You are not a Gadget: A Manifesto Read Online Free Page A

to be at war with the weird, manipulative fantasies of religions. And yet both invented their own fantasies that were just as weird.
    The same thing is happening again. A self-proclaimed materialist movement that attempts to base itself on science starts to look like a religion rather quickly. It soon presents its own eschatology and its own revelations about what is really going on—portentous events that no one but the initiated can appreciate. The Singularity and the noosphere, the idea that a collective consciousness emerges from all the users on the web, echo Marxist social determinism and Freud’s calculus of perversions. We rush ahead of skeptical, scientific inquiry at our peril, just like the Marxists and Freudians.
    Premature mystery reducers are rent by schisms, just like Marxists and Freudians always were. They find it incredible that I perceive a commonality in the membership of the tribe. To them, the systems Linux and UNIX are completely different, for instance, while to me they are coincident dots on a vast canvas of possibilities, even if much of the canvas is all but forgotten by now.
    At any rate, the future of religion will be determined by the quirks of the software that gets locked in during the coming decades, just like the futures of musical notes and personhood.
Where We Are on the Journey
    It’s time to take stock. Something amazing happened with the introduction of the World Wide Web. A faith in human goodness was vindicated when a remarkably open and unstructured information tool was made available to large numbers of people. That openness can, at this point, be declared “locked in” to a significant degree. Hurray!
    At the same time, some not-so-great ideas about life and meaning were also locked in, like MIDI’s nuance-challenged conception of musical sound and UNIX’s inability to cope with time as humans experience it.
    These are acceptable costs, what I would call aesthetic losses. They are counterbalanced, however, by some aesthetic victories. The digital world looks better than it sounds because a community of digital activists, including folks from Xerox Parc (especially Alan Kay), Apple, Adobe, and the academic world (especially Stanford’s Don Knuth) fought the good fight to save us from the rigidly ugly fonts and other visual elements we’d have been stuck with otherwise.
    Then there are those recently conceived elements of the future of human experience, like the already locked-in idea of the file, that are as fundamental as the air we breathe. The file will henceforth be one of the basic underlying elements of the human story, like genes. We will never know what that means, or what alternatives might have meant.
    On balance, we’ve done wonderfully well! But the challenge on the table now is unlike previous ones. The new designs on the verge of being locked in, the web 2.0 designs, actively demand that people define themselves downward. It’s one thing to launch a limited conception of music or time into the contest for what philosophical idea will be locked in. It is another to do that with the very idea of what it is to be a person.
Why It Matters
    If you feel fine using the tools you use, who am I to tell you that there is something wrong with what you are doing? But consider these points:
Emphasizing the crowd means deemphasizing individual humans in the design of society, and when you ask people not to be people, they revert to bad moblike behaviors.This leads not only to empowered trolls, but to a generally unfriendly and unconstructive online world.
Finance was transformed by computing clouds. Success in finance became increasingly about manipulating the cloud at the expense of sound financial principles.
There are proposals to transform the conduct of science along similar lines. Scientists would then understand less of what they do.
Pop culture has entered into a nostalgic malaise. Online culture is dominated by trivial mashups of the culture that existed before the