A review of Jaron Lanier’s You Are Not A Gadget: A Manifesto
209 pages. Alfred A. Knopf.
If you bought a Windows computer in the late 1990s, perhaps you remember the system’s preloaded music. Beethoven’s “Fifth Symphony,” Bach’s “Brandenburg Concerto Number Three,” Tchaikovsky’s “Dance of the Sugarplum Fairies”—Windows Media Player included them all, along with two songs created by Microsoft called “Passport” and “Canyon,” the apparent digital love children of elevator music and 1980s advertising jingles. Though any listener could recognize the classics’ melodies, each note sounded somehow mechanical, and certainly simplified.
In his first book, You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto, Jaron Lanier uses the birth of these songs as one example in his intriguing investigation into culture’s current relationship with technology. The songs use a programming strategy called MIDI to make music. MIDI stands for Musical Instrument Digital Interface, which simplifies music’s complexity into discrete steps in pitch. Dave Smith, a synthesizer designer, devised MIDI in the 1980s, but we still find MIDI songs everywhere from digital alarm clocks to cell phone ringtones. Certainly, they are no longer the best available strategy, but, Lanier argues, they have become a “locked-in” design, an assumed and arbitrary rule in computer programming.
Lanier looks ahead a thousand years at a hypothetical descendant in a spaceship: “She will probably be annoyed by some awful, beepy MIDI-driven music to alert her that the antimatter filter needs to be recalibrated.” Full Review »