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.'"

Comments

Lanier is a dipshit

[realmolo]

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.

Re:Lanier is a dipshit

[Animats]

He got in early on 3D graphics and had dreadlocks

I know, I know. I met him back when he had his original VR system, with a pair of SGI machines hooked up to 320-line or so goggles and about a second of lag between the head tracker and the video. Turn head, wait 1s for image to stabilize, repeat. Once people figured out that all you could do well in VR was move and shoot, interest declined. Even for gamers. (Autodesk had a big interest in VR at one time; the idea was that you'd be able to do architecture in VR with an intuitive interface. Pick up window, walk to wall, insert window in wall, step back, look at result, slide window to different position... Didn't work out. Without force feedback, manipulation in 3D VR is clumsy.)

Lanier's main complaint seems to be that being a second or third-tier musician doesn't pay well any more. Historically, it never did. The notion of musical stardom came from a brief period in history when duplicating phono records was a very expensive process. There are now somewhere between 5 and 8 million bands on Myspace. (Some of which might not suck.) So being a "musician" isn't a big deal any more.

Interestingly, he's against anonymity, which encourages ranting. But nobody listens to online ranting from anons much any more. Post on Slashdot as Anonymous Coward and you're lucky to get a rating above 0. Post on Wikipedia without logging in, and unless you have something really productive to say, you'll probably be reverted, Rant at people via e-mail and spam filters block you. Grief in a MMORPG, and you get kicked out and have to restart as a noob with low stats. Problem solved. (Mostly.)

Facebook and Google, on the other hand, are against anonymity because it interferes with monetizing data about their users. That's not a good reason.

Anonymous commenters

[ArcadeMan]

An enabling and foreshadowing of mob rule, not a growth of democracy, but an accretion of tribalism...

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.

Can't handle the truth?

[gestalt_n_pepper]

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.

Re:Can't handle the truth?

[jedidiah]

Or as the Romans put it: In vino veritas.

Re:Can't handle the truth?

[evil_aaronm]

Exactly. I don't know the kind of circles in which this chucklefuck runs, but he must be fairly well sequestered from reality if he thinks people can rise above our baser nature. People are animals: nothing more, nothing less. We grok tools pretty well, but we're still animals, prone to the same kinds of behaviors as lions, tigers and bears. Oh, my! Anyone who thinks highly of us, as a species, is in for some serious disappointment.

Re:Can't handle the truth?

[Anonymous Coward]

It represents the true feelings of the participants, unhindered by social inhibitions and cultural conditioning.
 
Please. I use it to troll. I don't represent any point of view aside from the one I think will get the most reaction out of fools like you. I come off as either a leftist or a rightist depending on who's ire I'm trying to rise and a preach against products that I use daily just to see how much of a twist the fanbois get in. And I don't just do that here, I have accounts across dozens of websites that I do this with. Not to mention areas where I make my voice known but I'm not even a real member of the conversation, like on IMDb where I'll vote films I've never even seen with a 1 or a 10 on a whim. It might not be much but I still do it. And if I could tell you the number of times I've made outragous statements and got modded up on Slashdot when I was 100% trolling is amazing. It has nothing to do with facts or my true feelings. It's me understanding my audience and playing them. Entertainers of all kinds do it daily and make millions, I do it as a troll and feel smug in realizing that supposedly educated people are duped just as easily as the bumpkins on the street. In the end it makes me feel that most of what goes on in the Interwebs is either a scam outright or is likely a scam that draws in people with the best intentions. A great waste of other peoples' efforts. Hurhay!
 
  It is digital drunkenness, and like drunkenness, often reveals ugly facts about human nature, which remain facts, nonetheless.
 
Anyone who's a serious drunk will tell you that what comes out of the mouths of your average drunk after about 2/3rds of a fifth of Jim Beam can't be trusted as either fact or true feelings. I've seen it happen a handful of times but most of the time it doesn't. This is why most of the "digits" guys get off of girls after a few hours of drinking get tossed in the garbage. It's a good idea, at the time, but once reality sets back in they realize that they're lucky that it never went any further.

Re:Can't handle the truth?

[catchblue22]

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.

I think the poster neglects something very important here, that the nature of our discussions and interactions changes us. If our default level of discussion is the internet equivalent of a bar room brawl, it will tend to bring out, to accentuate, to amplify those irrational and cruel tendencies. If this becomes too widespread, it will not end well for society.

The poster refers to the "ugly facts" about human nature. If I want to discover these "ugly facts", a quick survey of Roman history will suffice. Roman legions entering a town and indiscriminately kill 300 000 men, women and children. The mad emperors Caligula, Nero and Commodus committed atrocities that would make most readers want to throw up upon reading about them. Never mind the barbarism of slavery. We humans are quite messed up. We have the potential to be good, but we also have the potential to be monsters. Does that mean that we should tolerate, nay, encourage those traits?

Re:Can't handle the truth?

[postbigbang]

The pseudo-cloak of anonymity would reveal perhaps less than that, but maybe more. When you came here, your IP was recorded. Go anywhere, and using that, they know you and correlate you.

Oh, you used a proxy? Didn't hide much. You can be figured out fairly quickly. That means you, where you're sitting, reading this. They know. The ostensible mask of anonymity is vaporously thin.

The hoops you need to jump thru to really randomize yourself are getting farther and farther from practical. Sure, it might be on a vast ten-dot network with thousands of machines behind a few IP addresses. Doesn't take long to figure out the local IP, and to correlate that. Just using a single email send will start to reveal oodles about you and your machine. The more you send, the more is corroborated and the less is guessed.

The guise of anonymity is important, but on the interwebs today, it's plainly a thin veneer that's easily vaporized. Spew what you want; the direction and velocity of the chunks will give you away. True anonymity is pretty much gone.

'Tis alright

[lightknight]

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.

 

Anonymity

[Dan East]

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?

Re:Anonymity

[Kjella]

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.

Agreed, if anything the anonymous voice is being shut out from more and more of the public debate because sites increasingly use debate systems with a real name policy. You could of course register a fake Facebook account but that only lasts until someone cares to report it as possibly fake. People's perception of what the public opinion is, is now formed more and more on places like Facebook and less and less on places like slashdot where nicks are the norm. Sure it cuts down on the spam and trolling and generally obnoxious behavior but it also cuts down on the truth, but is presented as just as good or even better than the real thing.

Penalty potential too potent.

[icebike]

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.

Re:Penalty potential too potent.

[Krishnoid]

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.

His experience in this area seems to actually be the basis for his opinion:

But something he mentioned next really astonished me: "I’m sensitive to it because it murdered most of my parents' families in two different occasions and this idea that we're getting unified by people in these digital networks—"

"Murdered most of my parents' families." You heard that right. Lanierd's mother survived an Austrian concentration camp but many of her family died during the war—and many of his father's family were slaughtered in prewar Russian pogroms, which led the survivors to flee to the United States.

Anonymity isn't the mask, our real identity is

[Anonymous Coward]

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").

Re:Anonymity isn't the mask, our real identity is

[bmo]

If you don't have the balls to say something with your name attached to it then don't say it.

Then why are you using a nom-de-plume, or is your real name BitZtream?

Hypocrite.

--
BMO

Re:Anonymity isn't the mask, our real identity is

[JWW]

One in a billion people have something to actually fear about what they say getting them killed or otherwise harm

Um, while this may be true for the whole population of the world. It is demonstrably NOT true for the populations of China, Syria, Iran, Egypt, North Korea, Venezuela, Russia, Cuba, ........

Hell, I'm beginning to think its not even true for the whole world and that you're quite wrong.

Anonymity is unimaginably important when you are standing up to a power structure that does not want you saying what you are saying.

Re:Anonymity isn't the mask, our real identity is

[bmo]

Anonymity is unimaginably important when you are standing up to a power structure that does not want you saying what you are saying.

The SCOTUS has come down time and again saying that anonymity is crucial to free speech, and nearly everyone cites the Federalist Papers as a shining example.

In China, the Communist Party has a great big problem with corruption, and online communication is exposing that. So they try to cover it up by making people fear for their lives for posting about corruption under their real names.

Remove anonymity and you remove the last check against an abusive government.

--
BMO

Argument by authority

[TeknoHog]

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.

Re:Oblig.

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, anonymity has its downside, but "a danger to political discourse and the polity itself"?

The Federalist Papers were published under a collective pseudonym.

Lanier is exactly right!

[Anonymous Coward]

I cannot agree more with him:
Anonymous cowards posting on the internet will be the downfall of society!!

History is longer than 30 years

[girlintraining]

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.

Re:Oblig.

[preaction]

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.

What?

[bmo]

"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

Anonymity vs Pseudonymity

[Areyoukiddingme]

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.

Anonymity on today's Web??

[seandiggity]

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.

Re:ok AC?

[Anonymous Coward]

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/

Re:Oblig.

[alexander_686]

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.

Re:Oblig.

[owski]

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.