Book Review – You Are Not a Gadget (Re-read)
Author: Jaron Lanier
Publisher: Vintage Books
Year: 2010
I first read this book in 2011. Thought it was interesting but maybe a bit alarmist. The internet was fine. Social media was fun. What was this guy so worried about?
Reading it again in 2025 I want to go back in time and slap myself.
Jaron Lanier — who helped invent virtual reality, who was there at the beginning of Silicon Valley, who knows these people and these systems from the inside — saw everything coming. Not the specifics but the trajectory. He understood that the decisions we were making about digital architecture would lock in and become permanent. That treating humans as data points would eventually make us act like data points.
The book is fifteen years old and it reads like it was written yesterday.
His critique of “the hive mind” — the way platforms aggregate human expression into statistical averages, flatten individual voices into “content,” reward conformity and punish originality — describes the internet we live in now. Twitter reducing all thought to 280 characters. TikTok’s algorithm deciding what creativity looks like. AI art trained on human labor, erasing the humans in the process.
Lanier was warning about AI before most people knew what AI was. Not killer robots. Something worse: systems that would make human contribution invisible. That would blur the line between human creativity and statistical recombination until we forgot the difference.
The writing is sometimes meandering. He’s a polymath with too many ideas and not all of them land. There are sections about music and economics and virtual reality that feel dated in their specifics. And his proposed solutions are vague — he knows what’s wrong but not exactly how to fix it.
But the diagnosis is prophetic. The chapter on “lock-in” — how early technological decisions become permanent because so much gets built on top of them — explains why we’re stuck with platforms that don’t serve us. The chapter on “digital Maoism” — his term for the cult of collective intelligence that erases individual achievement — describes the ideology driving the worst tech companies.
I don’t agree with everything. Lanier is more hopeful about capitalism than I am. He thinks better design can fix systemic problems. I’m less sure. But his humanist core — his insistence that people are not users, not data, not content — feels essential now.
Read this. Then look at your phone. Then feel bad. Then maybe do something different.
My rating: ★★★★☆