Jaron Lanier. Image via Wikipedia
On Tuesday morning, Nouriel Roubini tweeted a very interesting interview with influential high tech pundit Jaron Lanier. Lanier might look like nothing more than a dreadlocked Rasta, but he was named one of Time Magazine's 100 most influential people in the world last year. His bestseller “You Are Not a Gadget" was published in 2010 and was named one of the 10 best books of the year by Michiko Kakutani in The New York Times. Janier writes and speaks on numerous topics, including high-technology business, the social impact of new technology, the philosophy of consciousness and information and Internet politics. In an interview with online magazine The Edge on Monday, Lanier talked about Apple and Google, and the future of media content generation.
Here are some excerpts from The Edge:
The Apple idea is that instead of the personal computer model where people own their own information, and everybody can be a creator as well as a consumer, we're moving towards this iPad, iPhone model where it's not as adequate for media creation as the real media creation tools, and even though you can become a seller over the network, you have to pass through Apple's gate to accept what you do and your chances of doing well are very small. It's not a person to person thing, it's a business through a hub, through Apple to others, and it doesn't create a middle class, it creates a new kind of upper class. Google has done something that might even be more destructive of the middle class, which is they've said, "Well, since Moore's law makes computation really cheap, let's just give away the computation, but keep the data." And that's a disaster. If we enter into the kind of world that Google likes, the world that Google wants, it's a world where information is copied so much on the Internet that nobody knows where it came from anymore, so there can't be any rights of authorship."
