Reality and beyond
Virtual reality, or VR, is the “stage magic” of technology, observes Jaron Lanier in his new professional memoir, “Dawn of the New Everything” — the multiplication of technical effects to transport the beholder from the everyday to a simulacrum of another reality. Like producing a rabbit from a hat, it also comes with a certain integrity: The audience, when it dons VR goggles, knowingly submits to artifice. VR thus confers a rare superpower on its creators. “People who make a living creating illusions know illusions,” writes Lanier. “VR scientists are the illusionists of science; we’re honest when we tell you we’re fooling you, and you should take us seriously when we point out that we’re not the only ones.”
Lanier has created his own franchise assailing what he sees as the illusory thinking of many of his fellow technologists and its implications for us non-techies obliged to transact much of our lives inside their products. In “You Are Not a Gadget” (2010) and “Who Owns the Future?” (2012), he skewered the often-whimsical considerations behind software design that box us in, foreclose on possibilities. And he staged a takedown of what’s become an article of faith among many in the tech community: the conviction that a quickening in technological progress presages a “singularity” — the emergence of a monolithic self-sustaining robotic mind uncoupled from humans. Elevated to the status of religion, this teleology denigrates us and warps development of technology away from our needs, Lanier warned.
A substrate of his work is faith in human agency: Source code is not destiny — today’s technological firmament is the product of manmade decisions, often governed by immediate exigencies or pet philosophies, that may be reversed, or at least modified. In this vein, “Dawn of the New Everything” spirits us back to a time when a plurality of ideas about what the Internet could be were still in play. Thus, it traces the provenance of the organizing principles of the Web we live with today. “I’m laying down breadcrumbs for you to follow,” writes Lanier, “to get a sense of how we got where we are.”
It’s also an account of the making of a digital humanist. Besides the oblique vantage point afforded by VR, Lanier is marked by a decidedly unconventional upbringing.
Reeling from the death of his mother growing up in New Mexico, he was tasked by his father with designing a new home, devising a structure resembling an earthbound Starship Enterprise replete with icosahedrons and nine-sided pyramids. Skipping high school, he took music, math and programming classes at New Mexico State University, then, following sojourns at art school and as a musician in New York City, washed up in Silicon Valley in the early 1980s. In short order, Lanier found himself, as the author of a successful video game, with the means to pursue his passion project. It was far removed from gaming’s closed systems; he envisioned an immersive open-ended form of computer-mediated reality. By 1984, it was technologically feasible, at least rudimentarily, and with fellow enthusiasts (“veeple”) he founded VR’s first startup, VPL Research.
Lanier was CEO, enfant terrible and hacker in chief. Early commercial applications included surgery simulation alongside off-the-wall projects like virtual musical instruments, “erotic wearables” and “nonhuman avatars.” The technology captured the imagination in a way the latest spreadsheet did not, and Lanier was cast as a kindof trip-master, demoing VR to a steady stream of VIPs, including Steven Spielberg, Brian Eno, Al Gore and Yoko Ono. Later, psychedelic guru Timothy Leary glommed on to the burgeoning Burning Man-like “scene,” extolling VR as “the new LSD” (a view from which Lanier vigorously dissents).
A breezy read “Dawn of the New Everything” is not. Baggy, unkempt and idiosyncratic as its author, it pulses with kaleidoscopic insight, recondite science and deeply felt opinions — a rejoinder to singularity-struck “digital supremacist[s].” It also contains some of the more artful, numinous writing you’ll find on technology.
Lanier explains “haptics,” the whole-body sensation of touch and texture that VR attempts to simulate, as “a kiss, a cat on a lap, smooth sheets, and corduroy desert roads.” Elsewhere, he notes our underdeveloped vocabulary for haptics: “What is the desirable feel of smartphone glass? Smooth, of course, but a sink is also smooth. It’s cool-smooth, slidey-smooth, with just a bit of give, at the edge of sensation, and just a bit of grab so that you don’t slide on it like ice. What is the word for that?”
In the 1980s and ’90s, Lanier emerges as a figure (albeit a heretic) in the nascent Bay Area cyberculture. In his telling, we have this milieu to thank for today’s Internet exceptionalism: the peculiar friction-free “weightlessness” of the Web as an arena where concepts like intellectual property and civility that govern our dealings in the physical realm have no purchase. In its idealism, libertarian ethos and concern with equity, the movement was instrumental in ideas, such as the primacy of personal privacy (but not of private property), codified in the Web’s design, he notes. The features it endorsed — for example, free email and unidirectional linking (sanctioning permission-free copying) — fanned the Web’s hypergrowth, but saddled us with problems — spam, trolling, the gutting of once-vital creative industries and online balkanization, he adds.
In “Who Owns the Future?” Lanier proposed a bold scheme to re-engineer the Internet with “automated micropayments” for the masses as recompense for content and data contributed to the digital commons. Such “sustainable economics” would restore “economic dignity,” resurrect flagging middleclass fortunes and counter the disproportionate wealth corralled by “Siren Servers” like Google and Facebook, he wrote. Here, he reiterates the case for online “gravity.” By limning his own history in virtual reality, Lanier offers a vision for an enhanced reality for everyone — if only, he adds, the engineers would wake up from their reveries about magic robots and we all would wake up from our magical thinking that the Internet is a place where age-old human conventions somehow shouldn’t apply.
Stephen Phillips is a freelance writer whose work has appeared in the Atlantic, Los Angeles Times, Financial Times and South China Morning Post, among other publications. Email: books@ sfchronicle.com