Digital Maoism 2

We continue the translation of Jaron Lanier’s essay on what he calls “Digital Maoism”. In the first part Lanier tells us the story of his Wikipedia biography. It’s ironic how the creator of virtual reality fell into an alternate reality, where he was systematically listed as a film director. Today the Wikipedia article is fixed, so at least he got something out of this essay.

In this part Lanier introduces the concepts of the hive mind and meta-aggregation, and criticizes the value of sites like Digg, Reddit, Meneame, Fresqui or BlogMemes.

Digital Maoism

(continued, published in The Edge, May 30, 2006)

The Wikipedia is far from being the only online fetish site for foolish collectivism.

Lanier describes a frantic race online to become the most “Meta” site, the highest-level aggregator. It started innocently enough with directories like the early Yahoo, then AltaVista, then Google and its page rank algorithms, then blogs and Meta-blogs like Boing Boing; in all of them real, identified people were still in charge, and value flowed from people. The trend of the last couple of years, he says, has been to remove the scent of people, so that content seems to emerge from the Web as if it were speaking to us like a supernatural oracle.

He then turns to his friend Kevin Kelly, former editor of the Whole Earth Review and founding executive editor of Wired, who has been thinking about what he and others call the “Hive Mind”. In March Kelly reviewed “Consensus Web filters” such as Digg and Reddit, where nobody takes responsibility for what appears, only an algorithm; a month later he reviewed popurls, which aggregates those filters. Lanier, writing on May 27, 2006, notes that an experimental approach to diabetes treatment that matters to tens of millions of Americans isn’t mentioned on popurls, while a story about a student’s ice-cream-eating record is, and that the serious earthquake in Java is buried under layers of aggregation, on equal footing with the ice cream story, with no context or authorship.

Kevin Kelly says of the “popurls” site, “There’s no better way to watch the hive mind.” But the hive mind is for the most part stupid and boring. Why pay attention to it?