You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto

A computer scientist's case against the design assumptions of the social web, written by one of the people who built its precursors.

Lanier's subject is lock-in: the programming choices made at the birth of digital media that hardened into permanent conditions before anyone weighed them, among them the way software fixes what a user's identity can be. He follows those decisions into social networks, cloud storage and the Web 2.0 designs that put the aggregate output of crowds and algorithms above what individual people think, and asks what a future built on the same philosophy would produce. Alfred A. Knopf published it in January 2010; Vintage issued the paperback in February 2011.

Lanier is a computer scientist and musician who helped found the field of virtual reality, and has worked at the boundary between computer science and medicine, physics and neuroscience. He returned to the economics of networked culture in Who Owns the Future? He lives in Berkeley, California.