While at a conference recently, just prior to beginning his keynote presentation, Jaron Lanier asked the audience to not tweet while he was speaking. Not out of respect for him, he explained, but out of respect for themselves. If the audience felt that what he was saying was important enough to tweet about, then they might want to take some time to think about it. Let it be "weighed, judged and filtered by someone's brain--instead of just being a passive relay."
Thinking and feeling is crucial to our existence. "You have to find a way to be yourself, before you can share yourself,” he reasoned. This thought process is lacking today in the world of mindless retweeting, sharing, and following.
This idea appealed to me, so I thought I would pass it along for the SFIMA audience. Some of his arguments may seem like mere complaints about the digital world, but he optimistically asserts that we are still young enough in the "web 2.0" space to make changes before "lock-in" occurs and we cannot alter course.
Cybernetic Totalism is taking over
Lanier's overall philosophy is about digital humanism, which starkly contrasts the mainstream digital world where most of us work and play. The path that we are on is subjugating the Person for the Collective, as we trade in the individual mind for the "hive mind". He asks the question: Is there truly wisdom of the crowds, or is it a surrender to the "digital Maoist" mindset, no different than mob rule.
Is all this crowd mentality any different than the much hated design by committee that pervades the corporate world?
Lanier offers this thought experiment: If we had 100,000 people contributing to an article about science, how many decades would it take before the crowd came up with something equal to the "Theory of Relativity"? Would this ever happen? Mainstream examples of the committee rule are: Wikipedia, American Idol and Google searches to name a few.
Do we consider the "crowd", the algorithm, or the cloud to be greater/better than a person with flesh and blood and a conscience? Is Google's algorithm really insightful, or do we all just do contortions (SEO writing) to make the algorithm work, and make the machine seem smarter than it is. Recently AOL writers were asked to "dumb down" their articles so that Google could find their content easier. This is like "teaching to the test" - it is only for short-term gain, not long-term. It is part of the dumbification of our society.
A more humanistic web
Some takeaways about how to make the web more humanistic, and a call to resist acting like a machine, or a piece of software, Lanier offers up some of these gems found in his new book.
- Create a website that expresses something about who you are that won’t fit into the template available on a social networking site
- Post a video once in a while that took 100 times more time to create that it does to view
- Write a blog post that took weeks of reflection before you heard the inner voice that need to come out
- If you are Twittering, innovate in order to find a way to describe your internal state instead of trivial external events, to avoid the creeping danger of believing that objectively described events define you, as they would a machine
- Don't post anonymously, unless you are in danger
Google, Facebook, a more distributive digital clout, and the future...
Digital advertising took a wrong turn at the beginning of the century. Advertising has traditionally evoked emotion, connection, and the best ads tell a story. Google text ads should not even be called "ads" - they should be called "raw data access points" or an "interpersonal access fee."
We are de-monetizing everything to support these little ads (i.e. music, journalism). This is part of the diminution of the middle class.
Most models online are trading short-term gain for long-term sustainability. An example is the publisher model of "Make it free, get the audience and then hope/pray the advertising supports it." In capitalist societies, however, we believe that everyone shall be paid for their efforts, but in this digital Maoist society, we (the hive) want everything to be free. With this mentality only those few entities with data centers serving the ads are making any money. Everyone else is giving away their work for free. In the end there will be only a few players.
The USA needs a greater distribution of digital clout, which would be akin to a middle class. We are slowly loosing this, as it is being gobbled up by the biggest players: IBM, Google, Facebook, Amazon, and hedge fund computers.
The rigid format of Facebook has a reductive quality, paring down well-rounded beings full of nuance, color, and soul, into "multiple choice identities." There was a time that only the government would make us enter data into a box to register as “Male,” “Female,” “Single,” “Married,” “Birthdate,” “Hometown,” etc, which was demeaning to some people. (However, to their credit Facebook has helped to get the web out of the awful anonymity of the early years that spawned the dark side of the web, Lanier concedes.)
It's bizarre that Facebook has no business model or plan. And, bizarre that they should have to compete with Google, but that is what they are doing. (Google is all about getting people off the search engine and onto their destination; Facebook is sticky.)
On web content: "Comments about TV shows, major movies, commercial music releases, and video games must be responsible for almost as much bit traffic as porn," Lanier observes. "There is nothing wrong with that, but since the web is killing the old media. We face a situation in which culture is effectively eating its own stock. … We are growing into a culture of reaction without action. That online culture is dominated by trivial mashups of a culture that existed before mashups, by fandom responding to the dwindling outposts of centralized mass media."
In the future, computers and robots will drive cars and trucks and the shipping and transportation industry (the middle class) will face the same slow death that newspapers are facing today. Where will all those workers go? If computers and robots do all our work, and we want everything to be free, then how will we make a living?
Read more in his bestselling book You Are Not a Gadget: a Manifesto. Overall, Lanier is optimistic about the future of the web, but only if can recognize and make changes where needed.
About Jaron Lanier:
Jaron Lanier is known as the father of Virtual Reality technology and has worked on the interface between computer science and medicine, physics, and neuroscience. He is also a professional musician and author.
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1 comments:
As a staunch opponent of design by committee I've been watching the evolution of crowdsourcing creative. I have many of the same fears as Lanier regarding individual expression and innovation being threatened by mob rule, but prevailing sentiment seems to be encouraging this trend.
An example, there are now crowdsourcing agencies such as GiantHydra. Another agency, Victors & Spoils offered $5,000 to anyone that could come up with a concept that their client, Harley Davidson would buy. The commercial that was eventually produced from this effort was not critically well received (I don't believe).
There are other variations on this theme. While innovation should be encouraqed let's not lose sight of our creative and personal goals. It's important to manage our tools and not let the tools drive results.
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