A tech futurist, researcher and writer, he is well placed to act as guide to the world described in Dawn of the New Everything ... Compared to today’s social media — which Lanier, no fan, sees as sterile and Pavlovian — VR would be a place to truly encounter others, stripped of the limitations of the everyday persona ... Lanier, however, is an engaging guide, and readers will find themselves wishing that he is right. A lot of the charm of this highly personal account turns on his description of a childhood that reads like something out of a magical realist novel ... Lanier is at his most impassioned here when reprising his earlier arguments, while also making space to warn about the AI that he sees as a natural product of today’s hubristic Silicon Valley.
Virtual reality, or VR, is the 'stage magic' of technology, observes Jaron Lanier in his new professional memoir, Dawn of the New Everything — the multiplication of technical effects to transport the beholder from the everyday to a simulacrum of another reality ...spirits us back to a time when a plurality of ideas about what the Internet could be were still in play. Thus, it traces the provenance of the organizing principles of the Web we live with today ...an account of the making of a digital humanist ... Baggy, unkempt and idiosyncratic as its author, it pulses with kaleidoscopic insight, recondite science and deeply felt opinions — a rejoinder to singularity-struck 'digital supremacist[s]' ... By limning his own history in virtual reality, Lanier offers a vision for an enhanced reality for everyone.
At first glance, Lanier’s book seems like a sustained effort to secure his place as a founding father... This is more than a mere attempt to reinforce a particular history. Lanier is more self-deprecating and self-reflective than the typical Californian tech maven, and too self-critical and self-aware to play the role of blinkered advocate...a more studied and nuanced interrogation of VR’s potential, as well as a gentle critique of what he sees as a failure of imagination when it comes to the medium’s current proponents ... The memoir complete, in the final sections of the book Lanier enters his wheelhouse: pontificating in tones that lurch between that of the cheerleader, envisioning all that VR tech might be, and that of the end-time prophet, all dread worries and warnings.
This is a disjointed and melancholy book, with a beautiful idea at the core. Lanier proposes that VR, the technology of the unreal, refreshes our love for the world as it is … The best way to think about VR, Lanier writes, is as the removal of a single human-shaped mass from the fabric of the universe. To build a VR universe, then, you mentally excise a single person from her surroundings; the surroundings stay the same … The notion that VR could incite a ferocious love for the ‘infinite detail’ of the physical world that it imitates felt, by the time I finished these books, almost painfully elegiac. What physical world, which version?
Lanier has some strong opinions. He is scathing on the current state of social media, which he describes as ‘replete with spying algorithms that organize and optimize people for the benefit of giant server businesses.’ But his overall approach is refreshingly nuanced. He does not feel the need to declare the Internet to be either good or bad for democracy, nor does he try to decide if machines will save or destroy the human race … If you are looking for a pithy definition of virtual reality — or of anything, for that matter — then this book is probably not for you. Instead, Lanier provides something much more compelling: a poetic and humanistic view of technology.
...intimate and idiosyncratic … You could almost say that Lanier’s vivid and creative imagination is a distinct character in this book, he discusses it so much … Lanier plows into philosophy and expands the limits of what V.R. might achieve, blurring definitional lines and sometimes making it all sound truly surreal … Lanier cannot have it both ways: insisting that VR is very realistic, and thus affecting and potentially therapeutic, but also that it will be used only for good. That will happen only if it remains expensive and if the technology stalls. Fat chance.
Mr. Lanier’s Dawn of the New Everything: Encounters with Reality and Virtual Reality is a highly eccentric memoir that traces the author’s quest for VR back to its roots, not as some sort of geeky engineering challenge but as a feeling he had as a child of being overwhelmed by the magic of the universe … What went wrong at VPL? Unfortunately, you won’t find out here. Mr. Lanier warns us he isn’t going to deliver a blow-by-blow; instead we get a disjointed sequence of half-remembered anecdotes. What does come through is his ambivalence about going into business at all, and his even deeper ambivalence toward writing about it.
Dawn of the New Everything lacks the directed energy of his previous books, fusing techno-utopian thought experiments with truncated memoir, but still contains plenty to argue with. Most immediately engaging are the autobiographical sections, for Lanier has led a fascinating life … The enemy here, as in his previous books, is the model of a ‘weightless’ internet — anonymous, free, and therefore, Lanier writes, inherently manipulative — that we live with today. The libertarian utopianism of Silicon Valley is a result of this frictionless internet, where nobody pays for anything so that we all become products … Despite Lanier’s gestures towards the benign singularity of universal oneness, the image of VR that emerges here feels decadent and isolating.
...has two purposes here. The first is to offer a vision of what virtual reality is and the cool things it can do, while the second is an amiable tour through his life and his perhaps unlikely course through the very beginnings of VR ... In relating it, Lanier veers between the plainspoken...and the mystical...with lots of solid tech-manual ponderings on phenotropic systems and formulas to boot ... A spirited exploration of tech by a devotee who holds out the hope that bright things are just around the corner.
Alternating between personal memoir and the history of virtual reality technology leading up to take, computer scientist Lanier transports readers to the experimental, obsessive, and even messianic intellectual tech guru circuit of the 1970s and 1980s... Writing with a performative style of prose that switches between self-help book and self-involved philosophical treatise, Lanier spews optimism about human potential and cognitive enhancement, alongside stories of long-held grudges and bitterness about situations around the early history of his startup... With this cleverly crafted autobiography of sorts, Lanier convinces readers that he’s both brilliant and inspiring enough to keep the podium in a field that’s gone from fringe to corporate.
