What Turned Jaron Lanier Against the Web?

[Ailedhoo]

A intresting interview has been conducted. The interview is with Jaron Lanier.


Here is the interview.


The interview is about Lenier's criticism of the internet, of his concerns of mobs and of on the idea of the crowd. The last passages are notable especilly:

“This is the thing that continues to scare me. You see in history the capacity of people to congeal—like social lasers of cruelty. That capacity is constant.”

“Social lasers of cruelty?” I repeat.

“I just made that up,” Lanier says. “Where everybody coheres into this cruelty beam....Look what we’re setting up here in the world today. We have economic fear combined with everybody joined together on these instant twitchy social networks which are designed to create mass action. What does it sound like to you? It sounds to me like the prequel to potential social catastrophe. I’d rather take the risk of being wrong than not be talking about that.”

Here he sounds less like a Le Carré mole than the American intellectual pessimist who surfaced back in the ’30s and criticized the Communist Party he left behind: someone like Whittaker Chambers.

But something he mentioned next really astonished me: “I’m sensitive to it because it murdered most of my parents’ families in two different occasions and this idea that we’re getting unified by people in these digital networks—”

“Murdered most of my parents’ families.” You heard that right. Lanier’s mother survived an Austrian concentration camp but many of her family died during the war—and many of his father’s family were slaughtered in prewar Russian pogroms, which led the survivors to flee to the United States.

It explains, I think, why his father, a delightfully eccentric student of human nature, brought up his son in the New Mexico desert—far from civilization and its lynch mob potential. We read of online bullying leading to teen suicides in the United States and, in China, there are reports of well-organized online virtual lynch mobs forming...digital Maoism.

He gives me one detail about what happened to his father’s family in Russia. “One of [my father’s] aunts was unable to speak because she had survived the pogrom by remaining absolutely mute while her sister was killed by sword in front of her [while she hid] under a bed. She was never able to speak again.”

It’s a haunting image of speechlessness. A pogrom is carried out by a “crowd,” the true horrific embodiment of the purported “wisdom of the crowd.” You could say it made Lanier even more determined not to remain mute. To speak out against the digital barbarism he regrets he helped create.

So what do you think of the internet? Is it a positive as Ray Kurzweil states or a negative force as Jaron Lanier notes? The negatiave cases of Violentacrez and many others must be taken account of, as well as the positive forces that came in the Arab Spring.

In the ened of the day: do you agree with Jaron Lanier?

 

[Tahuti]

His argument is basically similar to Andrew Keen's 'The Cult of the Amateur', though the latter's conclusions are slightly less radical.

In many ways I feel sympathetic towards them, yet abandoning the web goes a little bit too far.

 

[peter grimes]

His argument is basically similar to Andrew Keen's 'The Cult of the Amateur', though the latter's conclusions are slightly less radical.

In many ways I feel sympathetic towards them, yet abandoning the web goes a little bit too far.

Yes I completely agree. Let's not throw out the baby with the bath water. But I should mention that I know nothing of this 'keen' you mention

 

[Traitorfish]

Unreconstructed Hobbesean fears, despises human race; sees barbarian hordes everywhere.

News at 11.

Spoiler less glib comment :

I don't think that he's without insights, but he's just sort of all over the place. One minute the problem is that smalltime artists are finding it harder to make money, the next it's that the internet provides a new medium for people to be dicks to each other, the next it's that- and I really don't get this- file-sharing is somehow responsible for a social re-composition that began about thirty years before file-sharing was even a thing... There's no coherent thread, here, no sustained critique, just a shotgun-scatter of not obviously related complaints. Perhaps he develops something more coherent in his book, I don't know, but from this he just comes across like any of the other "everything's going to crap" doomsayers, distinguished as far as I can tell only by his dreadlocks and ability to go five minutes without invoking Bronze Age war-deities.

 

[Formaldehyde]

For supposedly being a software industry luminary and nominated for a Time 100 most influential person, I found it quite surprising that I didn't recognize the name at all. I haven't even heard of the game he is supposed to be involved with creating.

But I do remember what a complete flop VPL Research was.

 

[warpus]

Seems to me like he isn't saying that the web is causing this - he's saying that social media is causing it.. two totally different things.

 

[King Kalmah]

I blame myspace and facebook....

how can you get a lynch mob together when you're looking at porn?

 

[Tahuti]

Seems to me like he isn't saying that the web is causing this - he's saying that social media is causing it.. two totally different things.

In many ways, social media and 'the web' are already the same things. The early 2000s saw the rise of what is called Web 2.0, or the increased interactivity of the internet. Now the web was already interactive, but the interactivity behind original WWW created by Tim Berners-Lee was largely off limits to non-aficionados, with the notable exception of fora, though these can still be much better regulated than social media or social media functions such as comments. Now, we have sites that are scripted in such ways that they allow everyone, to post stuff.
Classical infantile tirades against a person popular to hate (like Justin Bieber) are a distinctively Web 2.0 phenomenon. This wasn't so much of a problem in the original WWW, where the mean intelligence level of internet 'produsers' and audiences were significantly higher.

 

[warpus]

Sure, but "web 2.0" is just a vaguely defined catchphrase used by the media and not really by web dev. professionals. That phrase means nothing to us, really.

"The web" is just a protocol. Social media is something else entirely that you can't really compare to "the web", as it spans across other technologies, the web only being one of them. There are also aspects of the web that are not social at all.

Maybe in a very diluted/pop culture sense you could make this work, but if we are going to stick to definitions and what things actually mean, then you can't really equate social media with the web.

 

[Tahuti]

Sure, but "web 2.0" is just a vaguely defined catchphrase used by the media and not really by web dev. professionals. That phrase means nothing to us, really.

If by "us", you mean computer scientists, I can say I used to agreed with that viewpoint as well, having studied computer science as well. But if you look to the web from qualitative viewpoint, the term actually works pretty well. There is a very clear pattern in which the web has shifted from an aristocratic to a democratized model, the latter of which is the web 2.0.

"The web" is just a protocol. Social media is something else entirely that you can't really compare to "the web", as it spans across other technologies, the web only being one of them. There are also aspects of the web that are not social at all.

Maybe in a very diluted/pop culture sense you could make this work, but if we are going to stick to definitions and what things actually mean, then you can't really equate social media with the web.

The point is that social media has come to dominate the web. You may be right that social media is more than the web, but the web itself has been engulfed by social media. Nearly everything about the web is "social" (read: about user input). And it has proven fairly detrimental to the quality of info for a large part. CivFanatics is perhaps one of the few sites on the web where discussions are relatively civilized and intellectually dignified, owing to its audiences. But as soon as audiences become wider (as is to be expected with for-profit enterprises) things will go downhill fast. Just reading any site's comments section is enough to contemplate suicide.

 

[warpus]

If by "us", you mean computer scientists, I can say I used to agreed with that viewpoint as well, having studied computer science as well. But if you look to the web from qualitative viewpoint, the term actually works pretty well. There is a very clear pattern in which the web has shifted from an aristocratic to a democratized model, the latter of which is the web 2.0.

It remains a term that's incredibly vague and not very well defined, though. It means different things to different people, and from what I remember it was a term that was invented to describe dynamic webbpages, back in the late 90s..

It was pretty much always a "Wow!" term, in that you could plaster it on your resume and wow people with your knowledge of "web 2.0".

The point is that social media has come to dominate the web. You may be right that social media is more than the web, but the web itself has been engulfed by social media. Nearly everything about the web is "social" (read: about user input). And it has proven fairly detrimental to the quality of info for a large part. CivFanatics is perhaps one of the few sites on the web where discussions are relatively civilized and intellectually dignified, owing to its audiences. But as soon as audiences become wider (as is to be expected with for-profit enterprises) things will go downhill fast. Just reading any site's comments section is enough to contemplate suicide.

Oh, you are right that social media is huge right now, but you can't really equate it to the web. I mean.. the concepts overlap quite a bit, but they are different.

I can be pedantic when it comes to accuracy, especially when it comes to something I know a bit about... plus I don't like it when people misuse terms (such as saying "the internet" and meaning "the web").. I mean.. I don't really care generally, but if we're going to have an indepth discussion about these things, we should be using the proper terminology.