Free You are not a Gadget: A Manifesto by Jaron Lanier Page B

the potential for unforeseen creative processes that aren’t explained by ideas like evolutionthat we already believe we can capture in software systems. That kind of modesty is the signature quality of being human-centered.
    There would be trade-offs. Adopting a metaphysically modest approach would make it harder to use database techniques to create instant lists of people who are, say, emo, single, and affluent. But I don’t think that would be such a great loss. A stream of misleading information is no asset.
    It depends on how you define yourself. An individual who is receiving a flow of reports about the romantic status of a group of friends must learn to think in the terms of the flow if it is to be perceived as worth reading at all. So here is another example of how people are able to lessen themselves so as to make a computer seem accurate. Am I accusing all those hundreds of millions of users of social networking sites of reducing themselves in order to be able to use the services? Well, yes, I am.
    I know quite a few people, mostly young adults but not all, who are proud to say that they have accumulated thousands of friends on Face-book. Obviously, this statement can only be true if the idea of friendship is reduced. A real friendship ought to introduce each person to unexpected weirdness in the other. Each acquaintance is an alien, a well of unexplored difference in the experience of life that cannot be imagined or accessed in any way but through genuine interaction. The idea of friendship in database-filtered social networks is certainly reduced from that.
    It is also important to notice the similarity between the lords and peasants of the cloud. A hedge fund manager might make money by using the computational power of the cloud to calculate fantastical financial instruments that make bets on derivatives in such a way as to invent out of thin air the phony virtual collateral for stupendous risks. This is a subtle form of counterfeiting, and is precisely the same maneuver a socially competitive teenager makes in accumulating fantastical numbers of “friends” on a service like Facebook.
Ritually Faked Relationships Beckon to Messiahs Who May Never Arrive
    But let’s suppose you disagree that the idea of friendship is being reduced, and are confident that we can keep straight the two uses of theword, the old use and the new use. Even then one must remember that the customers of social networks are not the members of those networks.
    The real customer is the advertiser of the future, but this creature has yet to appear in any significant way as this is being written. The whole artifice, the whole idea of fake friendship, is just bait laid by the lords of the clouds to lure hypothetical advertisers—we might call them messianic advertisers—who could someday show up.
    The hope of a thousand Silicon Valley start-ups is that firms like Face-book are capturing extremely valuable information called the “social graph.” Using this information, an advertiser might hypothetically be able to target all the members of a peer group just as they are forming their opinions about brands, habits, and so on.
    Peer pressure is the great power behind adolescent behavior, goes the reasoning, and adolescent choices become life choices. So if someone could crack the mystery of how to make perfect ads using the social graph, an advertiser would be able to design peer pressure biases in a population of real people who would then be primed to buy whatever the advertiser is selling for their whole lives.
    The situation with social networks is layered with multiple absurdities. The advertising idea hasn’t made any money so far, because ad dollars appear to be better spent on searches and in web pages. If the revenue never appears, then a weird imposition of a database-as-reality ideology will have colored generations of teen peer group and romantic experiences for no business or other purpose.
    If, on the other hand, the revenue