Comments on: “You Are Not a Gadget” — Why Open Culture and Technocentric Philosophies Are Ruining Our Lives

By: “Tabnapping” and Other Nonsense | David Merrick

“Tabnapping” and Other Nonsense | David Merrick — Fri, 04 Jun 2010 09:03:57 +0000

[...] and turned it off. The part of the story that the article neglects to mention is that it took him two teams and four years in a controlled laboratory environment to study how to use technology to kill senior [...]

By: Identity and Identification « Clyde Street

Identity and Identification « Clyde Street — Fri, 28 May 2010 06:45:16 +0000

[...] You Are Not a Gadget (Kent Anderson, Scholarly Kitchen) raised some fascinating ideas about “participation in social media and electronic commerce, especially the centrality advertising is gaining in the culture developing around online identity” prompted by Jaron Lanier’s You Are Not a Gadget. [...]

By: Monkeys vs. Robots: The Mysteries of Identity in the Age of Facebook « The Scholarly Kitchen

Sun, 23 May 2010 20:55:03 +0000

[...] discussed here before Jaron Lanier’s insights about the extended childhoods the force-fit of social media is creatin…, who never lose touch with each other and might have something closer to a single identity. This [...]

By: If I were a gadget, I’d be a PC « The Cutting Room Floor

If I were a gadget, I’d be a PC « The Cutting Room Floor — Wed, 12 May 2010 22:42:33 +0000

[...] what got me thinking about it was a February blog post that I recently came across from the Scholarly Kitchen, the blog of the Society for Scholarly Publishing. It was a book review of Jaron Lanier’s [...]

By: Publishing Talks David Wilk interviews Kent Anderson of Scholarly Kitchen. | WritersCast

Tue, 09 Mar 2010 06:21:36 +0000

[...] latest book, called You Are Not a Gadget, that Kent recently reviewed in depth in the Scholarly Kitchen, a book that raises a number of really interesting concerns about the way the open online economy [...]

By: Orbiting the Google — A Gravitational Pull Affecting Our Lives and Thinking « The Scholarly Kitchen

Thu, 04 Mar 2010 10:42:49 +0000

[...] center of Web thinking these days, whether it manifest itself in attention economy for scholars, the pernicious effects of digital apologists, the vanishing middle-class of information workers, the belief that free content can be [...]

By: David Crotty

David Crotty — Fri, 26 Feb 2010 03:56:02 +0000

Well, the Maoism piece was his first public salvo, from 2006. His thinking has evolved somewhat since then, though the themes are similar. The WSJ piece was written in conjunction with his current book.

By: Kirill

Kirill — Fri, 26 Feb 2010 00:18:40 +0000

David – I did read the “Digital Maoism”: thanks for posting those links. If his book is in the same style, the chances are I am not going to bother, I think I got his (not very complicated) message.

By: Kent Anderson

Kent Anderson — Thu, 25 Feb 2010 17:29:01 +0000

Agree.

By: Kent Anderson

Kent Anderson — Thu, 25 Feb 2010 17:28:19 +0000

I think this is too far a shift of meaning into “secret”. Lanier’s point is that some things are naturally obscure (in which cupboard I keep the peanut butter) while not being secret (corner cupboard to the right of the sink — not secret, but still obscure enough that I’m not worried about you stealing my two, count ‘em, two jars of peanut butter). Technologists are making things non-obscure that people assume are obscure (e.g., where I am right now) and not thinking through the implications. Also, they assume things that are obscure aren’t secure, which is not logically true, especially for short periods of time. So they over-engineer things. In essence, they get it wrong both ways — revealing things they shouldn’t, securing things that don’t need it. Of course, users are also foolish for divulging their locations and all that jazz, but as you state, that’s a question of points of failure. If the technologists weren’t enabling all this as if it were all fine and dandy, people could behave as they always have.