Why the web has gone sour

http://www.theage.com.au/digital-life/digital-life-news/why-the-web-has-gone-sour-20100214-nzo5.html

by bootload • 16 years ago

23 13 16 years ago

theage.com.au

bootload2• 16 years ago

"... 'I observed myself getting into bizarre pissing matches. It's just astonishing how it takes hold of you. It's like a demon or something.' ... also noticed a disturbing tendency among the champions of the internet's "open culture" to humiliate and attack those who had lost out in the online revolution - the musicians, artists, journalists and others ..."

Valid.

"... Lanier believes that by fetishising and over-stating the power of this collective so-called intelligence we undervalue individual humans ..."

Anonymous are doing some interesting things to highlight Internet censorship in Australia ~ http://www.google.com/search?q=australia+cyber+attacks+anony... Individuals would have a lot of difficulty in undertaking these - legally questionable and technically difficult tasks ~ http://www.google.com/search?q=australia+cyber+attacks+anony... The down side of this of course is moderation and control. The instability of the mob. The possibility to do good one day, evil the next.

fierarul• 16 years ago

He might have some valid points but too bad he can't get into them too deeply in any article since he's trying to sell this new book of his. Oh well, I'll wait for it to hit the public library.

_delirium• 16 years ago

The observation that the current set of networks / communication platforms "chop[s] up a network of individuals so finely that you end up with a mush" is interesting.

I do see something of a progressive decrease in community in my cyberspace dealings, as everything gets more connected and networky: the BBSs I was on had typically very strong community that persisted over time, early web stuff was not quite the same but still reasonably strong (mailing lists, the heydey of kuro5hin.org), and that's increasingly gotten sort of diluted.

narag2• 16 years ago

Sorry for the off-topic, but hasn't this man got very fat? I've read today the news about Kevin Smith thrown away from a plane, a few days ago I was scared by a video of Kerry Livgren and now the photo of Lanier. Guys, you must be eating some kind of poison over there. No way people gets like that just overeating after 40.

m0th87• 16 years ago

Perhaps you should be taking Lanier's anti-troll sentiments to heart :)

narag2• 16 years ago

Troll? Why? I admire this man, that's because it hurts. Moreover, is saying someone is fat a way to discredit what he says?

marshallp• 16 years ago

Thats a load of hokey. Mr Lanier, if read any of his previous expositions, has a habit of disregarding all established work and opinion, without giving any data points, or even making his arguments in established terminology.

Jaron Lanier is a contrarian, and like most contrarians, gives a bad reputation to discerning skeptics everywhere.

DanielBMarkham• 16 years ago

I think as technically-inclined people we are all waiting for the next, coolest, most radical way of becoming more and more integrated into the hive mind. In fact, one of the most amazing things I've witnessed over the past twenty years is the carelessness with which people give up all of their personal details and lives into the void that is the net.

But Lanier's right: it's not all just wine and roses. Things come with trade-offs. We need to keep having intelligent conversations about the things we're giving up. Sometimes I get the feeling that instead of some master plan, because of a lack of natural selection, we're not automatically evolving into some better form of existence. Instead we're just randomly screwing around with what makes us human, like a kid trying to fly a 747 by remote control by pulling various levers and seeing how much "fun" the reaction is.

carsonbaker• 16 years ago

I'm halfway through his book You Are Not a Gadget and I give it very low marks so far, but not for the writing or the ideas presented -- the latter of which, however, is disappointingly nebulous. The main problem is that Lanier consistently chooses poor examples to make a point and presents very little real evidence to support his claims. He mainly complains a lot about fuzzy circumstances and persuades very little.

For example, on page 12 Lanier elucidates the idea that "entrenched software philosophies become invisible through ubiquity." It begins, "An even deeper locked-in idea is the notion of the file. Once upon a time, not too long ago, plenty of computer scientists thought the idea of the file was not so great." The section ends, "The idea of the file has become so big that we are unable to conceive of a frame large enough to fit around it in order to assess it empirically."

In between are three sparse paragraphs. The first paragraph mentions Xanadu and the original iteration of the Mac OS as examples of systems that didn't use files. The second and third paragraphs complain that now every system uses files, that we're locked in to using filesystems, and we can't even conceive of systems without files.

At this point while reading I'm very curious about Xanadu and trying to conceive of file-less systems myself. I'm desperately waiting for the author to support the analogy, but he quickly moves on to claim that "[lock-in] could happen soon to the definition of a human being."

Wait, what? Stop, and tell me about these file-less organizational systems. Why can't we conceive of them anymore? Why didn't they gain traction? Prove to me that we're really locked-in and that's a bad thing. I'm not accepting your segue -- how exactly is this a worthy example for your larger point?

And so it goes. I've picked one example, but it's truly page after page of baseless assumptions, spacey ideas, thin examples, and doubtful conclusions. Where is the evidence? I'm screaming at the pages imagining my high school english teacher scribbling "illustrate!" in red ink across the margins.

bootload2• 16 years ago

"... In between are three sparse paragraphs. The first paragraph mentions Xanadu and the original iteration of the Mac OS as examples of systems that didn't use files. The second and third paragraphs complain that now every system uses files, that we're locked in to using filesystems, and we can't even conceive of systems without files. ..."

Try reading up on Andrew Pam. I met Andrew for lunch one day around '95 and remember him talking about Xanadu ~ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Xanadu running on a new fangled thing called a "Be Box" ~ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BeBox At one stage you could buy the software with a book in bookshops and I remember looking at it. WWW was more interesting.

sailormoon• 16 years ago

Since you mentioned Xanadu, I am compelled to once again post the link to the best account of the project and its history that I know of: http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/3.06/xanadu.html

michaelneale• 16 years ago

Some have mentioned that the iPhone/iPad (and probably other mobile platforms) are moving consumers away from file based computing (even if the specific OSes underneath are using them). Each application in the iphone doesn't really think about files, but more objects and persistent data or the network resources.

techiferous• 16 years ago

"When I started to notice myself getting mean online I thought, 'Something is missing here. Something has gone terribly wrong,"

I think the larger problem is that technology is not merely the addition of something new, but it's the addition of something new at the expense of something else, because technology abstracts. It's only a win if you don't care about the "something else" that you lose in the abstraction.

With the Internet, we can communicate with more people and more quickly than ever before. That's a gain. We lose the body language, human touch, voice intonations, etc. More than merely making the communication more difficult, experiences like seeing someone smile at what you just said (rather that merely getting an upvote) and getting actual physical contact like a handshake or a hug are part of our necessary social nutrition. The Internet is making us more productive but if we aren't careful we can become socially malnourished.

Why the web has gone sour

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