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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’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.
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.
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
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
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.
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.