Ramblings Concerning You Are Not A Gadget (Part 1), etc.

Really fascinating read; wanted to jot down notes as I went along so I could type them into this box (actually, I wrote that in pen first--caught me in a lie) but I had issues finding a suitable break point because I was so engaged with it. This is somewhat comical because it's written in tiny snippets with obvious places at which to break, but I didn't do any of that.
These concepts that Jaron Lanier so eloquently describes are exactly the types of ideas I have had floating around in my head for years, but I rarely have had the chance to articulate them to others. I want to print out bits of it and keep them handy to pass out to clients of mine.
Although I was very young (or perhaps because I was very young), I feel along with Lanier a sense of nostalgia for the earlier web (I choose the world earlier because I missed the real early web; my family joined the collective in 1997 and my love for the Internet and programming couldn't begin before then, and I was 9) because I can remember a time when rules and standards (externally and internally imposed) were actually up in the air and the big players of today were only mere ideas, if that.
I was in love with the Internet from the start; it blew my mind apart with all the possibilities it introduced for my nascent little nerd brain to ponder. I needed to understand how it worked and I needed to forge a space of my own there to share with the rest of the collective. Being a child, I had no conception of using it as a commercial vehicle; I made websites about the things that I loved so that I could collaborate with other people who shared my interests: other enthusiastic nerds who would chat over ICQ or IRC to help one another learn and grow as programmers just because we thought it was awesome.

My first brush with the web's ties to capitalism came as result of one of these innocent efforts: at age 11 I sold a Pokémon website (pokevillage.com) to a local ISP one town over. They thought it would make a nice feature for kids to click through on their portal homepage defaulted on all of their subscriber's browsers at home. I was so confused at the idea of being paid for my efforts that I turned down their initial offer of $500 and drove the price to $1500 completely by accident before agreeing to move to their servers. My one request was that it was a UNIX box and not one based in DOS; this meant I had the entire server to myself, because every casual nerd knew DOS/Windows but not many were comfortable with the Terminal. I mention this for two reasons: 1) I am proud of little me and 2) Lanier referenced UNIX quite a lot in the first chapter. It's excellent stuff!
From then on, they paid me to keep the website updated with new content along with other odd side jobs helping them program their community forums and later manually aggregating local news on the weekends for a later incarnation of their business. Adults started to talk to me about my future as a millionaire, but just about no one I knew at the time had any idea what it all meant, only that the news told them they should be paying attention. It was nice having money all the time during junior high school because I was being paid to do something I was already doing for free. Oh, and we started running banner ads.
Back to the book, though... imagining a world without files is so beyond me that it's making me insane just thinking about the words. I think that it would make an interesting thought exercise, but I'm unwilling to try it right now. We'll put that one off to the side for now.
One massive example of lock-in that came to mind: PC's (including Macs post-2006) all run on processors based on the x86 architecture. Interestingly, I wrote a paper on this in high school arguing in favor of ditching it altogether, however painful that would be for everyone involved, in order to bake-in some flexibility and scalability in a new processor architecture. I have no clue if this would be a good idea or not considering all of the reworking of hardware and software (massive...) that would need to take place, but that's precisely the problem, isn't it? Modern day CPUs from Intel/AMD are like tricycles with layer upon layer of rockets attached to it--more and more each year and they keep getting faster but the tricycle still only holds a single 3 year old on its seat deep in the middle of the massive structure that's built up around it. Part of my argument was the general superiority of PowerPC chips build on a different base architecture that originated many years after x86 was codified--these were the chips inside of Macs until 2006, funny how that turned out...
I really dig Lanier's humanist approach to looking at computers; in the rare occasions I have talked to fellow nerds on subjects of this nature, I felt myself sitting in his camp (though I didn't have any knowledge of it until last night) while most of the people I know fit into the categories that he critiques. When I am working, people always start our conversation by saying some variation of 'I'm computer illiterate' before they allow themselves to describe the reason(s) they have come to me and it has always tickled my brain, but now I think I have a more appropriate response than nodding and saying 'sure,': The computer isn't you literate. This book is doing an excellent job so far of challenging some of my assumptions and upholding others.
In self reflection, I usually come to the conclusion that computers make sense to me because people like me are the ones who make the hardware and the software and not because I have some extraordinary talent for remembering how to make the machine do everything I want.