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.
"Digital Maoism" extends Lanier's brief on behalf of embattled, flesh-and-blood personhood. The threat he addresses this time comes from a phenomenon he calls "online collectivism." Exhibit A, for Lanier, is the Web-based, collectively written and edited Wikipedia. Controversy about the online encyclopedia's accuracy and editorial policies is currently making headlines, but Lanier's criticism has a different focus. "A desirable text," he writes, "is more than a collection of accurate references. It is also an expression of personality."
Personality, according to Lanier, is under-represented in
Wikipedia. In our day and age, he maintains, the collective--whether called a
network, a crowd, or a swarm--ominously devalues individual judgment and voice.
After a century that saw Nazism and Maoism, the "resurgence" on the Internet
of collectivist ideals should, Lanier argues, inspire fear rather than faith.
"History has shown us again and again," he writes, "that a hive
mind is a cruel idiot when it runs on autopilot."
IDEAS: Why did you write "Digital Maoism"?
LANIER: Because I'm concerned about the way ideas get
embedded in software. Take the current legislative battle about network
neutrality, whether the companies that run the Internet infrastructure have to
treat all Internet users on an equal basis, or whether less-rich users will be
disadvantaged. I'm pro-"net neutrality." Certain things like air and
water and the right to vote are fundamental. You have to be a bit of a
socialist in order to be capitalist. You have to have that underlying layer.
Some examples of ideas embedded in software are positive.
The most dramatic positive example is the Internet itself, put together with
the official Department of Defense mandate to be survivable in a nuclear war.
What resulted is the possibility of the Internet as we understand it. That's a
piece of good luck. If you look at other early information systems, like the
French Minitel, you can see a completely different conception.
IDEAS: So people made the right decisions back then. A
reader of "Digital Maoism" might ask, what's Lanier worried about?
LANIER: We all have our red lines, things that are
unacceptable. Here's what's paramount for me: We can't lose ourselves--can't
have computers become ways of losing personality.
IDEAS: How well did "Digital Maoism" address that
issue? After all, much of the response had to with this or that aspect of
Wikipedia.
LANIER: There are nerdy people who are tone deaf to the
types of things I'm concerned about, and are going to continue to talk about
technical details. But given the amount of activity around the essay--there
were 90,000 hits by its seventh day online--I have to believe that at least
some of it addressed what I actually said.
Let me be specific: I don't like people pretending something
better than themselves exists in the computer. This is a great danger. I see it
again and again in my life as a consultant and academic. You get a bunch of
people together on a project, and they quickly become anonymous. They
contribute to some sort of computer-mediated phenomenon, and treat the results as
an oracle.
IDEAS: You're contesting the idea of "wise" crowds
and the notion that genuine intelligence can somehow emerge from
"dumb" processes like those in a network, or a swarm.
LANIER: I reject the word "wisdom" with regard to
crowds. A crowd is not good with ideas. A crowd is absolutely inarticulate,
vulnerable to going crazy. A crowd is actually idiotic. It's a statistical
accountant, a calculating device, a certain type of thermometer or barometer.
You can use a crowd as a scientific instrument.
IDEAS: You worry that individuals are losing ground to such
instruments?
LANIER: Yes. It's almost a postmodern form of suicide. The
motivations are easy to understand. There's death denial. People die but
computers and crowds, maybe, don't. And there's liability avoidance. As an
individual, you have to be responsible. As a member of a crowd--or a user of
information systems--you're not responsible anymore.
IDEAS: You've used the expression "nerdy people."
Meaning what?
LANIER: Over the last 60 years there's been a giant nerd
wave of intellectuals responding to the computer metaphor. An early example is
Noam Chomsky, who thought human language must be like a computer program. His
whole scenario came out of contact with the computer world at MIT, and the new
computer metaphor for the brain.
The magnitude of nerd culture, with its addiction to the
computer metaphor, increases and increases, as the stuff that used to be
confined to a few little labs at MIT and Stanford has become mainstream
culture. The thing about the nerd culture is it has, as one part, the
psychology of trying not be human, rejecting human identity.
IDEAS: Your mother was a Holocaust survivor. Your father
fled the Bolsheviks. Does that background make you anxious about cultural
tendencies that might strike others as less disturbing?
LANIER: Absolutely. We have to worry about the world we're
creating.
Of course, I'm worried about oppressive government. But in
recent history--I mean the last 150 years--what we've seen again and again is that
movements for change that are only worried about the other people go bad
themselves. For a lot of people now, the idea is to be as critical as possible
of the current government. That's yesterday's criticism. The new criticism
should be directed at what we're creating now--the digital world. It's on the
ascendant and some day will be as powerful as the government.
Harvey Blume is a writer based in Cambridge. His interviews
appear regularly in Ideas. E-mail hblume@globe.com.
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