Dawn Of The New Everything
Jaron Lanier
I got this for Christmas a couple of years ago but didn’t get round to reading it. After trying an Oculus Quest and being really impressed I picked up this book to learn more. It’s a nice read, the tale of Lanier’s life and career interspersed with philosophical explainers of VR.
Beginnings
Lanier has a tough start - he loses his mother early and doesn’t fit in easily. He goes to a Montessori school in Ciudad Juarez and describes crossing the border as simpler then, before drug cartels and immigration politics took hold. There’s a passage where he is looking out of the window, lost in a complex imaginary world, but the teachers scold him for lack of focus.
He’s a tinkerer from an early age - he builds a halloween display with Theremin antennae - so you get some sense of how he became a pioneering engineer. I’ve seen this with other top engineers - Wozniak was building stuff as a kid, Zuck was programming games his friends would play. He drops out of secondary school and starts attending classes at the University of New Mexico as a teenager. He notes that the proximity of his home to the White Sand Missile Range gave him a community of talented scientists, engineers and tinkerers he could interact with.
He goes on to college in NYC (despite not getting a high school diploma), gets involved with an anti-nuclear movement and develops his love for music. He moves to California to pursue a relationship and ultimately winds up in Palo Alto.
Palo Alto
Once Lanier arrives in Palo Alto he quickly gets into the ‘hacker scene’. He describes it as a watershed:
“Beforehand I was a weightless rolling stone. When you’re a massless particle, you are light; the world exposes impressions as you flash through… when you alight in a place, you must deal with people for real. When you’re planted, you must also deal with yourself”.
This description of when he first arrives is great:
“I was expecting an enchanted place… instead, I found what looked like the most dispiriting parts of L.A. … low industrial buildings that we born ugly. It was in these lifeless places that Silicon Valley reinvented the world. Has there ever before been such an unaesthetic center of power and influence?“.
Suits vs Hackers:
”The first thing you need to know is that there are two main tribes, the hackers and the suits. Don’t trust the suits” … people were forming themselves into tribes, for no other reason than to find mutual distrust.
Agglomeration:
”This was our gathering place. We needed to stay close together, as there was not yet an internet, but we needed network effects… a hacker in Palo Alto was like a cue ball that spins in a fixed spot after knocking another ball into faraway action. We spun in place… while our momentum was transferred outward, reformatting the whole rest of the world.”
Coding before libraries:
”The experience was different than it is for coders today, because at that time you worked directly with the chip to get decent enough performance. That meant you weren’t dealing with languages, tools, or libs from other programmers. Everything important was fresh, entirely made of your own mind.”
Coding as mysticism:
”There is - or at least used to be an amazing feeling in the gut when code was correct. An incredible, almost messianic feeling. We used to talk about it with a bit of embarrassment, our hidden store of mysticism buried under a fortress of rationality. That experience of the apex of programming has become ever more elusive, because programs are no longer written by a single person; new programs of any importance are usually made by teams, and when they run, they’re spread out like moss grown upon myriads of preexisting software structures, which in turn aren’t even running on an identifiable computer, but instead roam secretly between the world’s uncharted, interconnected computers.”
Musings on the web
Lanier discusses his opinions on the WWW when it first emerged in the 90s. He viewed the “one-way” nature of links, where you couldn’t trace information back to its “original” source, since all you had to do was spin up a web page, claim the information or source was yours and off you went. This lack of verification made it easy to get going but easy to pirate and scam people too. The move towards blockchain technologies is partly getting back to what Lanier envisioned as better - a system where you could verify online information and content.
Lanier points out that “companies like Google and Facebook would make hundreds of billions of dollars for the service of partially mapping what should have been mapped from the start”.
On trolling:
”One of the consequences, first emerging in alt. Usenet groups, was an explosion of cruel nonsense, because nothing could be earned other than attention, and no one had a stake in being civil.