Jaron Lanier is that rarest of rare birds — an uber-geek who is highly critical of the world created by the technology he helped to create. Now 52, he first came to prominence in the 1980s as a pioneer in the field of "virtual reality" — the development of computer-generated environments in which real people could interact. Ever since then, he has attracted the label of "visionary," not always a compliment in the computer business, where it denotes, as the New Yorker memorably put it, "a capacity for mercurial insight and a lack of practical job skills."
In person, he looks like central casting's idea of a technology guru: vast bulk, informal attire, no socks, beard and dreadlocks. Yet he also has good people skills. He's friendly, witty, courteous and voluble. His high-pitched voice belies his physical bulk and he giggles a lot. He's a talented musician who is widely read and he writes accessible and sometimes eloquent prose. His latest book — "Who Owns the Future?" — is a sobering read for anyone who worries about what cultural critic Neil Postman called "technopoly" — the belief the primary goal of human labor and thought is efficiency and that technical calculation is superior to human judgment.
Lanier's been thinking along these lines for a while. An earlier book of his — "You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto" — argued that the Internet was eroding human interaction, stifling creativity and changing us as people. Lanier was particularly scathing about remix culture, which he viewed as not only ethically dubious but also self-defeating in the long run. If we have a world in which original artists cannot earn a living from their work, ultimately we will run out of stuff to remix.