Power Without Bounds (Are We Thinking This Through?)

There was an interesting piece in an online paper on the use of the internet and the culture that is evolving from it. The article was in the New York Times. Looking at it I find there is a bit of a hidden bias, an apologia for a coming change to the Time’s access policy. However there are a couple of points that are much broader and merit mention. The article penned by John Tierney is somewhat a book review of a tome entitled “You Are Not a Gadget,” by Jaron Lanier. It is somewhat a polemic about how writers are getting screwed by the mantra of an open internet.

Hey I agree creators of intellectual property should get paid for their endeavor. I have no problem with that. I wish I was good enough to get paid for my writing. On the pragmatic side of how writers whose work is disseminated via the internet should get paid and how much should they get paid, I haven’t worked that all out in my head. Personally I have problems with long patent durations on life saving/life sustaining drugs. Similarly I have issues with long term copyrights on manuscripts that trail on far after the creator of the work is dead. Yeah and I am okay with estate taxes too.

As interesting as the above paragraph and the ideas contained therein might be, there are at least six different blog posts possible on each sentence, what I am more interested in is the comments regarding internet group dynamics. I am reprinting the first part of the article here but if you want to read it in contact here is the link,

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/12/science/12tier.html?ref=science

Mr. Lanier, a musician and avant-garde computer scientist — he popularized the term “virtual reality” — wonders if the Web’s structure and ideology are fostering nasty group dynamics and mediocre collaborations. His new book, “You Are Not a Gadget,” is a manifesto against “hive thinking” and “digital Maoism,” by which he means the glorification of open-source software, free information and collective work at the expense of individual creativity.

He blames the Web’s tradition of “drive-by anonymity” for fostering vicious pack behavior on blogs, forums and social networks. He acknowledges the examples of generous collaboration, like Wikipedia, but argues that the mantras of “open culture” and “information wants to be free” have produced a destructive new social contract.
“The basic idea of this contract,” he writes, “is that authors, journalists, musicians and artists are encouraged to treat the fruits of their intellects and imaginations as fragments to be given without pay to the hive mind. Reciprocity takes the form of self-promotion. Culture is to become precisely nothing but advertising.”

I find his critique intriguing, partly because Mr. Lanier isn’t your ordinary Luddite crank, and partly because I’ve felt the same kind of disappointment with the Web. In the 1990s, when I was writing paeans to the dawning spirit of digital collaboration, it didn’t occur to me that the Web’s “gift culture,” as anthropologists called it, could turn into a mandatory potlatch for so many professions — including my own.

So I have selfish reasons for appreciating Mr. Lanier’s complaints about masses of “digital peasants” being forced to provide free material to a few “lords of the clouds” like Google and YouTube. But I’m not sure Mr. Lanier has correctly diagnosed the causes of our discontent, particularly when he blames software design for leading to what he calls exploitative monopolies on the Web like Google.
(emphasis added)

Two things have always bothered me about the web. These items are the lack of accountability on the macro scale relative to both bloggers and larger organizations and the pervasive nature of group think. I have always worried that demagogy would find this place an excellent and fertile group for something way beyond the fascists and the National Socialists of the 1930s. While Hitler had to rely on tracts and speeches, a really ingenious potential despot could use faked videos and faked polls and faked everything to appeal to the basest instincts of the lowest common element of society. Republican pundits would imply that this is how Obama was elected. Whatever.

But really if there was someone with broader appeal than Osama the net could be a scarily destructive force to democratic values in a way that I don’t think the general populous has considered. I don't know that I trust the hive. I am afraid that nobody will be holding back the mad vendors of hate.