Slashdot Mirror
What Turned VR Pioneer Jaron Lanier Against the Web
i_want_you_to_throw_ writes "Details of Jaron Lanier's crusade against Web 2.0 continue in an article at Smithsonian Magazine. The article expands upon Lanier's criticism of Web 2.0. It's an interesting read, with Lanier suggesting we are outsourcing ourselves into insignificant advertising-fodder and making an audacious connection between techno-utopianism, the rise of the machines and the Great Recession. From the article: 'As far back as the turn of the century, he singled out one standout aspect of the new web culture—the acceptance, the welcoming of anonymous commenters on websites—as a danger to political discourse and the polity itself. At the time, this objection seemed a bit extreme. But he saw anonymity as a poison seed. The way it didn’t hide, but, in fact, brandished the ugliness of human nature beneath the anonymous screen-name masks. An enabling and foreshadowing of mob rule, not a growth of democracy, but an accretion of tribalism. ... 'This is the thing that continues to scare me. You see in history the capacity of people to congeal—like social lasers of cruelty. That capacity is constant. ... We have economic fear combined with everybody joined together on these instant twitchy social networks which are designed to create mass action. What does it sound like to you? It sounds to me like the prequel to potential social catastrophe. I’d rather take the risk of being wrong than not be talking about that.'"
He got in early on 3D graphics and had dreadlocks, which made him a darling of the "Wired" and "Mondo 2000" (remember that?) crowd.
But he is clueless.
I also think the same thing about Facebook. Here we have people and companies putting all their eggs in the same basket controlled by a single entity.
Get free satoshi (Bitcoin) and Dogecoins
If he hates Web 2.0, I hate to be the one to tell him he's not going to feel any better about Web 3.0. This "sell yourself as the product" (either on purpose or out of blindness and ignorance) mentality isn't going anywhere, and it's not going to get any better until privacy becomes important to the masses again.
I’d rather take the risk of being wrong than not be talking about that.'"
OK, you're wrong. One aspect of the raw, awfulness that is anonymous internet commentary is far more important than polite reasoned discourse. It represents the true feelings of the participants, unhindered by social inhibitions and cultural conditioning. It is digital drunkenness, and like drunkenness, often reveals ugly facts about human nature, which remain facts, nonetheless.
Perhaps you prefer the sweet simpering smiles of courtesy. I do not. I would rather know who and what people really are. Reality rules. Fantasy is for fools.
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
While it has taken some time, the internet has evolved defenses to many of these social problems.
Adblock is so effective that advertisers want it outlawed. Spam Assassin cuts down on hideous amounts of junk mail, and Microsoft is offering bounties for the heads of spammers. Encryption is evolving at a frightening rate, spurred by overreaching agencies. Darknets are springing up, complete with obfuscated addresses. VPN is now a common term among the laymen.
The only people getting cut out are the technically illiterate, and their numbers are dwindling each day.
Yes, it shouldn't be like this, but realize, its adaptations are a direct result of our interactions with it; it's a mirror of our society, and it tells us that we have a very dark soul.
I am John Hurt.
I became aware of the impact of anonymity on a person's behavior back around 1991 when I operated a dial up BBS. Punk kids would get on and cause all kinds of problems, but when we politely showed up at their house and advised their parents that someone from that phone number had been dialing into our system and making all kinds of threats, well, the kids would typically practically wet themselves when their parents called them out on it. So for one thing, this is nothing new, and for another, it's an obvious fact of human nature that people will behave differently when they feel there isn't any direct accountability or ramifications for their actions in the "real world".
However, I'm still having trouble seeing where this all fits in to be anti "Web 2.0". If anything sites like Facebook have taken things in the opposite direction, making it more difficult to be anonymous (or at the very least, encourage the majority of people to simply use their actual identity online). At the end of the day there isn't any "real" ramification to these "poison seeds" of anonymity.
Perhaps a real-world example of what he's so concerned about would be more helpful. I skimmed through the rather large story at the Smithsonian site, and I just couldn't really pull any meat out of it. Lots of, um, words about disjointed stuff that I couldn't tie together. Maybe someone else can be so helpful as to sum it up in a way that makes sense?
Better known as 318230.
Lanier seems to cavalierly disregard the potential for being locked up simply for expressing the truth in open discourse.
I wonder if he, in his wisdom, foresaw a time where government agents or Islamic assassins appear at one's door step simply for expressing an opinion.
I can't imagine someone with even a modicum of historical hindsight would dismiss this so easily.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
We can only be honest when we're anonymous. That *is* our real self. It's when we have to be out in the open that we hide behind bullshit politeness and "civility" (aka "We both bullshit each other rather than being honest").
People should be required to use full names and titles. After all, the opinion of a professor is much more worthy than that of a manual worker.
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
Yes, anonymity has its downside, but "a danger to political discourse and the polity itself"?
The Federalist Papers were published under a collective pseudonym.
I cannot agree more with him:
Anonymous cowards posting on the internet will be the downfall of society!!
â"the acceptance, the welcoming of anonymous commenters on websitesâ"as a danger to political discourse and the polity itself.
Anonymity is not optional in a free society. If we all had to put our names on our ballots, if cash were outlawed and everyone had to pay by credit card with their name on it, if we truly became the transparent surveillance society tech pundits keep pointing to as the future, then democracy is dead. Anonymity is the one thing that can change the status quo -- it allows expression of ideas, themes, and alternatives to it without retribution or revenge being brought down on the speaker. Without anonymity, the government can simply disappear anyone who disagrees. Corporations can lock out political and social undesireables from key markets. When you make speaking out against the establishment impossible without painting a big target on your ass, you've killed democracy. It simply cannot survive without it.
The internet's free-wheeling and democratic nature, complete with our Anonymous cyber-terrorist groups and our Anonymous Cowards (mostly harmless, sometimes annoying), to cyber-bullies and cyber-other-things-left-unmentioned, is probably a shock to a dreamer like this guy. As a self-described pioneer, he's clearly an idealist. He doesn't see the practical long-term problems, only the ones keeping him from taking whatever his next step is on his ideological journey. For him, he's decided anonymity is the next problem to be kicked out on the way to utopia.
Sir, with respect to your accomplishments, there are no digital utopias anymore than there are real ones. The analogues between our world, here, and the world out there, and your desire to bridge the two, is noble. But you cannot pick and choose ideological values for your new world. All you can be is a humble medium through which social change occurs. All the great inventors of the world know this. When Maxwell was approached by a politician on the usefulness of electricity, he remarked, "One day sir, you will tax it." I'm sure he envisioned homes lit by power 'from the ethers', and buggies that no longer needed horses as he slaved away in his lab, but he kept enough perspective to realize that what he was discovering would one day integrate into the fabric of society in ways even he couldn't imagine... and the idea of free power for humanity, while noble, was less practical in light of the fact (no pun intended) that it would be regulated and taxed. He knew that, before it even existed.
Show some humility, sir. You are not the first, nor will you be the last, to become frustrated that the world you created did not develop at all like you imagined.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
In support of your comment, anonymity is a requirement for free speech. In fact, forcing someone to attach their identity to their speech is "a danger to political discourse and the polity itself" moreso than anonymity. I will deal with assholes on the Internet because I know that requiring them to identify themselves so they can be tried in the court of public shame leads down a very bad road.
Absolutely correct. It is terrifying to me how many people do not get this point.
Answer: Having to find something other than VR to talk about, and too much sci-fi. HTH.
Do you see what I did there?
"As far back as the turn of the century, he singled out one standout aspect of the new web cultureâ"the acceptance, the welcoming of anonymous commenters on websitesâ"as a danger to political discourse and the polity itself."
Oh you mean Fidonet? AKA Fight-O-Net? Or like my local bbses where everyone knew each other? One wag commented just hours ago at another forum that the local networks were "the crazy story of raging hostility and love." And they were. We would fight it out online and go to Rock&Bowl and RHPS every weekend. The Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory doesn't account for cruelty and bickering among the people you know and love. It also doesn't account for the BS people post under their *real names* - see Facebook for that.
This isn't some new phenomenon. This is human nature being acted out online. I don't know where he's coming from that he should be surprised at all. I think he led a very sheltered life online and offline. He thinks that the masses should go back to where they came from. We're well past that point of no-return. Maybe if he doesn't want to be immersed in society, he should go create another Internet, with a population of 1, himself.
--
BMO
Silicon Snake Oil 2.0?
That's my opinion. CSS was a good idea but it's almost never used for its intended purpose, which was to make it easy to change the style of an entire site without rewriting every page. What it's used for is to vainly attempt to make a web site look like a newspaper or magazine page with everything exactly where the designer wants it -- only that's an impossibility, because of different aspect ratios, screen sizes, and orientations.
Web designers today want to use absolute coordinates, which results in one user having a horizontal scroll bar while another has half the screen empty, and both get an ugly page that sucks donkey balls, pretty as the page may be on the designer's screen.
I wish they'd take absolute positioning out of the spec. You can't position an item absolutely on the internet.
Oh, and I have to apologize for web2.0, because I had all its elements in my web site in 1998 (except ebsolute positioning; I'm not nearly as stupid as most webmasters). Sorry guys, my bad.
Free Martian Whores!
Seems to me that while anonymity is a problem (and the post of the link to Penny Arcade deserves to stay at the top of the heap), pseudonymity is very very useful, and largely immune to many of the problems of anonymity.
Take Slashdot, in particular. Slashdot has accounts and a reputation system. You are not required to use your legal name as your account name, but that's irrelevant. Once you've chosen a name, it's your name. Outside of astroturfers, most of us use only a single Slashdot account. (I'm sure there are those of you out there who work really really hard at muddying the waters around yourself. We know you're out there. Congratulations. Don't respond.) In consequence, the karma an account accumulates maps pretty well to a single individual. Lanier's concerns about a lynch mob congealing out of the masses are short-circuited by that mapping. We don't know each other's given names, but we know a name for each other. Except for actual Anonymous Cowards, we are pseudonymous, rather than anonymous. And that's enough to form a community, rather than a mob.
Well, almost. I mentioned the reputation system and karma already, but it bears repeating. That plus conversation threading is probably indispensable as well. The @Blah convention of non-threaded comment systems works very poorly, since it doesn't scale. Taken together, the three features form a community.
Lanier is right if you ignore Slashdot. Every other site that accepts comments is full to the brim with useless trolls. But it's easy to see why, and the names in use don't matter a damn. What matters is the lack of karma, moderation, and threading. Youtube comments are a cesspool of noise that should simply be deleted, right now, and reestablished with a SlashCode moderation system. The difference would be astounding.
In truth, because the names currently in use are usually required to be unique within a system, they're usually better identifiers for an individual than their legal names. If my account name was John Smith, I could be one of thousands of John Smiths. But I bet there's only one AreYouKiddingMe on the entire internet. (I haven't Googled and I'm not egotistical enough to bother.) So advocating for requiring the use of legal names online is rather missing the point. The identifier isn't relevant to either the problem or the solution.
And Lanier is wrong, whether you ignore Slashdot or not. There is one crucial difference between an online mob and an actual mob: nobody can get killed by an online mob. Driven to suicide is the worst it gets, and if our personal support systems (in-person friends and family) weren't so broken, even that wouldn't happen. Nobody has ever been strung up from a tree by a crowd of Youtube commenters, and they never will be, because they AREN'T a crowd. They're a bunch of individuals sitting in front of screens, separated by a cumulative total of millions of kilometers. That, and the psuedonymity/anonymity cuts both ways—the mob can't hang a person it can't find.
The primary victim of "Web 2.0" seems to have been anonymity. We are tracked. Everywhere on the Web. And we have to work much harder than we should not to reveal ourselves...and it's not just our identity, it's our location, our friends, our habits, our pleasures.
Geeks like to think that they can ignore politics, you can leave politics alone, but politics won't leave you alone.-rms
My first live Jaron talk was a rant against virtual reality at Xerox Parc in the 1980s. The VC's were exploring it as the Next Great Thing. Jaron had done some experimenting and found it lacking then.
He does think about things deeply. So I value his comments even if I do not always agree.
what i got from the article,
he would like us to continue to be enslaved by "social norms" by being punished for brandishing a position that may widely differ from the norm. Being as we are in a "normal" society and are judged for thinking "abnormally", tying anonymity to abnormal behavior is just a way to enforce entrenched behaviors.
i for one applaud Anonymity online.
case: http://allthingsd.com/20121224/china-poised-for-crackdown-on-internet/
I think the main reason for Lanier's discomfort lies in idea that the web is driving us towards a significant shift in social interaction. The old standbys of social segmentation mean nothing on the net. Age, race, gender, religion, sex, even language. Anyone can rotfl or TL;DR or RTFA along side their now global peers, even if in reality they currently share no common norms. I think it is this one change which should be celebrated.
This change has not come without consequences, however. With a lack of norms comes a possible anomie, and my main concern lies with the coming generations. While most of us reading (indeed, the early adopters of this evolution) are like minded in nature; introverted, rational thought, highly adaptable with great problem solving ability, it doesn't mean that we have become the archetype of the world. We also have found our 'place' in society. A lack of definite social structure can be harrowing to most, especially when coupled with the main social controls that the net currently employs: shunning and shaming. We don't hang online offenders, but to some on the receiving end of these controls, the effect may end up being the same.
Also realize that children pickup up much more than just language by watching their parents and siblings, and other members of the kid's self defined community. Important cues as to personal space, appropriate gestures, the levels of response to various stressors. Your kids are watching you on levels that you find innate and invisible. The net doesn't provide these important queues. When (North America) has both parents at work, the siblings at higher grades of school and the net as the next social everything-anytime, along with it's inherent anomic state, I think we are going to see much more behavior crop up which we would find highly erratic or disturbing. I predict a large rise in violence/suicide in the coming years, especially amongst children in ages were we've not considered such behaviors possible.
As to social catastrophes... I don't think those are the words he wants to use. Significant social events maybe. His position is obviously one of concern, but to be honest, the doom and gloom side of human nature is an everlasting trope. It's 2012, soon to be 2013. Villages are still being sacked. Thieves and sociopaths still kill and plunder for personal gain. Revolutions still promise change. And most people still try and lead a peaceful life while still enjoying a good fart joke now and then. Nothing new under the sun there.
What is changing is our interaction with one another on a global scale. With the advent of a mostly norm-less, instantly accessible society for all comes a new era for both social wonders and horrors.
Absolutely. I would rather suffer through a thousand trolls or genuinely extremist comments from anonymous persons than not be able to read the thoughtful comments a more timid person may not have written had they been required to attach their name to them.
However I'm not sure I would draw a parallel between The Federalist Papers and the drivel many current anonymous posters write.
I am going to have to disagree with you – the writers of the Federalist papers where widely known to support the constitution.
Back then, advertising your ideas were taken as sign of ego and hubris – signs that you coveted power and fame – implying that you wanted to set yourself as aristocracy. The time favored cool rotational thinking. The writers wrote anonymously to remove their personal interests from the debate so the focus would be on the ideas.
However I'm not sure I would draw a parallel between The Federalist Papers and the drivel many current anonymous posters write.
That's only because the barrier to entry has dropped so low. There are many pamphlets from the same era which have been lost to history because they were drivel. There would have also been some real gems that never got out there because costs prevented them from being published.
I think the point that Lanier is really missing is that anonymity is not new, just that pen and ink is now nearly free.
But at least you don't stand in jail.
What do you mean by anonymous? What else you want me to do? I already said my name is khan.
This is going to read like an ad hominem attack but I am genuinely curious because I see so many sarcastic remarks like yours on a daily basis that I have to ask:
Have you ever considered that you might actually be wrong about something? That it is possible that someone older and/or more experienced than you in a particular field can have some particular insight backed by their experience that allows them to see things you don't?
Could it be possible that this "Aging 'Genius'" isn't weird, he just disagrees with your particular world view and that you are the one who is mistaken and possibly even weird?
To me, the current willful acceptance of surveillance by the masses is very "weird". The Stasi archives did not contain anywhere near the detailed information about people that Facebook now possesses and the people using it, delivered that data on purpose.
"They thought they were free" as it were.
The logic seems to be: This asshole anonymously trolled people on Reddit. Hitler was a genocidal asshole. Therefore, online anonymity leads to genocide. Did I miss a step? I did read the whole article.