Brilliant talk at the RSA tonight – one of those events that give you a payoff you’re not fully expecting, and all the more satisfying because of it. Jaron Lanier – pioneer of Virtual Reality and musician amongst many other things – launched his book of the above title which, in essence, is a manifesto for people over technology, delivered with an unremitting optimism for the potential of the human spirit. His argument goes, and of course I’m paraphrasing, that after a generation of experiment, the evidence shows the web not to have delivered some of the things early evangelists (of which he was one) said it would. For example, the idea that open source would deliver the kind of bountiful return that would make producers (of music, software, literature etc) rich from the seed of their own generosity just hasn’t happened. The evidence, as you know from speaking to any musician trying to make an honest living these days – is that freemium has left many people poorer despite opening up the closed systems that went before.

What is has delivered is a collection of connecting experiments that haven’t really worked yet because we’re not allowing the full extent of human creativity to be applied to it – for reasons of walled gardens, proprietary behaviour and an over-reliance on the idea that technology will somehow take over from the people that made it. “The intelligence of computers and the kind of robots people tell you will take over the world, is as exaggerated as much as the intelligence of those that made them is underestimated.” Computers will take over the world? Well not on the evidence we have so far where experiments like Facebook are a rather dull and unimaginative way of helping people relate, and also built on a business model of shifting sand.

Larnier is, however, not an internet naysayer. He made pains to point out he LOVES the internet. Rather his point is there’s so much more that this technology can do – if artists and engineers could work together unfettered to make the adventure of human life in its greatest forms much much more seductive. Relying on technology to do this (which is limited) rather than the human spirit (which is not), is crazy.

A must read for anyone who suspects that behaviour on the internet as it is right now, is sometimes actually quite dull and could be made so much more liberating through aesthetics and humanism than just better and better technology. or read more about , and .