# You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto *By Jaron Lanier. Alfred A. Knopf (US), 2010.* > I did not read the whole book. The contents and page numbers come from an Open Library catalog record of the Knopf hardcover's printed table of contents, which I cross-checked against a publisher-authorized New York Times excerpt of Chapter 2. What the book argues comes from the audiobook's publisher description, the author's own Q&A page, a Guardian review, Zadie Smith's review in the New York Review of Books, an NPR segment and the Wikipedia article, as linked below. I read page text, not audio or video, and I make no claims about specific passages beyond what those pages quote. The source that mentioned the book, a StarTalk Plus episode note, names it only in a one-line bio of the guest. ## 1. Book facts | | | |---|---| | Title | *You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto* | | Author | Jaron Lanier | | Publisher | Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 2010 (US hardcover; I did not confirm the exact day). Vintage paperback: published Feb 8, 2011 (Penguin Random House page). UK: Allen Lane, 2010 (the Guardian review lists it at £20) | | ISBNs | US hardcover 9780307269645; Vintage paperback 9780307389978 (ISBN-10 0307389979); Allen Lane 9781846143410 (Open Library) | | Pages | Hardcover: ix + 209 (Open Library); the NYRB review lists "209 pp., $24.95". Vintage paperback: xiii + 223 (Open Library). The author's FAQ page says edited versions of his FAQ answers are "now found as a new last chapter in the paperback edition"; I did not check what else differs | | Language | English. A Brazilian Portuguese edition ("Gadget: Voce Nao e Um Aplicativo!") appears in Amazon search results | | Audiobook | Unabridged, 7 hr 35 min, read by Rob Shapiro (Penguin Random House Audio per Google Play; Audible release date Jan 12, 2010) | **Where it came up.** One mention: - [Neil deGrasse Tyson And Jaron Lanier on the AI Illusion](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a_ZKYH8v_do) (StarTalk Plus). My vault note on the episode lists the book in a one-line bio of Lanier, with *Who Owns the Future?*, *Dawn of the New Everything* and *Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now*. Vault note: [[Video Summaries/StarTalk Plus/Neil deGrasse Tyson And Jaron Lanier on the AI Illusion]]. I did not check whether the episode discusses the book itself. ## 2. Book resources **Free (legal).** The book is in copyright; these are library routes and publisher-authorized excerpts only. I did not link any unauthorized full-text copies that turn up in web searches. - **Libby/OverDrive.** The Los Angeles Public Library catalog lists an [ebook](https://www.overdrive.com/media/291999) and an [audiobook](https://www.overdrive.com/media/214255). You need a library card, and I did not check availability or wait times. Your own library may differ. - **Internet Archive controlled lending.** [youarenotgadgetm0000lani](https://archive.org/details/youarenotgadgetm0000lani) (and a [second scan](https://archive.org/details/youarenotgadgetm0000lani_c6c2)) are Knopf-edition scans. Open Library flags them as print-disabled, which means lending or accessibility access only, not open reading. I did not open the borrow page. - **Hoopla.** Its [search page](https://www.hoopladigital.com/search?q=you+are+not+a+gadget) loads, but I could not see availability from my box. - **Open Library:** [work OL9772922W](https://openlibrary.org/works/OL9772922W) and the [Knopf hardcover record](https://openlibrary.org/books/OL23391999M) (the one with the contents list). A second work record, [OL18755648W](https://openlibrary.org/works/OL18755648W), covers the Penguin/Allen Lane editions and the IA scan. - **Project Gutenberg.** Not available; the book is in copyright. - **Excerpt.** [Chapter 2 excerpt in the New York Times](https://graphics8.nytimes.com/packages/pdf/books/You-Are-Not-a-Gadget_excerpt.pdf) (book pages 24 to 26 as laid out in the PDF, "Excerpted with permission of Alfred A. Knopf, the publisher"). The author's page also lists a Harper's Magazine excerpt (subscribers). - **Author's own pages:** [web resources for the book](https://www.jaronlanier.com/gadgetwebresources.html), [FAQ](https://www.jaronlanier.com/gadgetcurrency.html) and [Q&A on the political and economic argument](https://www.jaronlanier.com/poleconGadgetqa.html). **Paid.** - Audiobook: [Audible, read by Rob Shapiro](https://www.audible.com/pd/You-Are-Not-a-Gadget-Audiobook/B0030UTJ72) (7 hr 35 min per Audible's [author page](https://www.audible.com/author/Jaron-Lanier/B00J1ZK6S6)); also [Google Play Books](https://play.google.com/store/audiobooks/details/Jaron_Lanier_You_Are_Not_a_Gadget?id=AQAAAACEwR7BiM). - Publisher page: [Penguin Random House, Vintage paperback](https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/97779/you-are-not-a-gadget-by-jaron-lanier/). - Amazon and Kindle: [Amazon page for the Vintage paperback (ISBN 0307389979)](https://www.amazon.com/dp/0307389979) responded, but I could not parse price, stock or format, so I have not checked Kindle availability. The OverDrive record lists Kindle among its library ebook formats, which is a loan, not a purchase. **Cover:** [Open Library cover image](https://covers.openlibrary.org/b/id/6291944-L.jpg) (US hardcover edition). ## 3. Author biography Jaron Lanier (born May 3, 1960, in New York City, raised in Mesilla, New Mexico) is a scientist, musician and writer best known for his work in virtual reality. He enrolled at New Mexico State University at 13. In 1985 he left Atari with Thomas Zimmerman to found VPL Research, the first company to sell VR goggles and wired gloves. He has worked at Microsoft since 2006 and at Microsoft Research since 2009; his own biography gives his title as "octopus". Honors on his site and Wikipedia include the 2014 Peace Prize of the German Book Trade, TIME 100 (2010) and Prospect's top 50 World Thinkers (2014). The audiobook description calls *You Are Not a Gadget* his "first book". His later books: *Who Owns the Future?* (2013), *Dawn of the New Everything* (2017), *Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now* (2018). Sources: [his biography page](https://www.jaronlanier.com/general.html); [Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jaron_Lanier). ## 4. Author interviews and talks The author's [resource page](https://www.jaronlanier.com/gadgetwebresources.html) lists dozens of reviews and interviews; I read the page text or description of each below, not audio or video. - **Random House Q&A on the book's political and economic argument.** [On the author's site](https://www.jaronlanier.com/poleconGadgetqa.html); questions were asked by Erinn Hartman of Random House. I read the opening answers. There Lanier says the book "is actually about what might best be called 'spirituality'" and that the material in the interview is what readers "seem to respond to first". - **NPR, All Things Considered, Feb 15, 2012.** [Should Facebook's Users Share Its Riches?](https://www.npr.org/2012/02/15/146944925/should-facebooks-users-share-its-riches) (4:15, Aarti Shahani). I read the transcript's start. Lanier says "I'm not in any sense anti-Facebook" and argues it would be in Facebook's self-interest to find a way to increase its users' wealth. The segment calls him "most recently author of 'You Are Not a Gadget'". It is an economic argument that later became *Who Owns the Future?* - **Bloggingheads.tv, with Robert Wright (recorded Feb 6, posted Feb 11, 2012).** [The conversation](https://bloggingheads.tv/videos/8903), also listed on the author's page as a Slate "Wright Show" item. The page's topic list includes "Is the Internet ruining humanity?", why Lanier does not use Facebook, and "Should Facebook be paying us?". I read the topic list only. - **Edge.org.** [Video and transcript "The Local-Global Flip"](https://www.edge.org/conversation/the-local-global-flip), which the author's page lists as an introduction to that idea. Page loads; not read in full. - **Others listed on the author's page.** PBS NewsHour (the link returned a 500 to my box), Tech Nation, KUOW, a New Yorker profile, MSNBC and others. I did not open them. The NYT, Atlantic and Economist links returned a 403 or 404 to my box. ## 5. Summary **What the book is (publisher description, as printed on the audiobook page).** "Jaron Lanier, a Silicon Valley visionary since the 1980s, was among the first to predict the revolutionary changes the World Wide Web would bring to commerce and culture." The description says the web's first designers "made crucial choices (such as making one's presence anonymous) that have had enormous—and often unintended—consequences", that these designs "quickly became 'locked in,'" and that sites such as Wikipedia, Facebook and Twitter are "elevating the 'wisdom' of mobs and computer algorithms over the intelligence and judgment of individuals". It also lists four claims: 1960s antigovernment paranoia shaped the online world and enabled trolling; file sharing is killing the artistic middle class; a belief in a technological "rapture" motivates influential technologists; and a new humanistic technology is needed. **The argument as described by others.** - Steven Poole's Guardian roundup calls it a "dazzling polemic" that springs "not from a morose Luddism but from an insistence that things ought to be made better". It says Lanier tears apart Silicon Valley's "cybernetic totalism" and "antihuman rhetoric", including the "wisdom of crowds", the elevation of the "cloud" over the individual and the "fragment" over the whole, "the fetish of 'free'", and the "wan acquiescence to the hegemony of advertising". It credits him with pointing to the contingency of technology history: personal computing "didn't have to be arranged around the concept of 'files'". Poole quotes the phrase "information is alienated experience" and Lanier's "cephalopod envy" and says the book also offers "intriguing ideas as to how things could be improved". - Zadie Smith's NYRB essay on the book and *The Social Network* ("Generation Why", Nov 25, 2010) says Lanier is interested in how people "reduce themselves" so a computer's description of them looks more accurate. It quotes "Information systems need to have information in order to run, but information underrepresents reality." Her paraphrase is that online social networks turn life into a database, which Lanier argues rests on a "philosophical mistake", that software is "not neutral", and that "lock-in" makes designs invisible and hard to change. She also quotes Lanier: "You have to be somebody before you can share yourself", and "Resist the easy grooves they guide you into." - Wikipedia's article on Lanier says the book criticizes the "hive mind" of Web 2.0 and calls the open-content expropriation of intellectual production "Digital Maoism". It says he criticizes Wikipedia and Linux, argues that open source does not create anything like the iPhone, and says that "the lords of the clouds" gain from luck as content concentrators. It adds that he criticizes the MIDI standard. I take these as reported, not checked against the book. **What the chapters cover.** Titles and page numbers (Knopf hardcover only, from the Open Library record of its printed contents). I confirmed that Chapter 2 starts on p. 24 against the NYT excerpt's page layout. Where I list what a chapter says, it comes from the source named; for the others I have only the title. - Preface (p. ix) - **Part One, What Is a Person? (p. 1)** 1. Missing Persons (p. 3). Title only. 2. An Apocalypse of Self-Abdication (p. 24). From the NYT excerpt: it introduces "cybernetic totalism", which "applies metaphors from certain strains of computer science to people and the rest of reality". It treats the Singularity, "an apocalyptic idea originally proposed by John von Neumann" and elaborated by Vernor Vinge and Ray Kurzweil, as a technologists' rapture ("Singularity books are as common in a computer science department as Rapture images are in an evangelical bookstore"). It says the Singularity and the Rapture "can never be verified by the living", and has a section "You Need Culture to Even Perceive Information Technology". There it takes on Kevin Kelly's claim that we no longer need authors and Chris Anderson's "The End of Theory" (Wired, June 2008), and says "A computer isn't even there unless a person experiences it." 3. The Noosphere Is Just Another Name for Everyone's Inner Troll (p. 45). Title only. - **Part Two, What Will Money Be? (p. 73)** 4. Digital Peasant Chic (p. 77). Title only. 5. The City Is Built to Music (p. 87). Title only; Wikipedia's note about MIDI may belong here, but I do not know the chapter. 6. The Lords of the Clouds Renounce Free Will in Order to Become Infinitely Lucky (p. 94). Title only. Wikipedia's "lords of the clouds" idea matches the title. 7. The Prospects for Humanistic Cloud Economics (p. 100). Title only. 8. Three Possible Future Directions (p. 108). Title only. - **Part Three, The Unbearable Thinness of Flatness (p. 117)** 9. Retropolis (p. 121). Title only. 10. Digital Creativity Eludes Flat Places (p. 133). Title only. 11. All Hail the Membrane (p. 138). Title only. - **Part Four, Making the Best of Bits (p. 149)** 12. I Am a Contrarian Loop (p. 153). Title only. 13. One Story of How Semantics Might Have Evolved (p. 158). Title only. - **Part Five, Future Humors (p. 175)** 14. Home at Last (My Love Affair with Bachelardian Neoteny) (p. 179). Title only. - Acknowledgements (p. 195); Index (p. 197). The Vintage paperback has a different page count (xiii + 223), so its page numbers will differ; per the author's FAQ it also has a new last chapter. **Reception (as reported by others).** The author's page says Time and the New York Times listed it among the year's best books and links the NYT review by Michiko Kakutani (403 to my box, unopened). Zadie Smith calls it "a short and frightening book" that "chimes with my own discomfort, while coming from a position of real knowledge and insight, both practical and philosophical". Poole's Guardian roundup is very favorable. I did not look for negative reviews, so this list is not balanced; the Audible author page, for instance, shows a 4.1 rating from 339 ratings and, among its sample reviews, one headlined "Naive, luddistic, and ultimately pointless". **Why it is here.** The StarTalk Plus note lists it in the guest's bio. The episode is about AI, which is a different topic from this book's. ## 6. Fact-check Overall verdict: **supported** for the publication facts. The arguments are the author's and reviewers' accounts, not my reading. | Claim | Verdict | Evidence | |---|---|---| | Knopf hardcover, 2010, ISBN 9780307269645, ix + 209 pages | Supported | Open Library record OL23391999M; the NYRB review lists 209 pp.; the NYT excerpt's footer carries the ISBN | | Vintage paperback ISBN 9780307389978, Feb 8, 2011 | Supported | Penguin Random House page | | Audiobook read by Rob Shapiro, 7 hr 35 min, unabridged | Supported | Audible author page and Google Play listing | | Table of contents (14 chapters in five parts) | Supported | Open Library contents record; a search-result snippet of another contents list matched; Poole's and Smith's references agree with chapter 2 | | Page numbers | Edition-scoped | Open Library record of the Knopf hardcover only; Chapter 2 start (p. 24) cross-checked against the NYT excerpt | | Library ebook and audiobook exist in OverDrive | Supported | Los Angeles Public Library catalog records | | Internet Archive lending copy | Print-disabled only | Open Library flag | | Paperback has a new last chapter | As stated by the author | His FAQ page; not checked against the book | | Book criticizes Wikipedia, Linux and MIDI; "Digital Maoism" | Unverified | Wikipedia's summary only; "Digital Maoism" is also the title of an earlier Lanier essay, and I did not check that it appears in the book | | Quotes ("You have to be somebody before you can share yourself"; "information underrepresents reality") | As quoted | Quoted in the NYRB essay; I did not check them in the book | ## 7. Citations and references - Author's pages: [Web resources for the book](https://www.jaronlanier.com/gadgetwebresources.html); [FAQ](https://www.jaronlanier.com/gadgetcurrency.html); [Q&A on the political and economic argument](https://www.jaronlanier.com/poleconGadgetqa.html); [Brief biography](https://www.jaronlanier.com/general.html). - Catalogs and listings: [Open Library work OL9772922W](https://openlibrary.org/works/OL9772922W); [edition OL23391999M](https://openlibrary.org/books/OL23391999M); [Vintage edition OL26232734M](https://openlibrary.org/books/OL26232734M); [Internet Archive](https://archive.org/details/youarenotgadgetm0000lani); OverDrive [ebook](https://www.overdrive.com/media/291999) and [audiobook](https://www.overdrive.com/media/214255); [Penguin Random House](https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/97779/you-are-not-a-gadget-by-jaron-lanier/). - Excerpt: [NYT-hosted Chapter 2 excerpt, courtesy of Knopf](https://graphics8.nytimes.com/packages/pdf/books/You-Are-Not-a-Gadget_excerpt.pdf). - Audio: [Audible](https://www.audible.com/pd/You-Are-Not-a-Gadget-Audiobook/B0030UTJ72); [Audible author page](https://www.audible.com/author/Jaron-Lanier/B00J1ZK6S6); [Google Play Books](https://play.google.com/store/audiobooks/details/Jaron_Lanier_You_Are_Not_a_Gadget?id=AQAAAACEwR7BiM). - Reviews and articles: [The Guardian, Steven Poole's non-fiction roundup, Feb 20, 2010](https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2010/feb/20/steven-pooles-nonfiction-roundup); [Zadie Smith, "Generation Why", NYRB, Nov 25, 2010](https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2010/11/25/generation-why/); [Wikipedia, Jaron Lanier (section on the book)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jaron_Lanier); [Wikipedia, Digital Maoism](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Maoism). - Interviews: [NPR, Feb 15, 2012](https://www.npr.org/2012/02/15/146944925/should-facebooks-users-share-its-riches); [Bloggingheads](https://bloggingheads.tv/videos/8903); [Edge, "The Local-Global Flip"](https://www.edge.org/conversation/the-local-global-flip). - Author: [Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jaron_Lanier) - Source: [Neil deGrasse Tyson And Jaron Lanier on the AI Illusion](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a_ZKYH8v_do)