Warner against digital dangers – Hamburger Evening Gazette

10.13.14, 06:08

The Internet Jaron Lanier was visionary in Frankfurt awarded the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade

By Tom R. Schulz

Hamburg. The history loves those figures – the convert, the inverter, the late of understanding, perhaps because they are so rare and because the mainstream yes rather the contrary pays homage: the question never asked by individuals and persistently realized vision. Jaron Lanier, who was honored on Sunday in Frankfurt with the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade, is such a reverser; one that has evolved from apologists of the Internet for warning voice in the digital world of the dangers of seemingly boundless freedom, because he believes to have recognized that this freedom is a freedom of the very few: said of him “Siren Server” digital Moloch services such as Google, Facebook, Twitter or Instagram, their attractiveness for so even talkative Otto couch potato of today has only the small disadvantage that they gradually leads to societal Total erosion.

Frankfurt and location of the ceremony, the St. Paul’s Church, both appear as ordered for Lanier. “The sharpest critics of the moose / were once themselves which” is the profound satirical couplet of FW Amber from the second Frankfurt School. The peace prize winner with the red-brown dreadlocks, born 1960 in New York to Jewish immigrants – the mother a Holocaust survivor, the father escaped pogroms in Russia – one of the masterminds and co-inventors of the digital society. He started in the 80s as a game programmer at Atari, invented data glove and other based on computer technologies, such as 3-D graphics in the movies, and now teaches at several universities in the United States. It is said that the term “virtual reality” was coined by him. 2010 was Lanier among the candidates of the “Time” magazine for the 100 most influential people of the earth.

In time its from the once affirmative Moose of the computer age may not equal the sharpest, but increasingly dismayed critics; Lanier, who is also a musician, among others in the ensemble of Philip Glass, tells how he, the beginning of the crash of the music industry as a result of digitization, on a weekly basis people asked beginning of the millennium to his involvement in charity concerts for musicians, which thereby broke away livelihoods.

Him dawned that something was wrong with the once propagated by him free universal availability of music on the net, if they droves drives the creative minds into ruin. From the Saul of the Internet age, a Paul that calls for the return of the human factor in the virtual world, was the respect for the creativity of the individual who must honor the earth, they will continue to benefit from it. That it was just Paul’s Church, in the Lanier now the Peace Prize winner, will appear as a higher addition. It was named after the name of the convertible Apostle.

Lanier took the prize of 25,000 euros and since 1950 for the completion of the Frankfurt Book Fair Sub award, previously about Albert Schweitzer, Jürgen Habermas, Orhan Pamuk, Susan Sontag or Anselm Kiefer was gone, “not only for me” to, as he said early in his acceptance speech, but “on behalf of the world community of digital activists and idealists, even though many of us do not agree are “.

In fact, it pays for itself quickly in the swarm enemies when one considers the idolization of this swarm and its supposedly all standing intelligence in doubt. Wikipedia is worse than Facebook, the “wisdom of crowds” an illusion, postulated Lanier, whose books “gadget. Why the future needs us” and “Who owns the future?” made him also the widely read author. On the other hand, take the criticism of Insiders about the data collection delusion of Big Data and the associated possibility of total surveillance of the individual or to the Google algorithms and therefore always pass more accurate delivery of users with promotional offers precisely the zeitgeist. Jaron Lanier, outside an inflated Hobbit not dissimilar, is the figurehead of the roll-back of the euphoria over the Internet 2.0.

The award ceremony was broadcast live on ARD . The television cameras drifted occasionally from across the desk bent hulking figure Lanier off and showed the guests at the event, which was thought in many cases to see that them the statements of the prize winner appeared quite nebulous, and not because he was reading in his native language from the manuscript . You will want to read Lanier’s speech, and it will take time to understand the ideas underlying it.

received acclaim Lanier, unsurprisingly to audiences that the Booksellers Association of the had the German Book Trade loaded, for his glowing defense of the book of paper. Books are not the only reason why well because “the Internet is not the only platform of communication,” and should serve us best, “if it is not simultaneously subject and object” is. Although paper run to burn hazard, but it frustrates the monitoring of the reader through the next for use in e-readers algorithms.

His increasingly carried by emotion plea for the primacy of humanity against the computer and artificial intelligence Jaron Lanier devoted to his father, who had escaped 60 years before the destruction by the inhumanity and who died in these days in old age.