New book coming later this month. kleinbl00
- “It does give me this feeling sometimes that something’s going wrong with our culture in Silicon Valley and maybe it’s just that thing of power corrupting and absolute power corrupting absolutely, just losing perspective. Like Zuckerberg might think, ‘Well, I went around to a bunch of states and I ate barbecue and wrestled cattle so I’ve been around all kinds of people.’"
Good to see someone talking to Jaron again. He's a very interesting dude, who looks at the world through this interesting crack in the facade; like a desktop globe with a cut in it, he sees interesting shit inside, but not all of it. I was fortunate enough to be in his circle of friends around the time he sold the PowerGlove tech to Nintendo, and came into very very large buckets of cash. The best thing was that it didn't change who we was, essentially, at his core, which was a computer tinkerer, electronics geek, with a decidedly non-conformist view of the world. He, Stuart Brand (of the Whole Earth Catalog/Network), and Cliff Stoll (writer of The Cuckoo's Egg), were all a part of this odd group of thinkers who are still relevant today, and have been talking about the confluence of tech and humanity for a long time.
Jaron's books? Not my cup of tea. He is smart, and sees the grand sweep of things, while also knowing the pinouts on a 68000 processor chip by memory. I enjoy his broad vision, but not his tendency to get into the little details. It's a bit too much, when someone gives me a big beautiful sausage full of flavor, and then immediately drags me down into the factory to see it made. Let just enjoy this for a bit, alright? :-) Cliff Stoll is kinda the opposite. He is so manic, that all he has is details, and he delivers them in a fascinating way. (I need to go back and read that book again, now that it is 30 years later...)
I had the dumbest idea- as a Jaron, I want to interview everyone in the world named Jaron. I've always had a pet theory that people Jaron seem to be disproportionately eccentric and spaced around so that most people only know 1 Jaron in person at a time. Maybe a website where I ask Jarons to fill out a form of stock interview questions? I just don't know if Jaron Lanier would approve.
You joke, but those are gonna be why he gets elected to the presidency in 2020. Why else would he, a once-vocal atheist, start talking publicly about the value of religion? It's common knowledge that to win elections in the United States you must espouse a belief in God. It doesn't have to translate to any religiously indicated or pro-social real-world behaviors, but you do have to say the words.
It occurred to me I might be pretty naive - I just thought that it's nice that he's willing to acknowledge the Bowling Alone effect that Facebook has propagated.