Infinite Lock-In, part 8

What is lock-in? How does MIDI epitomize it? Why is it an existential problem? Why must a technological singularity conflate technological paradigms with paradigms of the human mind?

I concluded my previous reflection with a perhaps unpopular opinion:

Not every technological advancement actually represents progress.

With such a pronouncement, I know I’ve let myself in for this: “You’re just one more reactionary conservative panicking over new technology!”

No, really I’m not. I’ve read, thought, and written about these issues for a decade now. If my efforts here to construct a sound, non-Luddite argument go unappreciated, if I can’t convince you that I’m not a creature of reactionary panic, then I’m not sure what will convince you.

I’m not trying to claim I can’t possibly be wrong. I’m just trying to forestall knee-jerk disbelief at the arguments I’ll plumb in the forthcoming parts of “Infinite Lock-In.” We’re sailing into very dark waters.

Lock-In

In the opening pages of You Are Not a Gadget, Jaron Lanier laments the ravages of a process called lock-in, which occurs when a technological paradigm’s triumph forever excludes advantages that could be derived from other paradigms.

Lanier cites the example of MIDI, the digital standard for representing music. His premise is that MIDI, “made of digital patterns that represented keyboard events like ‘key-down’ and ‘key-up,’” limited musical expression to what a keyboard can do. MIDI is a powerful tool for synthesizing sounds, but it has drawbacks. Lanier writes:

Before MIDI, a musical note was a bottomless idea that transcended absolute definition. It was a way for a musician to think, or a way to teach and document music. It was a mental tool distinguishable from the music itself. Different people could make transcriptions of the same musical recording, for instance, and come up with slightly different scores.

After MIDI, a musical note was no longer just an idea, but a rigid, mandatory structure you couldn’t avoid in the aspects of life that had gone digital. The process of lock-in is like a wave gradually washing over the rulebook of life, culling the ambiguities of flexible thoughts as more and more thought structures are solidified into effectively permanent reality…

Lock-in removes ideas that do not fit into the winning digital representation scheme, but it also reduces or narrows the ideas it immortalizes, by cutting away the unfathomable penumbra of meaning that distinguishes a word in natural language from a command in a computer program…

How can a musician cherish the broader, less-defined concept of a note that preceded MIDI, while using MIDI all day long and interacting with other musicians through the filter of MIDI? Is it even worth trying? Should a digital artist just give in to lock-in and accept the infinitely explicit, finite idea of a MIDI note?

If it’s important to find the edge of mystery, to ponder the things that can’t quite be defined — or rendered into a digital standard — then we will have to perpetually seek out entirely new ideas and objects, abandoning old ones like musical notes.

With lock-in, what Lanier calls “the edge of mystery” becomes ever harder to find, ever more fleeting. On the one hand, a paradigm’s triumph can banish the ideas or advantages that past paradigms offered, as MIDI did — and as I suggested when I argued for the typewriter’s usefulness.¹ On the other hand, a paradigm’s triumph can also make the advantages of other paradigms (which could have triumphed instead) impossible to realize. Whichever is the case, lock-in can force a technology’s users to live with less possibility, less of the raw ambiguity which makes life compelling, in a narrower, shallower, poorer world.

Thus Lanier arrives at quite a big question: are human beings “becoming like MIDI notes — overly defined, and restricted in practice to what can be represented in a computer”? He spends the rest of the book answering this from different angles.

The question may sound like armchair philosophy, but it isn’t at all. It’s about the direction in which technology steers not only civilization but existence itself. Simply, Lanier contends that “we can conceivably abandon musical notes, but we can’t abandon ourselves.”

Conflation of Paradigms

Before we press on, it’s vital that we tie together two threads of thought which have emerged in the preceding parts of “Infinite Lock-In.”