Jaron Lanier
Matt Kettmann in interviewed Jaron Lanier for the Santa Barbara Independent, in one of the answers Jaron reduces the essence of his “teaching”:
“Matt Kettmann: Our Web site is full of anonymous commenters. It seems to have led to a degrading of civil discourse much more so than an opening up of society. I have seen good ideas shot down by anonymous people. So what is the extent of that danger? How deep can these trolls go?
Jaron Lanier: Argh. For me, the thing people have to remember is that some of the things we like about the modern world are incredibly recent innovations and extremely fragile and precious. This idea of democracy, where people have a right to be heard and to be left alone, as Learned Hand put it, all of that stuff is incredibly recent. It’s just a 20th century thing, pretty much. The advent of modern democracy, with the American Constitution and the Bill of Rights, we didn’t really fine tune it until the 20th century. People don’t realize how rare and how precious that was.
There are two components that go together here. One thing is that in order for people to have rights, there has to be democracy. And in order for that to happen, clout has to be distributed. What that means is you need to have a middle class. I just don’t think you can have democracy without a middle class. You need to have a whole lot of people who collectively are richer and more influential than any band of rich people. That’s just a necessary background to having a democracy. It doesn’t guarantee it, I suppose, but I don’t think you can have one without it.
What’s happened in the last 10 years is that the original idea of the Internet was lost. The original idea, as articulated by Ted Nelson, who was the first person to think about it, was to make the Internet a way for people to buy and sell bits between each other so they had a way to make money when the machines got good enough to drive the cabs and sew the clothes and all that. It’s looking ahead to this time that we are starting to see the beginning of where physical jobs don’t make sense anymore. If you have a way to buy and sell bits, then people can still on their own time have some way of having their own clout so you have democracy.
If you don’t have that, there’s just supposed to be some institution that doles out your well-being, like some sort of socialist thing. Then all the power will accrue to whoever runs that institution, and then democracy gets ruined. This idea of buying and selling bits is the only idea I’m aware of in the history of humanity for how people can keep their dignity and democracy when the machines get really good.
What happened is we turned away from that, mostly because of Google — just the idea of using the Internet as a spying device in order to sell advertising makes a lot of money, so everyone said, “Forget all that dignity and buying and selling stuff. Let’s just go for everything being free, because people like being free, but then we can make a lot of money by spying on them in exchange.”
The problem with that is that people give up their power. Right now, if you’re close to one of the big servers, if you’re associated with the Google server or the Facebook server or the Microsoft server, you could do pretty well. And I’m one of those people — I’m very much associated with Microsoft right now, so we do great. All of us in Silicon Valley are making a lot of money and we’re all very happy.
But the problem in the long run is that it’s not sustainable. All those people out there who are just not part of the economy, but are just either on Facebook conforming and trying to avoid the evil eye or being trolls anonymously and being the evil eye, all of these masses of people who don’t get to benefit from the fruits of the spying operation, they’re just disempowered. There’s no online middle class. There’s either the rich or the unpaid. There’s no in between or well paid. You’re either fabulously rich or you’re nothing.
So there’s no such thing as an online democracy in those circumstances, and people are very opinionated and speak very loudly. If people have no political power, they kind of randomly riot. But none of it makes any sense because people don’t really have any power, people will kind of mouth off, but they have neither power nor responsibility nor hope for either. It’s a stupid way to run the world.
What I really want to try to do is bring back the original idea of the Internet, which is one where you do pay for stuff, but the only reason you’re motivated to is that you also get paid for stuff. So there’s reciprocity, and you’re not beholden to the big companies. I think the big companies would do well. I’m not anti-big company. I actually think the rising tide raises all boats, so I don’t feel any contradiction in what I’m suggesting since I work with big companies.
People have to learn to expect more and to be responsible more to become whole people. When they do that, they’ll also behave better. When you have something to lose is when you start to become decent.”
It was deplorable to hear Obama during the State of the Union address praise Google and Facebook as the examples of the American innovation. The ad supported Google and Facebook are the problem, they are the gatekeepers that impoverish all bottom up original content, they encourage linking and aggregation, the republishing mill that provide the ads inventory but diminishes the monetary value of the original content. They are the threat to democracy just like the oligarhy they represent is the threat to the middle class. What could be worse than praise the root of the inequality as the economic solution for the weak American democracy? Now look at the job creation chart on the last decade, the decade of the Internet, do you see the correlation? Jaron Lanier also comments on the anonymity:
“When you are commenting on someone’s blog post totally anonymously, then you can turn into a jerk really easy. So total revelation according to some strict rule that you only have one persona — which is [Mark] Zuckerburg’s idea of integrity, or the Facebook idea — and the sort of opposite of that, which is the total anonymity of the blog rolls, both of those things fail. They both create this artificial absoluteness that’s like some programmer’s idea of what reality should be.”
Yesterday I was thinking about the psychology of the anonymous trolls. It’s like placing a person into a bathroom stall and giving him a set of markers to doodle. The creative output of the bathroom art and poetry is predictable. A vile, shameful layer inevitably shows up.
Photo via flickr/Renee Blodgett
Further reading:
{ 1 trackback }