Jaron Lanier on Digital Maoism

Conversation on Lanier's controversial essay.

URL = http://www.cancore.ca/lanier.mp3

Description

"Wikipedia is the biggest fish in what is becoming a very big pond of community developed websites. These are pages where the public, the online collective, act as volunteer editors responsible for gathering content from a number of sources. Some people call it Hive Mind. Jaron Lanier calls it Digital Maoism. Earlier this summer, Lanier wrote a provocative essay explaining why he thinks the spread of collectivism online is a dangerous thing. Since then, it’s created a digital duststorm of debate. Jaron Lanier is a digital pioneer. He’s a computer scientist and a columnist for Discover Magazine. He also coined the term virtual reality."

Discussion

Maria Bustillos:

"In an influential 2006 piece at Edge, "Digital Maoism: The Hazards of the New Online Collectivism" Jaron Lanier wrote that "the hive mind is for the most part stupid and boring" and pronounced the concept of an all-wise collective not only faddish, but wrong and dangerous. He expressed a conservative contempt for "the collective" (by which he more or less means, "the mob") and a staunch faith in the validity and significance of "authorship" and "individuality."

From the same essay: "The beauty of the Internet is that it connects people. The value is in the other people. If we start to believe that the Internet itself is an entity that has something to say, we're devaluing those people and making ourselves into idiots." Well okay. I guess if we started to believe that the Internet itself were writing Wikipedia we would be in some trouble, or maybe we would be Rod Serling, I don't know.

A lot of things have changed since 2006, but Mr. Lanier's mind is not among them. Seriously, reading his stuff is like watching a guy lose his shirt at the roulette wheel and still he keeps on grimly putting everything on the same number. Lanier's reasoning is right next door to that of Nicholas Carr (The Internet Is Making Us Stupid), Evgeny Morozov (The Internet Is Worse Than Useless Politically), Malcolm Gladwell (oh, don't even get me started) and Sherry Turkle (The Internet Is Making Us Ever So Lonely.)

So in his 2010 book, You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto Lanier kept up the attack on Wikipedia and other forms of crowdsourcing.

From a 2010 interview:

- On one level, the Internet has become anti-intellectual because Web 2.0 collectivism has killed the individual voice. It is increasingly disheartening to write about any topic in depth these days, because people will only read what the first link from a search engine directs them to, and that will typically be the collective expression of the Wikipedia.

Stop saying "the Wikipedia"! Anyhoo. it's difficult to see how Lanier, Carr et al. will be able to keep this sort of thing up for much longer. Michael Agger took Lanier's book to ribbons in Slate: "[Lanier's] critique is ultimately just a particular brand of snobbery. [He] is a Romantic snob. He believes in individual genius and creativity, whether it's Steve Jobs driving a company to create the iPhone or a girl in a basement composing a song on an unusual musical instrument."

But how come we're still even discussing this, when Bob Stein already made mincemeat (very kindly, but mincemeat) of "Digital Maoism" right when it came out, in 2006? And how come the crux of Stein's observations went pretty much unnoticed?

- In a traditional encyclopedia, experts write articles that are permanently encased in authoritative editions. The writing and editing goes on behind the scenes, effectively hiding the process that produces the published article. [...] Jaron focuses on the "finished piece," ie. the latest version of a Wikipedia article. In fact what is most illuminative is the back-and-forth that occurs between a topic's many author/editors. I think there is a lot to be learned by studying the points of dissent. [...]

At its core, Jaron's piece defends the traditional role of the independent author, particularly the hierarchy that renders readers as passive recipients of an author's wisdom. Jaron is fundamentally resistant to the new emerging sense of the author as moderator — someone able to marshal "the wisdom of the network." (http://www.theawl.com/2011/05/wikipedia-and-the-death-of-the-expert)

More Information

The original essay is here at http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/lanier06/lanier06_index.html