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.

RE: You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto