One day in June, Jaron Lanier was lounging barefoot in the living room of his house in the Berkeley hills. Stretching back on a worn sofa, he began musing about the connection between Representative Anthony Weiner’s tweeting of lewd photos and Facebook’s controversial deployment of facial-recognition software, which automatically scans uploaded photos and identifies a user’s friends.

Jaron Lanier, at home with his daughter, believes that social-networking sites devalue friendship. Photograph by Martin Schoeller

To Lanier, a computer scientist and author, the common thread is that the Internet in general—and social networking in particular—has become difficult for the ordinary person to use with any security. “I’ve really been struck that a lot of people have said, ‘Why would powerful men risk so much for some sexual adventure?’ ” Lanier said. “But risk can be very sexual.” He briefly considered the possibility of two alternate Internets: one in which everything was viewable by anybody, and one in which users had absolute control over their private information. In neither case, Lanier said, would Weiner have sent his illicit snapshots. “What makes it erotic is the risk,” Lanier speculated. “If you had either perfect competence or no need for competence, because everything was a hundred per cent transparent, there would be no risk. So, in a way, the whole erotic risk factor of the Internet is being able to use it but not very well.”

He paused to interrogate a tortoiseshell kitten that was dozing in a corner of the sofa. “What’s happening, Starlight?” he cooed. As the kitten peered up sleepily, he added, “We think she’s female, but I haven’t done the most thorough examination.” He paused and said dryly, “If only cats texted, we’d know by now.”

Lanier is often described as “visionary,” a word that manages to convey both a capacity for mercurial insight and a lack of practical job skills. In the nineteen-eighties, he helped pioneer the field of virtual reality, and he is often credited with having coined the term. He has also dabbled in film. In 2001, he advised the writers of “Minority Report,” Steven Spielberg’s film about a dystopian future. Since 2006, he has worked as a consultant at Microsoft Research.

More recently, he has become the go-to pundit for people lamenting the social changes wrought by modern technology. Last year, he published “You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto,” a provocative critique of digital technologies, including Wikipedia (which he called a triumph of “intellectual mob rule”) and social-networking sites like Facebook and Twitter, which he has described as dehumanizing and designed to encourage shallow interactions. Teen-agers, he writes, may vigilantly maintain their online reputations, but they do so “driven more by fear than by love.” In our conversation about Facebook’s face-recognition software, he added, “It’ll just create a more paranoid society with a fakey-fakey social life—much like what happened in Communist countries, where people had a fake social life that the Stasi could see, and then this underground life.”

Such objections have made Lanier an unusual figure: he is a technology expert who dislikes what technology has become. “I’m disappointed with the way the Internet has gone in the past ten years,” he told me at one point. He added, “I’ve always felt that the human-centered approach to computer science leads to more interesting, more exotic, more wild, and more heroic adventures than the machine-supremacy approach, where information is the highest goal.”

These arguments have proved popular. The book has received admiring reviews in the Times and (twice) in The New York Review of Books. In the months after “Gadget” was published, Lanier lectured at Harvard’s Shorenstein Center, travelled to Seoul to speak at a major conference about innovation, and made Time’s list of the hundred “most influential people in the world.” At the South by Southwest Interactive conference, in Austin, in March of 2010, Lanier gave a talk, before which he asked his audience not to blog, text, or tweet while he was speaking. He later wrote that his message to the crowd had been: “If you listen first, and write later, then whatever you write will have had time to filter through your brain, and you’ll be in what you say. This is what makes you exist. If you are only a reflector of information, are you really there?”

Peter Haynes, a technology strategist and former U.S. business editor of The Economist, who is currently working with Lanier at Microsoft, says that he sees Lanier’s book as an overdue corrective to the national obsession with social networking. “As I read it, I was thinking, Yes, goddammit, this is exactly how I feel!” he said.

Such enthusiastic reactions have been, for Lanier, both gratifying and disorienting. He relishes the attention, but it also unnerves him. When a major newspaper asked him to write an op-ed about the Weiner scandal, he declined. “I’m not sure I should be the person who’s doing that,” Lanier explained. “I’m trying to stay focussed on the long game, not the item of the week. Because the issues I’m talking about will take a long time to address.”

For the past eight years, Lanier has lived in Berkeley, the mecca of techno-utopianism, in a ridgetop house that he shares with his wife, Lena, who is a child psychologist, and their four-year-old daughter, Lilibell, whom he credits with being his muse for “Gadget.” When I visited in June, Lanier had just returned from New York City, where he celebrated his fifty-first birthday in the lounge of the Bowery Hotel. The event, which began modestly, gradually turned into a celebrity bash. The film director Jim Jarmusch stopped by uninvited, as did the actor Forest Whitaker. As Whitaker recalls it, he and Lanier got into a long conversation about individual empowerment and the Internet. “When I saw him, I was really excited,” Whitaker remembers. “He was sitting with a lot of other guys. I came over and said, ‘Virtual reality!’ I have a lot of respect for him. He has an artist’s soul.”

Mountainously built, with a broad face surrounded by a mossy underbeard and rootlike dreadlocks, Lanier has an imposing presence that nonetheless comes off as oddly fluttery. He tends to talk in breathless bursts, and he often defuses his inflammatory remarks by allowing his voice to rise into a register that is more often reserved for talking to pets or small children. This can give listeners the impression that he is lecturing to a three-year-old while walking up a steep hill.

His house is nearly submerged in clutter; the living-room décor includes a four-foot hookah topped with a rubber Jar-Jar Binks mask, polka-dot curtains, a grand piano buried under papers and adorned with a pink feathered hat, and a homemade cave draped in scarves. The house also contains more than a thousand rare musical instruments, all of which Lanier plays. He will often begin his talks by performing on an esoteric instrument such as a Laotian khene, which sounds something like a harmonica. That afternoon, Lanier ascended the stairs to his studio, picking his way past an overflowing garbage can and a forest of microphone stands, and seated himself before a tall golden harp. He played a dark, plinky composition in what sounded like a minor key. “It’s not really minor,” Lanier said when I inquired. He played another dissonant progression. “It’s not that simple.” He gazed upward and added, “I’m really interested in scales that are harder to resolve.”

In the nineteen-eighties, Lanier came to believe that virtual reality—the creation of computer-simulated environments in which real people can interact—would precipitate an extraordinary revolution in art and communication. In an interview with Omni in 1991, he described the allure of programs that would let you feel as if you were wandering at will inside a Moorish temple or through the chambers of a beating heart. In an early paper, Lanier wrote of the ability of some octopuses to express fear or anger by changing color. In a virtual world, he hypothesized, people would be able to communicate in similar ways. Tom Zimmerman, Lanier’s business partner at the time, recalls that Lanier was taken by the idea of hosting virtual-reality parties, where guests would arrive in strange and exotic forms. “I had this feeling of people living in isolated spheres of incredible cognitive and stylistic wealth,” Lanier explained.

Constructing such spheres of wonder, however, proved technologically difficult, and by the mid-nineteen-nineties the field of virtual reality had largely collapsed. Despite this, Lanier has continued to argue that the purpose of digital technology should be to enrich human interaction. One of his most recent ventures has been to help Microsoft construct a new, joystick-free gaming system, called the Kinect, which uses a computerized camera to match the movements of a player’s body to the avatar in the game—allowing someone to kick a virtual ninja using her actual foot. In an op-ed piece for the Wall Street Journal, Lanier cited the Kinect, which this spring became the fastest-selling electronic device of all time, as an example of technology that could “expand what it means to think.” Unlike more Luddite critics, Lanier complains not that technology has taken over our lives but that it has not given us enough back in return. In place of a banquet, we’ve been given a vending machine.

“The thing about technology is that it’s made the world of information ever more dominant,” Lanier told me. “And there’s so much loss in that. It really does feel as if we’ve sworn allegiance to a dwarf world, rather than to a giant world.”

“My parents were kind of like me in that they had tons and tons of weird, amazing stuff,” Lanier explained. He recalled that, as a boy, he dug through a pile of his father’s junk and found an antique telescope that had once belonged to Commodore Perry. “This thing was just, like, on the floor,” he added. “So this environment of clutter, and interesting objects, is exactly the one that I grew up in—just with different objects. But I came by it honestly.”

Lanier’s mother and father belonged to a circle of artists in Greenwich Village, but they moved soon after Jaron was born—on May 3, 1960—first to Colorado, and then to a spot near El Paso, Texas, on the border with Mexico. The area was desolate and impoverished, and Lanier has speculated that the move was driven, at least in part, by fear. Lanier’s mother, Lilly, a pianist, painter, and dancer, had emigrated from Vienna when she was fifteen, after surviving a concentration camp. His father, Ellery, the child of Ukrainian Jews who had fled the pogroms, worked as an architect, painter, writer, elementary-school teacher, and radio host. When Ellery was seven, a close relative was murdered by a gang of anti-Semitic men wielding swords. A younger sister of the victim, who witnessed the assault but was warned by the attackers not to speak of it, was so traumatized that she spent the rest of her life as a mute.

Not long after Jaron’s birth, his parents abandoned their last name, Zepel, for the less Semitic-sounding Lanier, after Sidney Lanier, a nineteenth-century poet and flutist, whom Ellery admired. “I think they thought, We’ve got a child now, let’s get far away, let’s hide,” Lanier said.

In the desert, Lanier’s mother helped support the family by trading stocks through a broker in El Paso. Educated and bohemian, she taught her son piano on a Steinway she had shipped from New York, and arranged for him to attend a private elementary school across the border, in Ciudad Juárez. Lanier—a self-described “hyper-romantic” child—spent his free hours poring over art books in the school’s library. He recalls being enamored of a folio of paintings by Hieronymus Bosch, which he would sometimes leaf through while listening to Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D Minor. “The trifecta for me was eating chocolate, listening to Bach, and staring at Bosch,” Lanier said. The combination produced what he remembers as an “almost sexual” rapture.

Lanier was technologically precocious, as well as artistically minded, a mixture of traits that his father tried to nurture by giving him books about Buckminster Fuller. One Halloween when he was in grade school, Lanier modified a television to generate Lissajous waves: shadowy black-and-white interference patterns that, projected onto the walls of a makeshift haunted house, would jump in response to a person’s movements. Lanier found the effect magical—“like being surrounded by ethereal writhing spirits”—and imagined that other children would line up to visit. None did. “I didn’t have any friends at the time, and I really thought this would be my little honeypot—that somebody would love this thing, and want to know me,” Lanier recalls.