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Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now
Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now is a timely call-to-arms from a Silicon Valley pioneer. You might have trouble imagining life without your social media accounts, but virtual reality pioneer Jaron Lanier insists that we're better off without them. In his important new audiobook, Lanier, who participates in no social media, offers powerful and personal reasons for all of us to leave these dangerous online platforms behind before it's too late. Lanier's reasons for freeing ourselves from social media's poisonous grip include its tendency to bring out the worst in us, to make politics terrifying, to trick us with illusions of popularity and success, to twist our relationship with the truth, to disconnect us from other people even as we are more "connected" than ever, to rob us of our free will with relentless targeted ads. How can we remain autonomous in a world where we are under continual surveillance and are constantly being prodded by algorithms run by some of the richest corporations in history that have no way of making money other than being paid to manipulate our behavior? How could the "benefits" of social media possibly outweigh the catastrophic losses to our personal dignity, happiness, and freedom? Lanier remains a tech optimist, so while demonstrating the evil that rules social media business models today, he also envisions a humanistic setting for social networking that can direct us towarda richer and fuller way of living and connecting with our world.
Jaron Lanier (Author), Oliver Wyman (Narrator)
Audiobook
Ten Arguments For Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now
Random House presents the audiobook edition of Ten Arguments For Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now by Jaron Lanier, read by Oliver Wyman. Jaron Lanier, the world-famous Silicon Valley scientist-pioneer and 'high-tech genius' (Sunday Times) who first alerted us to the dangers of social media, explains why its toxic effects are at the heart of its design, and explains in ten simple arguments why liberating yourself from its hold will transform your life and the world for the better. Social media is making us sadder, angrier, less empathetic, more fearful, more isolated and more tribal. In recent months it has become horribly clear that social media is not bringing us together - it is tearing us apart. In Ten Arguments For Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now Jaron Lanier draws on his insider's expertise to explain precisely how social media works - by deploying constant surveillance and subconscious manipulation of its users - and why its cruel and dangerous effects are at the heart of its current business model and design. As well as offering ten simple arguments for liberating yourself from its addictive hold, his witty and urgent manifesto outlines a vision for an alternative that provides all the benefits of social media without the harm. So, if you want a happier life, a more just and peaceful world, or merely the chance to think for yourself without being monitored and influenced by the richest corporations in history, then the best thing you can do, for now, is delete your social media accounts - right now. You will almost certainly become a calmer and possibly a nicer person in the process. 'A blisteringly good, urgent, essential read' ZADIE SMITH
Jaron Lanier (Author), Oliver Wyman (Narrator)
Audiobook
Dawn of the New Everything: Encounters with Reality and Virtual Reality
In this captivating audiobook, Jaron Lanier -The father of virtual reality - explains its dazzling possibilities by reflecting on his own lifelong relationship with technologyBridging the gap between tech mania and the experience of being inside the human body, Dawn of the New Everything is a look at what it means to be human at a moment of unprecedented technological possibility. Through a fascinating look back over his life in technology, Jaron Lanier, an interdisciplinary scientist and father of the term "virtual reality," exposes VR's ability to illuminate and amplify our understanding of our species, and gives listeners a new perspective on how the brain and body connect to the world. An inventive blend of autobiography, science writing, philosophy and advice, this audiobook tells the wild story of his personal and professional life as a scientist, from his childhood in the UFO territory of New Mexico, to the loss of his mother, the founding of the first start-up, and finally becoming a world-renowned technological guru. Understanding virtual reality as being both a scientific and cultural adventure, Lanier demonstrates it to be a humanistic setting for technology. While his previous publications offered a more critical view of social media and other manifestations of technology, in this audiobook he argues that virtual reality can actually make our lives richer and fuller.
Jaron Lanier (Author), Oliver Wyman (Narrator)
Audiobook
Jaron Lanier is the prophet of Silicon Valley--the father of virtual reality and one of the most visionary thinkers about technology and culture of our time. Today, you can’t buy a car, fill it up with gas, drill for oil, wear a prosthetic limb, undergo certain types of surgery, or play a game on the Xbox without benefiting from his inventions and insights. When Hollywood wants to envision the future, directors bring Jaron on set to tell them what it will look like. When Knopf published his book You Are Not a Gadget, it received major attention and sold fifty thousand copies. That book was a critique of social media, and was mostly a synthesis of previous writings. Still, Michiko Kakutani named it one of her ten favorite books of the year. It was the cover of the New York Review of Books and featured widely. Jaron was named to the Time 100 and the New Yorker published a major profile of him. This book, Who Owns the Future?, is much more ambitious and controversial. It’s about the effect network technology is having on our economy, and it connects the rise of digital networks (like Google and Facebook, but also hedge funds and mortgage lenders) over the past several years to the recession and decline of the middle class. Here’s an example of how that works. Kodak, at the height of its power, employed 140,000 people and was worth 28 billion dollars. They even invented the first digital camera sensor. But today Kodak is bankrupt, and the new face of digital photography is Instagram, which was sold to Facebook for a billion dollars last year, when it employed only thirteen people. Where did those 139,987 jobs go? And what happened to the wealth that those middle-class jobs created? This book is built to answer questions just like that. As technology flattens more and more industries, from media to medicine to manufacturing, we will face huge new challenges to our employment. It’s absolutely essential that we figure out how our information economy can support a thriving middle class. And that’s where Jaron Lanier comes in. Instagram isn’t worth a billion dollars because those thirteen people are so great. It’s worth that much because of the millions of users who contribute to their network, but don’t get paid for it. Networks need a great number of people to participate in them in order to generate value. But when they do, only a small number of people get paid, and that has the net effect of eroding the middle class--by concentrating wealth, while limiting overall economic growth. This book proposes an alternative future in which each one of us is paid for what we do and share on the web. Everyone who lives a part of their lives online, or who works in a business that’s being affected by new technology, has a stake in this debate. As Lanier writes, "information is just people in disguise"—and our markets should be rewarding people in an information economy, rather than taking advantage of them. Who Owns the Future? is hardheaded but hopeful, a new masterwork that will be revered for its humane insight into the effect technology has had on our culture and economy, and how we can win back our future.
Jaron Lanier (Author), Pete Simoneilli (Narrator)
Audiobook
Jaron Lanier, a Silicon Valley visionary since the 1980s, was among the first to predict the revolutionary changes the World Wide Web would bring to commerce and culture. Now, in his first book, written more than two decades after the web was created, Lanier offers this provocative and cautionary look at the way it is transforming our lives for better and for worse. The current design and function of the web have become so familiar that it is easy to forget that they grew out of programming decisions made decades ago. The web's first designers made crucial choices (such as making one's presence anonymous) that have had enormous-and often unintended-consequences. What's more, these designs quickly became "locked in," a permanent part of the web's very structure. Lanier discusses the technical and cultural problems that can grow out of poorly considered digital design and warns that our financial markets and sites like Wikipedia, Facebook, and Twitter are elevating the "wisdom" of mobs and computer algorithms over the intelligence and judgment of individuals. Lanier also shows: How 1960s antigovernment paranoia influenced the design of the online world and enabled trolling and trivialization in online discourse How file sharing is killing the artistic middle class; How a belief in a technological "rapture" motivates some of the most influential technologists Why a new humanistic technology is necessary. Controversial and fascinating, You Are Not a Gadget is a deeply felt defense of the individual from an author uniquely qualified to comment on the way technology interacts with our culture.
Jaron Lanier (Author), Rob Shapiro (Narrator)
Audiobook
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