Dawn of the New Everything
A Journey Through Virtual Reality
Jaron Lanier
Having read it
★★★★★
Composed, thoughtful and a really rather interesting memoir of the author’s early and younger days leading to (and in and around) his technical (and musical and philosophical) skills and passions toward his times in Silicon Valley (from the 1980s to the 1990s) and specifically virtual reality and its many associations.
It’s all balanced well with good perspectives and attitudes and by the twenty-teens of contemporary goings-on which all make for a read that shines a light on human specialness and why, despite the tech world’s somewhat absolutist nature, blurring and fuzziness adds to the clearly defined and categorised by allowing life to live, thrive and be diverse and different.
A good passage
Nothing about computers is inevitable. But we’ve put such a massive number of bits into place that it’s often too much work to remember how each brick of the edifice we live in is nothing but a peculiar obsession someone else put into place, once upon a time.
A second good passage
Approach, rather than arrival, is what makes science realistic, after all. (If that way of understanding science isn’t clear to you, please read this footnote.)†
There’s a grandeur in the gradual way science progresses. It takes a while to get used to it, but once you see it, the incremental ascent of science becomes a thing of beauty and a foundation for trust.
I appreciate the infinite elusiveness of a perfected, completed form of VR in the light of this sensibility. Reality can never be fully known, and neither can virtual reality.
A third good passage
[After a few years of steady progress with VR the author was encouraged to consider setting up a VR company, circa 1984.]
‘[...] This will have to be a company. No way anyone will take all those megamoronic [tech support] calls unless they’re paid money.’
‘Do you mean communism is doomed?’
‘You know, I never thought so before, but yes, we’ll have to get a lot of people to do incredibly boring things in the future if we want to have a lot of computers, and only capitalism can get people to accept being bored.’
‘According to Moore’s Law there will be billions of computers by the end of this century. Where? In doorknobs? All those passwords! Can we grow the human population fast enough to keep up?’
‘The only possibility is to get people to do their own support for free.’
‘Not possible.’
‘Sure it is. We’ll use computers to train people to take care of computers. And they’ll pay us even though they’re doing the work.’ (This person eventually became an early employee at Google.)
‘Guys! Stop. So far there’s no company. There’s no commune. Just give us five minutes to get something working.’
The lot of us shut up and slurped dan dan noodles in silence.
[...a little time later and after meeting (and signing forms) with a lawyer...]
Documents were laid before me on the desk. Sign them and the first VR company would be conjured into existence.
I picked up the pen and time slowed. The pen in my hand slid through curvy paths, depositing quick-drying ink.
Fantastically bizarre, that these large bipedal mammals would be gently guiding smooth oblong objects around on fragile paper to make these tiny marks, and then treat them as significant.