« Crossing the Bridge | Main | Gooogle fatigue? » Digital Maoism? (Or Mau-Mauism?)Jaron Lanier writes a spectacularly flawed essay on the supposed "hazards of the new collectivism," looking at collaborative projects like Wikipedia from the outside and equaiting them with the dictatorship of the proletariat. He so misses the point that he triiggers a set of responses far more interesting than his piece, though they have their own flaws. I think Howard Rheingold has the best response: Collective action involves freely chosen self-election (which is almost always coincident with self-interest) and distributed coordination; collectivism involves coercion and centralized control; treating the Internet as a commons doesn't mean it is communist (tell that to Bezos, Yang, Filo, Brin or Page, to name just a few billionaires who managed to scrape together private property from the Internet commons).It's interesting to see the usual suspects attempt to grab the river's current and keep it still. jon posted this at 11:06 PM |
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Umm, why do you think Jaron's essay was flawed? I thought it was a great warning against putting too much faith in the idea of "the Wisdom of Crowds" Sometimes, as in Wikipedia, when the crowd is focused on one goal, the crowd is wise. Sometimes, it's not. It's important to understand the situations where the sum is greater than the whole, and situations where everything descends to the lowest common denominator. See Digg for example.
Also, he talks about the loss of authorship on these sites. One of the things I like about the internet is it's unabashed first person voice. Sites like Wikipedia and Digg tend to take away that voice, and dilute it down to a bland monotone.
Now how is that "flawed?"
I agree with a lot of the comments and refutations on the essay, but I think they serve to clarify Jaron's point, not blindly dismiss it as you do.
Posted by: Matt Rose | June 13, 2006 6:20 PM
The flaw is that Jaron's constructed a straw man, this assumption that people are worshipping at some collectivist altar. Read Howard Rheingold's comment, which I quoted, which makes a distinction (between collective action and collectivism) that Jaron misses. Wikipedia is not a religion or a political movement, and Wikipedia's editors and adherents do not, themselves, assume that they're sustaining some flawless endeavor. Those who assume otherwise make flawed arguments about what Wikipedia represents, which is a collaboration, not a collectivist cell.
Posted by: Jon Lebkowsky | June 15, 2006 10:57 PM