Jaron Lanier

Last night Jaron Lanier spoke to fifty of us at a cybersalon at Berkeley’s Hillside Club. Jaron is the polymath musician who invented VR and started one of the first virtual reality companies.

What a guy! I’m still reveling in some of the ideas he put before us. A brief sample:

• Notation doesn’t capture the music, for every musician is an interpreter. It’s an ancient argument. Jaron thinks of denying the human aspect as “Digital Narcissism.” (This is akin to explicit knowledge… because music can’t be told.)
• MIDI (Musical Instrument Digital Interface) notation was a great innovation but no one expected it to become so pervasive. MIDI sucks. It only captures about half of what standard musical notation used to.
• The computer forces you to live your theory (because in computerdom, theory and practice are equivalent). So the air is filled with suface music, the stuff you hear in German clubs or at Burning Man. It’s all strained through MIDI.
• Switching topics, if you counted up how much time people put into dorking around with their computers, Silicon Valley would collapse. When a new generation of software solves the old problems, it inevitably brings new ones.
• OSX is but a recent example. Because the users anonymously contribute all this labor to enrich Apple, this is a “voluntary slave economy.” We do the fix-its because of the master (the computer) rather than the market.
• When Jaron was speaking at the dedication of the Gates Computer Center at Stanford, he said “Naming a computer science building after Bill Gates is like naming a medical school after Typhoid Mary.” That line didn’t make it through to the live audio feed in Redmond.
• The highest bandwidth input device in the body is the eye. The highest bandwidth output device is the tongue! So a mouth manipulation device is in development.
• Files have become fundamental particles in computing, like photons in physics, and that’s holding us back. Two centuries from now, people will look back at file structures as an anachronism, sort of like Earth Shoes. The way out is non-protocol computing.
• Jaron’s tired of flying, so he’s researching tele-emersion. Beam me up. Jaron thinks he’s got the answer.
• In his spare time, he’s investigating quantum gravity and pre-geometry. And in biotech, he’s helping to model the visual cortex.

Jaron played an ancient Laotian instrument, the khaen, for us. The khaen eventually morphed into the organ. This led to the Jacquard loom which led to the digital computer. No one knows how the khaen really works. Jaron once spent an afternoon working with Richard Feynman trying to figure that one out.

He’d walked down the hill to the Hillside Club. When I gave him a ride home, I found that this amazing man lives but six or seven blocks from my house.