Jaron Lanier

You Are Not a Gadget appeared in 2010, when the argument it makes was still unusual: that the design of social software was flattening people into data, that anonymity was corroding discourse, that the wisdom of crowds was being oversold, and that a web built on advertising would end up serving advertisers. Jaron Lanier wrote it from inside the industry rather than outside it. He built early virtual reality systems at VPL Research in the 1980s and did as much as anyone to popularise the term, and he has worked at Microsoft Research since 2009. He is also a musician with a large collection of wind and string instruments from around the world. Critics of the book found the polemic stronger than the evidence, and Lanier has never claimed otherwise about his method; the later Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now, from 2018, is blunter still.