I attended a graduate urban planning program, during which I researched the interplay between virtual and material spaces. When I started, Google Maps was just becoming a thing, and my early research looked at how planners could design streets for hyperspace. Very quickly, I shifted to investigating the relationships between online and offline spaces and how they inform each other, and I researched the ways online user-generated content could affect the material world. Jaron Lanier’s writings were—and remain—crucial for anyone trying to understand how technology affects us, and his work has very much influenced my own. I met British writer Tim Maughan when we were both screenwriters for the Screening Surveillance short-film series, produced by his wife, sava saheli singh. Through different approaches, both men investigate the complex entanglements of humanity and information technology. Lanier writes philosophically about the ethics of virtual reality, the internet, the slowly eroding notion of personal privacy. He’s also interested in the proliferation of open-source content and decentralized software, and, in a 2006 essay of the same name, he coined the term “digital Maoism” to codify the phenomenon. Maughan’s work considers the complex relationships between people, their environments, and the technology they use (or which uses them), often with a focus on cities, class, and the future. His short film A Model Employee, for example, explores the implications of monitoring, incentivizing, and disciplining employees for the purposes of increasing efficiency and maximizing profit. The film focuses on Neeta, an aspiring DJ who works at a restaurant where the owner uses tracking software to assess his employees’ performance when they’re on—and off—the job. The film equates access to data with power, while pointing out that the software becomes the arbiter of trust. Maughan and Lanier offer divergent, though complementary, ways of thinking about what it means to be human, amid the increasing importance of machine intelligence, Silicon Valley’s influence, and the continued exploitation of people’s labor, intellectual property, and data.

Lanier is best known as the man behind virtual reality. He is also an esoteric musician, a collector of instruments, a composer, and a thinker. With titles like Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now (2018), Who Owns the Future? (2014), and You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto (2010), Lanier’s books argue that we must insist on our humanity in the face of ongoing technological change.