Originally appeared in the Boston Globe,
By Harvey Blume
EVER SINCE musician, writer, and technological visionary
Jaron Lanier coined the term "virtual reality" in the early 1980s,
and headed up efforts to implement the idea, he's been a member of the digerati
in excellent standing. But he's an anxious member, known to raise alarms about
just those big ideas and grand ambitions of the computer revolution that happen
to excite the most enthusiasm among his peers. That was the case with his
contrarian essay, "One Half of a Manifesto," in 2000. He's done it
again in a new piece, "Digital Maoism," which has roiled the Internet
since it was posted at edge.org on May 30.
In "One Half of a Manifesto," Lanier attacked what
he dubbed "cybernetic totalism," an overweening intellectual
synthesis in which mind, brain, life itself, and the entire physical universe
are viewed as machines of a kind, controlled by processes not unlike those
driving a computer. This digital-age "dogma," he argued, got a boost
from the era's new and "overwhelmingly powerful technologies," which
also obscured the dangers inherent in totalist thinking. People who would steer
clear of Marxism, for example, might fall for an even more grandiose world view
if it had digital cachet.
