Was the promise made good for society through 2.0?

January 15th, 2010

Mr. Lanier, a musician and avant-garde computer scientist — he popularized the term “virtual reality” — wonders if the Web’s structure and ideology are fostering nasty group dynamics and mediocre collaborations. His new book, “You Are Not a Gadget,” is a manifesto against “hive thinking” and “digital Maoism,” by which he means the glorification of open-source software, free information and collective work at the expense of individual creativity.

Writes the New York Times

It is powerful stuff

He blames the Web’s tradition of “drive-by anonymity” for fostering vicious pack behavior on blogs, forums and social networks. He acknowledges the examples of generous collaboration, like Wikipedia, but argues that the mantras of “open culture” and “information wants to be free” have produced a destructive new social contract.

“The basic idea of this contract,” he writes, “is that authors, journalists, musicians and artists are encouraged to treat the fruits of their intellects and imaginations as fragments to be given without pay to the hive mind. Reciprocity takes the form of self-promotion. Culture is to become precisely nothing but advertising.”

This is a very thoughtful and insightful. The pendulum always swings equally in two directions. Personally I still believe that we are renegotiating the power relationships between ourselves, organisations, either commercial or political as we have rejected and now have the tools to effectively do so an industrial top down, managerial approach to how we live our lives.

Laniers point is based upon ethics and literacy, there must always be rules of engagement. Transitition is always difficult, protracted, great resistance is met with great energy to change.

The FUCK YOU Brigade meeting up with the FUCK OFF MY LAND incumbents will always result in collateral damage. Innocent bystanders get hurt, whilst others will always unscrupulously take advantage of the misfortune others. Look at loan sharks in poverty stricken areas, because banks will not give loans to certain sectors of society – Great White sharks feed off those on the breadline. And so, in the same way the networked society just scales differently.

So has it all gone Pete Tong? My view is no and I guess it depends on how Utopian you were in the first place?

Lanier does make some interesting points,

In the book Mr. Lanier offers some general proposals for helping content providers, like the establishment of a universal system for micropayments administered by the government. He’d be glad to see the system run privately, he told me, but there are obstacles to PayPal or anyone else establishing a universal system, so it needs to be a government function akin to maintaining paper currency. All of which raises some more questions for you to consider:

1. If there were a simple system of micropayments, would you be willing to pay a little to read the New York Times online? (You can explain what “a little” means to you.)

2. Should such a system of micropayments be run by the government?

3. Would newspaper readers be better off in the long run if newspapers charged online readers directly instead of relying so heavily on advertising revenues?

There is a something relevant here, micropayments for culture and information – as someone once said to me, ‘when civilisations die the only thing left is art,’ so we better work hard at working out what next looks like. In the same way that the sheet ice that scraped and shaped our planet into what it is today, networked and converged communication technologies are doing the same thing to our industrial world, releasing humanity from the frozen wastes of the toxic tail end of the industrial revolution. Pointing us towards a life better lived.

Negotiating the path towards that new place is always a bit dicey – but what I see, if one cares to look hard enough is that there are entirely new ways which are; faster, cheaper, more effective, and, more egalitarian that what had gone before.

Over exuberance is a natural state of affairs when you get a new train set especially when we a migrating to a more participatory, cooperative, reciprocal model of what our society might look like.

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