Lock-In Is the Whole Story

He Called It in 2010

Jaron Lanier is a computer scientist who helped invent virtual reality. In 2010 he published You Are Not a Gadget, and most of what the book 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 lost their pay while the platforms above them kept the money, exactly as he warned. He even said advertising would end up as the only thing the web reliably paid for, and here we are. He also predicted the death of paid expertise, as pooled crowd content replaced the editor who spent his whole working life on one subject. Being that early is the part that gets you when you read him today.

He was just as sharp on people. A person is deep and strange, Lanier argues. A profile is a checklist somebody else wrote first. Fill one 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, and every tradesman already lives inside it.

Lock-In Is a Trade Problem

Lanier's word for the trap is lock-in. His example is the Musical Instrument Digital Interface (MIDI), the music standard from the early eighties. MIDI turned every note into a key press with a number attached. MIDI could never record a voice sliding between notes or a guitar string bending. The whole music world adopted it anyway and got stuck. Once enough tools depend on one early choice, you cannot pull that choice back out without breaking everything built on top of it.

Any electrician who has worked on a proprietary control system knows the feeling. 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. The day that panel went in, he got signed to one vendor for good. The tech who wants to help him is stuck too. He could fix that system 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 stays a tech-world problem. The same money pattern runs straight through the trades. Your margin gets set by a distributor you cannot walk away from. The gear you trained on obeys the manufacturer before it obeys you.

Watch where the money went and the pattern shows itself. The work never stopped. Songs still get made and buildings still get wired. The pay moved up to the handful of outfits that own the platforms and control the protocols. Everybody doing the actual work took a smaller share 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 sits 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 for that than almost anyone, because we still own the trucks and the knowledge in our heads and hands. Lanier aimed all of this at artists in 2010. In 2026 it fits the trades just as well, and his follow-up book, Who Owns the Future, carries the argument further.

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