The End of Human Specialness

Approaching its 10 year anniversary, Jaron Lanier’s warning of the erosion of personhood couldn’t be truer.

“The defining idea of the coming era is actually the loss of an idea we never had to worry about losing before. It is the decay of belief in the specialness of being human.” ~ from The End of Human Specialness

After watching The Great Hack, a documentary covering the Cambridge Analytica scandal that painfully illustrated the commodification of individual political persuasion, I remembered a short article written by Jaron Lanier, the tech philosopher, titled The End of Human Specialness—Lanier’s contribution to a series of articles from The Chronicle of Higher Education in 2010 asking what, “The defining idea of the next decade,” will be. Lanier goes on to describe a human as simply a component, or a node, hooked into an emerging global computer.

This was written in 2010, during the early days of social media, before people totally bought into its power, before the leader of the free world used it to announce policy 280 characters at a time (or to talk trash to teenagers).

This was also written before we had evidence that intelligence agencies around the world would use it to implement disinformation campaigns in foreign countries in an attempt to create division among citizens ahead of public voting or to organize protests or riots. Corporations would tap into the social media computing network to identify vulnerable and persuadable citizens in order to act in accordance with…