You are not a Gadget: A Manifesto Read Free Page B

idealistic philosophy is realizable. Put a happy philosophy of life in software, and it might very well come true!
Technology Criticism Shouldn’t Be Left to the Luddites
    But not all surprises have been happy.
    This digital revolutionary still believes in most of the lovely deep ideals that energized our work so many years ago. At the core was a sweet faith in human nature. If we empowered individuals, we believed, more good than harm would result.
    The way the internet has gone sour since then is truly perverse. The central faith of the web’s early design has been superseded by a different faith in the centrality of imaginary entities epitomized by the idea that the internet as a whole is coming alive and turning into a superhuman creature.
    The designs guided by this new, perverse kind of faith put people back in the shadows. The fad for anonymity has undone the great opening-of-everyone’s-windows of the 1990s. While that reversal has empowered sadists to a degree, the worst effect is a degradation of ordinary people.
    Part of why this happened is that volunteerism proved to be an extremely powerful force in the first iteration of the web. When businesses rushed in to capitalize on what had happened, there was something of a problem, in that the content aspect of the web, the cultural side, was functioning rather well without a business plan.
    Google came along with the idea of linking advertising and searching, but that business stayed out of the middle of what people actually did online. It had indirect effects, but not direct ones. The early waves of web activity were remarkably energetic and had a personal quality. People created personal “homepages,” and each of them was different, and often strange. The web had flavor.
    Entrepreneurs naturally sought to create products that would inspire demand (or at least hypothetical advertising opportunities that might someday compete with Google) where there was no lack to be addressed and no need to be filled, other than greed. Google had discovered a new permanently entrenched niche enabled by the nature of digital technology. It turns out that the digital system of representing people and ads so they can be matched is like MIDI. It is an example of how digital technology can cause an explosive increase in the importance of the “network effect.” Every element in the system—every computer, every person, every bit—comes to depend on relentlessly detailed adherence to a common standard, a common point of exchange.
    Unlike MIDI, Google’s secret software standard is hidden in its computer cloud * instead of being replicated in your pocket. Anyone who wants to place ads must use it, or be out in the cold, relegated to a tiny, irrelevant subculture, just as digital musicians must use MIDI in order to work together in the digital realm. In the case of Google, the monopoly is opaque and proprietary. (Sometimes locked-in digital niches areproprietary, and sometimes they aren’t. The dynamics are the same in either case, though the commercial implications can be vastly different.)
    There can be only one player occupying Google’s persistent niche, so most of the competitive schemes that came along made no money. Behemoths like Facebook have changed the culture with commercial intent, but without, as of this time of writing, commercial achievement. *
    In my view, there were a large number of ways that new commercial successes might have been realized, but the faith of the nerds guided entrepreneurs on a particular path. Voluntary productivity had to be commoditized, because the type of faith I’m criticizing thrives when you can pretend that computers do everything and people do nothing.
    An endless series of gambits backed by gigantic investments encouraged young people entering the online world for the first time to create standardized presences on sites like Facebook. Commercial interests promoted the widespread adoption of standardized designs like the blog, and