Lock-In Is the Whole Story

He Called It in 2010

Jaron Lanier published You Are Not a Gadget in 2010, and most of what he warned about has since come true. He saw the anonymous pile-ons coming years before they took over the comment sections. Working musicians and writers got squeezed out while the platforms above them kept the money, exactly the way he warned. He even said advertising would end up as the only thing the web reliably paid for, and here we are. Being that early is the part that stings when you read him today.

He was just as sharp on people. A person is deep and strange, Lanier argues, and a profile is a short list of boxes somebody else already drew. Fill it out, and the software has decided which parts of you count. The rest gets dropped. He watched the early social sites file everyone into clean records so the machines on top could sort us and sell us. Fifteen years on, that sorting runs your feed all day.

The strange part is where his best idea came from. It came straight out of engineering, plain and simple, and every tradesman already lives inside it.

Lock-In Is a Trade Word

Lanier's word for the trap is lock-in, and his example is MIDI. MIDI is the music standard from the early eighties that turned every note into a keyboard press with a number attached. It could never carry the sound that lives between the keys, the slur of a voice or the bend of a string, and the whole music world adopted it anyway and got stuck with it. Once enough tools lean on one early choice, you cannot pull it back out without breaking everything built on top.

Any electrician who has worked on a proprietary control system knows that feeling in his gut. The building automation runs on one manufacturer's closed protocol, and the software to program it is tied to a single dealer. The owner goes to bid out his service contract and finds he can't, because the day that panel went in he got signed to one vendor for good. The tech who wants to help him is stuck too, locked out of a system he could fix in an afternoon if the tools were open. That gear will run for twenty or thirty years, and the lock-in runs exactly as long.

The building owner took the low bid on install day, and he is still paying for that choice twenty years later.

What the Trades Do About It

None of this is only a tech-world problem. The same skim runs straight through the trades. Your margin gets set by a distributor you can't walk away from, and the gear you trained on answers to the manufacturer instead of to you.

Watch where the money went and the pattern jumps out. The work never stopped, songs still get made and buildings still get wired. The pay just slid up to the handful of outfits that own the platforms and the protocols, while everybody doing the actual work took a thinner slice each year. Lanier called that arrangement the cloud's version of lords and peasants, and he described it before most of these companies turned their first profit.

His fix is buried under a lot of attitude, but it is the plain one, and it holds. Own your work. Keep your tools and your records in your own hands, so nobody gets to rent your own labor back to you. The trades are better placed to do that than almost anyone, because we still own the trucks and the knowledge in our hands. Lanier aimed all this at artists in 2010, and in 2026 it fits the trades just as well.

Next: the full review of You Are Not a Gadget.