microsoft, has a better idea than most. He was creating immersive virtual worlds back in the 80s, and as an original member of the Silicon Valley set, he's got plenty of stories to tell about how the earliest Macs were created without files and how web architecture hasn't changed much since Tim Berners-Lee linked up a small community of physicists in the early 90s.
The fact that the web's current form wasn't inevitable means that it's possible to ask if it's working for us, and tinker with it if it's not. Lanier's no luddite, but he's a passionate critic of web 2.0: not just Facebook and Twitter, with their distracting streams of unfiltered thoughts, but Wikipedia, file sharing and "citizen journalism" too. He's worried that America is losing its creative middle class, and dividing itself between a minuscule number of "computing cloud overlords", who spy on traffic to sell ads, and a vast majority of "digital serfs" uploading content for free.
If copying content was made impossible and users paid a small fee to access a digital book, song, film or newspaper, perhaps the UK and US could hold on to their status as leaders of creative industry, he contends. Otherwise, with China manufacturing our goods, India manning our helpdesks and machines doing our grunt work, our kids might not have many decent job options.
Lanier's economic argument is designed to scare, but not so much as his argument that web 2.0 – with its anonymously written wikis and multiple-choice expressions of personality on Facebook – is eating away at our very souls. The phrase "hive mind" is thrown around a lot, as is "digital Maoist", especially in discussions of Google founder Larry Page, who (according to Lanier) thinks the internet itself will become conscious. While Lanier is clearly very well-informed about IT, the social and spiritual strand of the book (republished now in paperback, but also available in electronic form) can't help but rely more on intuition, and it's tempting to dismiss it as the anxiety of an ageing innovator. But Lanier would no doubt relish the debate: he seems less interested in lecturing than in challenging readers to come up with their own version of a better future.
