I was first exposed to Lanier's take on the world earlier this year when I picked up a copy of his first book, You are not a gadget, at an airport bookstore. It's a difficult book to criticize, because it contains so many leaps of logic and bizarre conclusions that it's difficult to know where to begin. So I'll just focus on a couple of its more notable brain twisters.
1. He spends a huge amount of time criticizing a group he terms variously "cybernetic totalists" and "digital Maoists", but he never defines this group clearly enough so that you could determine who its members are. The closest he gets is when he says it's
"composed of folks from the open culture/Creative Commons world, the Linux community, folks associated with the artificial intelligence approach to computer science, the web 2.0 people, the anticontext file sharers and remashers, and a variety of others."
Notice how vague these sub-groups are ... what's a "web 2.0 person", for example? How would you know if you are one? For that matter, who are the "folks from the open culture/Creative Commons world"? ... would that include anyone who ever released anything under an open source or Creative Commons license? Forget "cybernetic totalists" for the moment - what would constitute evidence of membership in any of these these sub-groups?
He further muddies the waters by saying "Not every member of the groups I mentioned subscribes to every belief I'm criticizing." Then later in the book Lanier affirms that he himself is not anti-open source, and says "I frequently argue for it in various specific projects."
So, who's a "cybernetic totalist"? Assuming Lanier is not calling himself a cybernetic totalist, then it can't simply be someone who belongs to any of the groups identified in his non-definition, since Lanier says he advocates (situationally) for open source software, which makes him a member of the open culture movement. But membership isn't restricted only to people who belong to all of the sub-groups either (the "not every member of the groups ... subscribes to every belief" clause). So it turns out that it's pretty much impossible to determine who qualifies as a cybernetic totalist, which makes it a pretty useless classification 1.
Although that doesn't stop Lanier from throwing the term "cybernetic totalist" around like it's a widespread conspiracy, one comes away with the impression that it's just his way of conveniently labelling and dismissing anyone he disagrees with, to avoid having to seriously engage with their arguments.
2. A jaw-dropping example of his failure to engage with, or even understand, the subject of his critique comes in a later section of the book, where, having expended much energy criticizing the Creative Commons he comes out with this:
"why won't Creative Commons provide an option along the lines of this: Write to me and tell me what you want to do with my music. If I like it, you can do so immediately. If I don't like what you want to do, you can still do it, but you will have to wait six months. Or, perhaps, you will have to go through six rounds of arguing back and forth with me with me about it, but then you can do whatever you want. Or you might have to always include a notice in the mashup stating that I didn't like the idea, with my reasons."
So, from this I glean that Jaron Lanier has written a 200 page book, heavily critical of the Creative Commons, without ever bothering to look up the definition of a commons. In case anyone else is unsure, a commons consists of resources that are held in common by members of society, not held privately. The "Creative Commons" license Lanier is asking for does not create any sort of commons; it simply asserts his private property rights over his music. And he doesn't need a license for that, because his private property rights are already enforced by copyright law. The terms he's proposing for his "licence" are virtually identical with the standard process for requesting reuse of a work that's under copyright: you have to ask the rights holder for permission, who can choose to allow (or not) reuse of their work and/or impose conditions on how the work is used.
I could go on giving examples like the two above; the book is filled with them. But I'll stop myself here. Not recommended ...
1. Lanier gave a completely different, and much clearer definition of "cybernetic totalist" in an essay he wrote back in 2000, One Half a Manifesto. Bizarrely though there is little to no overlap between what he identified then as the component beliefs of cybernetic totalism and the groups he associates with that term in You are not a gadget. Or to put it another way, if he honestly thinks that "folks from the open culture/Creative Commons world" typically believe that "people are no more than cybernetic patterns" or "that qualitative as well as quantitative aspects of information systems will be accelerated by Moore's Law" it's up to him to prove it.