Interviews with Jaron Lanier

A summary of:
Zaleski, J. (1997). The Soul of Cyberspace: How New Technology Is Changing Our Spiritual Lives. HarperEdge: New York.
Reflections part 2 – Interviews with Jaron Lanier

I’ll begin this post where I left off at the last one, i.e. with the idea that computers are what we make them. Lanier puts this in no uncertain terms: “Computers don’t exist, to put it bluntly. Computers are just a bundle of matter, and they act as computers by virtue of cultural ability to recognize them acting as computers. So we can make of them what we will…. We have a choice here” (139).

While we have a choice, Lanier explains that it is very easy to get stuck in familiar ways of thinking, particularly the more and more we engage with technology. He uses two helpful analogies. The first is that of a trolley system: “I think there are three different things that can happen. One is that you can be just wandering around on a place, another is that you can have a map. The third, and it’s what happens with computers, is that you install a trolley system and you can go only where the trolley is going. That’s much more analogous to what happens when you create culture using programs. / As soon as a computer program becomes your tool for creation, you can create only what was conceived of in the ideas embedded in the program. That’s the nature of programs. Programs are not the same thing as nature” (185).

Lanier uses another, more colorful analogy to explain that it is very difficult to be creative (thinking outside of the box) when you are confined to the ‘box’ of the rules of computer programs: “When you try to do creative work by playing with computer programs that embed your own ideas or someone else’s ideas, it’s a little bit like hooking up a tube between your anus and your mouth to get nutrition. What you’re doing is, you’re recycling ideas instead of contacting nature and exploring it. That’s the difference between playing with musical instruments and using computers” (147).

What is this “contacting nature” business all about? Here it is again: “Essentially, if you try to do science without going back to nature, all you’re doing is reexploring human ideas that have been set down in a computer, and amplified by the simulation. So what you’re really doing is, you’re self-glorifying your own ideas that have been set down. It’s a little bit like taking a little poem that you wrote and then putting it up in a huge marquee in lights and saying, ‘Oh, wow, that’s really wise.’ It might be, or it might not be, but the point is that you’re blinding yourself. Essentially, a simulation takes a starting human idea that somebody had and amplifies it, and it looks more impressive” (148).

And again: “The way you get off the trolley system is by directly contacting the mysteries of nature. There’s nothing wrong with the trolley system as long as you get off. The problem, the nerd way of using the trolley system, to carry this metaphor on, is to stay on it all the time” (186).

Is this a useful way of defining spirituality? – making contact with (the mysteries of) nature? I suppose part of what Lanier is getting at is the sort of intangibility of reality – that we live in a constantly unfolding reality, of which we are co-creators but can never fully grasp because of its awesome complexity. This gets back to exactly what Lanier was saying about computers being a construct of our imaginations, a subjective thing. As he says, “If you think of the computer as only a conduit between people, you don’t run into this problem at all, because then you’re dealing with it as a conduit between minds. As soon as you treat the computer as an objective thing – as a real instrument, like a real person, as something that stands by itself – you run into this problem, you connect the tube to the wrong hole” (147). This almost energetic transference would be one of those mysteries of nature, and we ought to tap into that energy if we wish to do anything truly worthwhile – in a spiritual way, perhaps – with our technology.

Lanier is the Big Daddy of virtual reality, so of course he has opinions about how this relates to VR. “One way to think about a computer,” he says, “is that it’s a conduit between people. It’s a communication technology in which people can create miniature worlds that are models of things inside themselves in order to have a new form of communication in which they make up a shared objective reality in simulation instead of passing symbols between each other exclusively” (139). I really like this notion of trying to represent something “inside” yourself, because for the most part, I think that where VR and social networking and the like has failed thus far is that it only caters to representation of surface or external qualities of ourselves, e.g. Avatars that look like us, or Profiles where we fill in biographical information. But the other key aspect of this quote is that Lanier is challenging us to do great things with technology, rather than simply simulate our world. This, in fact, is the difference between someone who can draw what they see (someone who in Ellul’s terms would have mastered la technique) and a true artist, who can capture the ineffable. The latter would be spiritual, and Lanier argues that it should be the goal of technological development: “The potential does not lie, ever, in simulating something in the physical world. Because it will always either be done poorly, or if it seems it’s not being done poorly, it means you’re fooling yourself, as in the case of the music example, or this evolution-simulation example. If it seems like the (148) computer is simulating the real world, well, it just means that you’ve lost touch. / The right way to use computers is to use them to simulate alternate worlds, together with other people, as a form of communication” (149).

I struggle to think of examples where we have realized this potential on the Internet. But I can think of many where we are doing poor simulations. Facebook, for example, fosters simulated friendships which, I think we would all agree, pale in comparison to the real. We should not be content to think that this is all we can achieve with our technology, though! While it’s a far more difficult challenge – and one that may take a flash of artistic brilliance, an epiphany – we ought to be striving to create entirely new opportunities for us to think, see, communicate; and we’ll know it when we see it, just as we feel when a truly great painting moves us. This is the spiritual.

The challenge now is that computers exist within a framework that reinforces thinking about them as objective ‘things’, as the evolution of rational Western thought which is increasingly materialistic, pushing the soul and the spirit out of the picture. This makes it difficult to understand our current creations in new spiritual ways, because they were not created from a worldview that allows for this type of thinking. As Lanier himself says, “I think of virtual reality as a Western (142) idea, I make sense of it within the Western framework…. I think that the quest for the universal cultural framework that can contain everything is futile. So I don’t feel a need to try to explain prana in virtual reality. I use a different set of categories to explain virtual reality that don’t include prana. In my life, I certainly think in the larger framework that does include it” (143). To me, this means that we cannot succeed in making ‘slightly more spiritual technology’ if the underlying structure is not radically altered. We have to make “spiritual technology”, not “more spiritual technology”.

The key might lie in uncoupling technology from information. In our minds, they are the same. And immediately, information creates the alienation that would be the distancing of ourselves from (the mysteries of ) nature. Lanier explains, “…information is alienated experience. So, nothing ever goes over the wires whatsoever. But it can be whatever we wish it to be…. These are things we make up, like language” (157). His mission, therefore, is this: “What I’m trying to do is to save Western culture from being destroyed by information” (180).

In conclusion, all of Lanier’s discussions on what technology should be exposes his own spirituality which fits precisely with what Heelas et al described as the ‘subjective turn.’ In other words, Lanier is calling for a turn toward the subjective in our thinking about technology, which will thus lead to more glorious developments which nourish us in ways that technologies produced within an objective paradigm do not. This is perhaps best exemplified by Lanier’s “syncretic creation myth”. In this myth, as technology gets developed further and further along the lines it’s being created now, ‘experience’ gets squeezed out, until finally people can stand it no longer. “So they convened an emergency meeting about their lack of experience…. And as they knew there would be, there was only one solution: They got all of their machines and they put them in a great bonfire and destroyed them” (196). Call it ‘experience’, ‘subjectivity’, or ‘spirituality’, the lesson is that we need to pay attention to these needs, or else one day we will wake up to find that we are living in a prison of our own technological creations.