You Are Not a Gadget

Jaron Lanier has been a Silicon Valley guru since the 1980s, when he predicted that computers would change the way we do business. Now, in his first book written more than two decades after the creation of the web, Lanier takes a mordant look at how the web has transformed our lives for the better and for the worse. The early founders of the Internet made crucial decisions (like making one’s presence anonymous) that have had enormous—and often unintended—consequences. What’s more, these design choices quickly became permanent parts of the Internet’s very structure, something like biological characteristics.