Jaron Lanier's manifesto for the tech consumer

JARON LANIER, an octopus-loving Silicon Valley software engineer who pioneered virtual reality technology, has a few bones to pick. The technology industry, he says, treats people like machines to be processed for profit. In this sparky, thought-provoking rant on How Things Should Be, Lanier complains that, too often, compelling technologies emerge only for us to discover that their poor, early-stage design has some unattractive side effects. For example, technologies like Google’s search-term-sensitive Adwords system treats people as little more than a distributed array of dumb revenue-generating machines, matching people to ads in the same soulless way that Midi music software…