You have to be someone before you can share yourself.

With these words, Jaron Lanier's self-titled 'manifesto' throws down the gauntlet before those cheering the rise and boundless opportunity opportunity of the so-called web 2.0 movement.

Throwing around terms like 'cybernetic totalism' and 'bacchalardian neoteny', the book is at times a challenge for the less philosophically-minded reader. (Section One is titled "What is a person?") Still, peppered with playful turns of phrase and a certain mystical reverance, one very much gets the sense of a thinker at play with his ideas and words. The style of the book is not so much dense as it is concise. Reading it, one gets the sense that not a single word was wasted, and that Lanier believes in a certain economy of ideas.

For readers who watch the cultural tides of technology, it is an entertaining challenge to the prevailing hype surrounding recent advances in cloud computing and social media. There is a joy in watching intelligent, thoughtful people punch gaping philosophical and metaphysical holes in the somewhat overblown buzz that surrounds the current technological zeitgeist.

The heart of Lanier's concern is that if the current trends in technological culture get 'locked in', we are in danger of finding ourselves in a future that built for machines, and not for people. (In a similar vein, urbanists argue that we have built cities, not for citizens, but for cars.) In conceiving humans as inputs into computational search and aggregation algorithms, and then placing these systems at the heart of social interaction, we reduce ourselves to a dumbed-down computational feedstock while celebrating the apparent 'intelligence' of machines.

Taking a swipe at the 'mash-up', Lanier decries the loss of 'authorship', which is in turn the economic incentive for creativity and innovation. As we feed our creativity into increasingly sophisticated algorithms, hiding behind cryptic pseudonyms, (ala YouTube, et.al.), we lose something of our selfhood. He suggests that there has been no new popular music since the 1990's, as new creative works are now presented referentially as a combination of stylistic era's gone by. Neo-80s-punk-disco-chamber-rock, and the like.

Similarly he is a critic of cloud computing where the size of data sets and the speed of communication reduce understanding of fundamental reality and increase incentives to manipulate the bitstream, as our recent experience with finance demonstrated.

While this is a book about technology, it expresses a deep love of humanity. In the concluding chapters, Lanier looks at how technology might add meaning to our lives. He does not hope to escape his world to 'live' in some abstract Singularity, but rather draws on his experience as a pioneer of virtual reality to explore ways of communicating and expressing our human-ness.

How refreshing.