noteworthy wrote:
Jaron Lanier, whose new book is "destined to become a must-read":

Web 2.0 is a formula to kill the middle class and undo centuries of social progress.

I read some of this stuff on edge and it seems a bit over the top. For example, the claim that "information wants to be free" is associated with the hacker scene and not the extropians - its merely a way of expressing that information is hard to control.

Encouraging creativity is not the purpose of something like wikipedia - the purpose is to collect a concensus view, which wikipedia does quite well, and frankly reputation systems are likely to become a greater part of wikipedia and they will track and credit and encourage individual contributions.

I guess the reason that this rant doesn't resonate with me is that reputation systems are the answer to this problem and they've been the answer for a long time now. Reputation systems credit individual contributions to the collective.

Decius wrote:

Encouraging creativity is not the purpose of something like Wikipedia -- the purpose is to collect a consensus view, which Wikipedia does quite well ... I guess the reason that this rant doesn't resonate with me is that reputation systems are the answer to this problem and they've been the answer for a long time now. Reputation systems credit individual contributions to the collective.

What are the most successful reputation systems in widespread use today? The consensus is that eBay and PageRank are canonical examples. However, as Paul Kedrosky recently noted of PageRank, "Google has become a snake that too readily consumes its own keyword tail."

I haven't read the new book, but I heard a frustration with the way most users think of the "ten blue links" as the beginning and end of the answer to whatever question they posed to Google. And since Wikipedia is often the first hit, many people default to the consensus view it presents, never stopping to consider alternative perspectives.

Going back to 2006, after the Digital Maoism essay was published at Edge, he wrote to Boing Boing:

In the essay i criticized the desire (that has only recently become influential) to create an "oracle effect" out of anonymity on the internet - that's the thing i identified as being a new type of collectivism, but i did not make that accusation against the wikipedia - or against social cooperation on the net, which is something i was an early true believer in- if i remember those weird days well, i think i even made up some of the rhetoric and terminology that is still associated with net advocacy today- anyway, i specifically exempted many internet gatherings from my criticism, including the wikipedia, boingboing, google, cool tools... and also the substance of the essay was not accusatory but constructive- the three rules i proposed for creating effective feedback links to the "hive mind" being one example.

Perhaps his views of Wikipedia and Google have shifted in the last few years ... In the Q&A, he speaks of creating "a human-centric internet", which could be shorthand for an internet driven by reputation systems.

I agree with you that he confuses the narrative on "information wants to be free" by conflating the long-range aspirations of artificial intelligence researchers with the real-world risks raised by the information security community.

From 2003:

There are real lessons to learn in participating in a intellectual community, and we don't GET those lessons from the "real world" because the "real world" is NOT an intellectual community. It's sexual and political.

However, I think the internet has been an intellectual community only insofar as its roots have been firmly with the nerds. As it becomes more and more mainstream I think it will feel less and less like a place where mature conversation occurs. Love and war are irrational. The amount of drama on the net seems to increase exponentially with a linear growth in population.

Basically, I don't think anyone is going to give you hell because you posted immaturely 10 years ago. I think that people will give you hell because you expressed a view that offends them 10 years ago. People can understand spelling errors, but not political ones. Because politics isn't rational, and it wants to be offended.

Decius wrote:

noteworthy wrote:
Jaron Lanier, whose new book is "destined to become a must-read":

Web 2.0 is a formula to kill the middle class and undo centuries of social progress.

I read some of this stuff on edge and it seems a bit over the top. For example, the claim that "information wants to be free" is associated with the hacker scene and not the extropians - its merely a way of expressing that information is hard to control.

Encouraging creativity is not the purpose of something like wikipedia - the purpose is to collect a concensus view, which wikipedia does quite well, and frankly reputation systems are likely to become a greater part of wikipedia and they will track and credit and encourage individual contributions.

I guess the reason that this rant doesn't resonate with me is that reputation systems are the answer to this problem and they've been the answer for a long time now. Reputation systems credit individual contributions to the collective.

I read the review in Slate and I have to agree with most of the points made. But I think Lanier is writing it not as a perspective but as a provocation (I mean, he is using the word Manifesto). A lot of what he's railing against is true. The net has fallen from the great communication of humanity to basically a means to induce consumerism. Hell, there are several organizations who owe their entire valuations to the fact that you can monetize the interaction of people. That's fucking insane. And certainly not what we thought would be the best and brightest uses of this system when we were pushing its deployment. It doesn't help that a lot of these organizations cloak their intentions by placating the geek community.

I'm all for commercial intent and it's obvious that the Internet is the underpinning of pretty much all commerce globally at this point. But when you're shifting wealth by monetizing other people contributing content without them receiving any of the value chain, that's just slavery. And I think Lanier is saying it's not just economic slavery, but intellectual slavery as well.

I also don't agree that reputation systems are the answer to this problem in totality. Reputation systems are important for a lot of reasons and I think over the coming years, trust will be the absolute currency (the financial fiasco of 2008 is a good tipping point). But reputation doesn't care about well being. So I might have a great and trusted brand for spewing obnoxious shit that people are somehow compelled to consume. It does very little to find equilibrium between obnoxious shit and something wholesome.

flynn23 wrote:

The net has fallen from the great communication of humanity to basically a means to induce consumerism. Hell, there are several organizations who owe their entire valuations to the fact that you can monetize the interaction of people. That's fucking insane. And certainly not what we thought would be the best and brightest uses of this system when we were pushing its deployment.

The internet is just the latest instance of a general, time-honored pattern:

Financial progress is about learning to deal with strangers in more complex ways.

Consider VISA:

It's not so crazy to think of Visa -- "the corporation whose product is coordination" -- as a model for how these networked organizations of the future could be managed. As Dee Hock says, "Inherent in Visa is the archetype of the organization of the 21st century."

Or the bookstore:

The old-fashioned bookstore browser who picks and pokes and doesn't care about the critics or Oprah or the bestseller charts may wind up on the endangered species list.

Speaking of books, here's Neal Stephenson:

One of the things I wanted to talk about in "Cryptonomicon" was the history of computing and its relationship to society. I was talking to Stephen Horst, a philosophy professor at Wesleyan, and he mentioned that Newton for the last 30 years of his life did very little in the way of science as we normally think of it. His job was to run the Royal Mint at the Tower of London. I'd been thinking a lot about gold and money, which were themes in "Cryptonomicon."

At the same time, I read a book by George Dyson called "Darwin Among the Machines," in which he talks about the deep history of computing and about Leibniz and the work he did on computers. It wasn't just some silly adding machine or slide rule. Leibniz actually thought about symbolic logic and why it was powerful and how it could be put to use. He went from that to building a machine that could carry out logical operations on bits. He knew about binary arithmetic. I found that quite startling. Up till then I hadn't been that well informed about the history of logic and computing. I hadn't been aware that anyone was thinking about those things so far in the past. I thought it all started with [Alan] Turing. So, I had computers in the 17th century. There's this story of money and gold in the same era, and to top it all off Newton and Leibniz had this bitter rivalry. I decided right away that I was going to... [ Read More (0.2k in body) ]

flynn23 wrote:
When you're shifting wealth by monetizing other people contributing content without them receiving any of the value chain, that's just slavery. And I think Lanier is saying it's not just economic slavery, but intellectual slavery as well.

I also don't agree that reputation systems are the answer to this problem in totality.

In order to spread money through the value chain you have to have some way to measure value - thats what reputation systems measure.

But reputation doesn't care about well being. So I might have a great and trusted brand for spewing obnoxious shit that people are somehow compelled to consume. It does very little to find equilibrium between obnoxious shit and something wholesome.

Neither does money. I don't have a solution for the problem of bad taste.

Decius wrote:

flynn23 wrote:
When you're shifting wealth by monetizing other people contributing content without them receiving any of the value chain, that's just slavery. And I think Lanier is saying it's not just economic slavery, but intellectual slavery as well.

I also don't agree that reputation systems are the answer to this problem in totality.

In order to spread money through the value chain you have to have some way to measure value - thats what reputation systems measure.

But reputation doesn't care about well being. So I might have a great and trusted brand for spewing obnoxious shit that people are somehow compelled to consume. It does very little to find equilibrium between obnoxious shit and something wholesome.

Neither does money. I don't have a solution for the problem of bad taste.

touché, but I'm still saying that reputation systems don't solve the problem in totality. Ironically, my last startup attempted to quantify the value in health, by actually measuring people's biometrics and looking for improvements or regressions. The more you improved, the more value you created, the lower your costs. So I get it, but it doesn't solve the problem that someone will game the system to either corner the value without proper compensation to contributors (a la social networking et all) or to extract value without putting anything into it (a la the finance industry and most government programs).