Digital Maoism

Jaron Lanier is one of the pioneers in biometrics and other fields I work in. I once read that after reading William Gibson’s novel Neuromancer, Lanier had the idea of putting the notions of cyberspace into practice, and creating the concept of “Virtual Reality”.

Lanier recently wrote a controversial essay: Digital Maoism in The Edge. The essay is long but quite interesting and provocative.

We’re going to try to translate it, or at least some fragments. Here is the first part, which is entertaining and has to do with my previous post about WikiPediaMan. I hope you enjoy it.

Digital Maoism

By Jaron Lanier

(published May 30, 2006 in The Edge)

(JARON LANIER:) My Wikipedia entry identifies me (at least this week) as a film director. It is true I made one experimental short film about a decade and a half ago.

From there Lanier tells how he tried several times to retire from film directing in the alternate universe of Wikipedia, only to be turned back into a director within a day, and how reporters have started asking him about his film career. He says his worry isn’t Wikipedia itself, which is just an experiment with room to change and grow, but the way it has come to be regarded and used, as part of a larger pull toward a new online collectivism: the idea that the collective is all-wise, an idea that had terrible consequences when the extreme right or the extreme left imposed it in different periods of history.

He goes over last year’s Nature study comparing Wikipedia’s accuracy with the Encyclopedia Britannica’s, the wiki world’s faith that problems will be corrected incrementally as the process unfolds, and his argument that accuracy in a text is not enough: a desirable text is also an expression of personality, and a text loses part of its value when it is moved from its original site into Wikipedia’s anonymous stream. He closes this part with MySpace, which doesn’t pretend to be all-wise and where you can always tell something about the character of whoever made the page.

That’s the first part. When there’s more time we’ll continue…..