Mike Masnick Curb-Stomps Jaron Lanier

Who, sadly, deserves it. This is sad because I used to like Lanier. Back in the ancient days, when rocks were soft, I did a little work in virtual reality. I respect the pioneering work that Lanier did in that field. Sadly, he seems to have turned into a cranky old damned-kids-get-off-my-lawn type these days, trading on his past good work to sell books about the impending collapse of things he cares about, and peddle nonsense in major magazines.

Lanier's piece is an excerpt for his latest crank manifesto and it's just astonishingly full of wrong. People who are knowledgeable in one field are not automatically knowledgeable in others - as I so often prove. Here (and apparently in the book this column is excerpted from) Lanier shows that he really doesn't understand economics. In order to understand just how badly Lanier gets it wrong let me point you to this that's-not-actually-true.-at-all. dept column from Mike Masnick at Techdirt.

It's long, but a worthwhile read as Masnick goes point by point over several of Lanier's key economic mistakes and shows why these mistakes lead him to be totally wrong about things like digital music. This reminds me of David Lowery, who at least has serious music cred but who also takes a nearly entirely wrong approach to understanding the future evolution of digital music.

Where Masnick scores his best point - and where Lanier does so much worse than Lowery - is where Lanier appears to want to rewrite history (Masnick calls him out for "lying") and that's really a shame. People may not be able to be expert in every field, but good smart people ought to know better than this.