Books in Brief — Jaron Lanier: Dawn of the New Everything

My Copy

• Read Duration: 3 days
• Author: Jaron Lanier
• Year: 2017
• Genre: Non-Fiction
• Sub-Genre: Technology-> Virtual Reality. Autobiography.
• First sentence: It was late 1980s, and a large envelope with a formidable DO NOT X-RAY sticker had just been dropped through the slot of the front door of a tech startup in Redwood, California. (Preface)
• Top 10 Highlights:

1. I was an intense dreamer. Often I would find myself taking on the identity of a cloud rolling over a mountainside or of a mountainside itself feeling villages spread on its skin over the course of centuries, the stone cathedrals pressing into my flesh while the farmers tickled me.
2. Through VR, we learn to sense what makes physical reality real. We learn to perform new probing experiments with our bodies and our thoughts, moment to moment, mostly unconsciously.
3. ..How will people modify the sensorimotor loop through which we know and affect our world? Digital culture is all about modifying that loop, and Kinect hack videos mostly showed quirky twists.
4. It is a canonical cultural event of our times: coming up with a twist on our causal connection to reality and demoing it with digital devices. VR demos are like humor, opening up one’s thinking a little bit.
5. A good scriptwriter never tries to make the hero perfect, and yet we technologists often make the rookie mistake of trying to present our technologies as pristine.
6. VR makes people curious and there can be no more important function for a technology.
7. I argued that making music “free” would just result in no one being able to make a living when automation would eventually advance.
8. The key point is that digital idealism took a turn for the absurd around 1990. We started to organize our digital systems around bits instead of people, who were the only agents that made bits mean a thing.
9. The emotions of VR cut deeper than a thirst for novelty. People wrestle within walls that surround our short lives, so able to imagine, but so limited in our abilities to act. Technology is the pounding of our heads against those walls, and we do at least make dents.
10. In addition to exploring distant star systems, we might also imagine that in the future we’ll find ways to know each other better. Since we’re fundamentally creative, that process would never end. We’d become more interesting as we become more known.
11. (BONUS): Be tactically pessimistic and strategically optimistic.

My Blurbs:

1. One of the pioneers of Virtual Reality, Jaron Lanier takes you deep into the concept of VR, entrepreneurial struggles in new technology and tech culture — with humility and passion.
2. He makes you want to try that VR headset and begin messing with reality.