Bryan meets...

... Jaron Lanier: The father of virtual reality. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

You Are Not a Gadget broadens the argument far beyond the valley. Lanier — rightly, I believe — associates the tyrannous aspects of cybernetic totalism with a much wider ideology. It is, in fact, just one aspect of a package that includes transhumanism — the belief that we should work to escape our biological limitations and make ourselves more than human — and the weird cult of the impending Singularity, the point at which a computer becomes conscious and takes over the running of the world. Lanier even includes the kind of turbocharged Darwinism that claims natural selection must explain everything. These are all just different ways of trashing the human, a contemporary impulse of extraordinarily persuasive power.