This paragraph early in Ellen Ullman’s Washington Post review of Jaron Lanier’s You Are Not a Gadget seemed written just for me, someone who has become increasingly dismayed after nearly two decades of digital policy-related work:

Anyone who has followed technology and for years has resented the adoration heaped upon the ascendant tribe will positively swoon as Lanier throws into one great dustbin such sacred concepts as Web 2.0, singularity, hive mind, wikis, the long tail, the noosphere, the cloud, snippets, crowds, social networking and the Creative Commons — dismissing them all as “cybernetic totalism” and, more fun yet, as potential “fascism.”

I’ve been swooning for weeks.

I’ve been quoting Mr. Lanier’s book extensively in recent posts — here, here and here. I first blogged on him in 2007, when he had a piece in The New York Times decrying the technorati’s replacement of the individual with the swarm. He had me at the column’s title: “Pay Me For My Content.”

My intention is to do a proper review of Mr. Lanier’s book. The problem is, he’s much smarter than me. I’m reading it through a second time to make sure I can do the book justice when I do review it.

Fortunately Ms. Ullman didn’t need as long to write her review. Ms. Ullman, a software engineer and author, brings her own street cred to her review. She appropriately chooses to focus initially on Mr. Lanier’s repudiation of the myth of the majesty of the Internet hive mind — the wisdom of the crowds — or more accurately in this case the myth of the anthill.

The “cybernetic totalists” base their thinking on decades-old ideas known as “chaos” or “complexity” theory, which began with a question about ants: How does something as complex as a colony arise from the interactions of dumb ants? This approach can be useful if one is studying mass phenomena such as traffic jams. The problem comes when we try to apply ant-derived thinking to people who are trying to lead creative, expressive lives.

In the totalist model, algorithms (most of them secret and proprietary, such as Google’s search engine) create knowledge by making links among the system’s many human participants. From this possibly infinite set of connections arises intelligence. The creative actor is no longer the human being but the system and its algorithms, out of which emerges a living, nonhuman or trans-human higher being.

She notes Mr. Lanier criticizes how in this world, humans are peasants, providing volunteer labor for the lords of technology, i.e., those smart enough to become the middlemen, not the initiators, of our creative output.

Ms. Ullman’s strong endorsement of the book does contain a caveat. She points out that Mr. Lanier has a problem with how content gets separated from its creator online: “[O]ften you don’t know where a quoted fragment from a news story came from, who wrote a comment, or who shot a video.” She then faults Mr. Lanier for not sufficiently citing his own thought processes in developing his ideas and his book. Perhaps she feels some of her writing and research was an influence on Mr. Lanier.

Regardless, here are two individuals steeped in both technology and the digital culture, both of whom are resisting the groupthink that pervades our Digital Utopian world, or “digital Maoists” as Mr. Lanier likes to call them. If only were there more.

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This entry was posted on Monday, February 15th, 2010 at 5:53 pm by Patrick Ross and is filed under copyright opponents, creators, internet, web 2.0. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.