Jaron Lanier
While I was in Boston studying production at Berklee, I took a semester-long seminar through Berklee’s Institute for Creative Entrepreneurship. The seminar was a creative and dynamic course. In retrospect I almost want to call is a course-marketplace, and I’ll get back to that at some point. It was a mashup between the two big Cambridge schools on the northern shore of the Charles River: Harvard and MIT, and us lowly south-of-the-Charles Berklee folks. During that encounter, I had the chance to have a conversation with Jaron Lanier, computer science philosopher (through authorship) and composer. You may have heard of his book titled “Ten Arguments for Deleting you Social Media Accounts Right Now”. Amen, Jaron, amen.
I wanted to share him with all of you because he is one of the coolest most interesting cats I’ve ever met. In his own words, Lanier is “A Renaissance Man for the 21st century” He is a self-described “computer scientist, composer, artist, and author who writes on numerous topics, including high-technology business, the social impact of technology, the philosophy of consciousness and information, Internet politics, and the future of humanism.” For my own rendezvous with Lanier’s work, I think that last bit about the future of humanism is probably the closest you can get to depict his overall philosophical concept, when one thinks that humanism is from now on inextricably linked with technology. I’ve always thought of life, evolution, and the pinnacle of humanity being the sort of upper limit of a fractal, and everything outside of it, while still sharing original equation, is technology. Lanier makes a hard distinction between AI (what I may mistakenly think of as the development of self-awareness in technology) and AR… which is really outside of the score of this whole bit, but it really gets me stoked anyway.
The thing I love most about Jaron is there is no current ideological framework one can refer from to get what he is all about without putting in the time reading, and I highly recommend putting in the time. One perfunctory example of this is that, for instance, he doesn’t exclude certain ideas about spirituality when thinking about technology.
Oh, by the way THIS is the dude who popularized the term “virtual reality”. In the late 80s he oversaw the development of the the first “virtual worlds using head mounted displays”, a first riff on the headset, as we call them today, and also coined the use of the term “avatar”, and developed the system of identity representation within VR.
In terms of musical accolades, he has performed as a pianist and Asian wind specialist with Yoko Ono, Ornette Coleman, Phillip Glass, and many more, and has received several public commissions for his composition work. As a musician, of course, I find the non-musical parts of his mind to be the most novel and compelling. I’m doing a terrible job explaining this guy, but, so does everyone else. Probably the funniest line on his website is the heading for a section of other works referencing him: “Selected books with chapters devoted to trying to explain Jaron Lanier”. I feel that. (I’m not done talking about Jaron yet, keep reading in my space audio + music feature below.)
Trust me, you need to just read the books. Click below to visit his website!