Tech oracle Jaron Lanier warned us all about the evils of social media. Too few of us listened. Now, in the most chaotic of moments, his fears—and his bighearted solutions—are more urgent than ever.
https://www.gq.com/story/jaron-lanier-t ... ket-newtab"Lanier is the father of a 13-year-old girl, and “one thing that's really cool,” he said, was how the protest movement had been able “to get teenagers focused on real things, instead of garbage. Like, I've seen this real emphasis toward Wait, how did this happen in history? What happened with Reconstruction? Where did all these statues come from? They are focused on reality instead of the latest stupid thing that's on Instagram or TikTok, and it's pretty cool.”
Technology was doing, as it did every once in a while, what Lanier wanted it to do: giving people a chance to be better, to know more, to lead more informed and compassionate lives.
“I feel a gratitude to Black Lives Matter,” Lanier said, “for just reintroducing us to reality.”
Another source of optimism, he said, was the advertiser boycotts of Facebook just then being announced by Patagonia, Coca-Cola, Unilever, and other companies protesting the disinformation and hate speech spread on the platform. “Marketers,” he said, “are obsessed with the youth market, and the youth market is really just ******* tired of white supremacy. And I think that there's just a lot of people looking at what's next to their ads when they show up and what's going on, and they're thinking, ‘You know what? We're putting money into this thing, and it might lose us the youth market. And if we lose the youth market, we go down.’ ”
He said he noticed a change in how Facebook was both thought of and written about. Take the congressional hearings that were held in July with Mark Zuckerberg and other big tech leaders. “What struck me,” Lanier later told me, “was how alone the four CEOs were—no friends or allies anywhere in politics or society. They've creeped everyone out with their opaque form of influence. Even Big Tobacco had friends.” ...