Monday, January 11. 2010
Jaron Lanier has written an essay on the dark side of Web 2.0 and Social Media, he accused it of being a World Wide Mush. In doing so he touches on many of the areas we have in the last 2 years, but has a turn of phrase that is well worth reading:
On the Myths of Open Source's Inevitable Excellence
The "open" paradigm rests on the assumption that the way to get ahead is to give away your brain's work—your music, writing, computer code and so on—and earn kudos instead of money. You are then supposedly compensated because your occasional dollop of online recognition will help you get some kind of less cerebral work that can earn money. For instance, maybe you can sell custom branded T-shirts.
We're well over a decade into this utopia of demonetized sharing and almost everyone who does the kind of work that has been collectivized online is getting poorer. There are only a tiny handful of writers or musicians who actually make a living in the new utopia, for instance. Almost everyone else is becoming more like a peasant every day.
No Innovation?
Here's one problem with digital collectivism: We shouldn't want the whole world to take on the quality of having been designed by a committee. When you have everyone collaborate on everything, you generate a dull, average outcome in all things. You don't get innovation.
If you want to foster creativity and excellence, you have to introduce some boundaries. Teams need some privacy from one another to develop unique approaches to any kind of competition. Scientists need some time in private before publication to get their results in order. Making everything open all the time creates what I call a global mush.
On the issue of social collaboration being the best approach to problem solving
There's a dominant dogma in the online culture of the moment that collectives make the best stuff, but it hasn't proven to be true. The most sophisticated, influential and lucrative examples of computer code—like the page-rank algorithms in the top search engines or Adobe's Flash— always turn out to be the results of proprietary development. Indeed, the adored iPhone came out of what many regard as the most closed, tyrannically managed software-development shop on Earth.
Actually, Silicon Valley is remarkably good at not making collectivization mistakes when our own fortunes are at stake. If you suggested that, say, Google, Apple and Microsoft should be merged so that all their engineers would be aggregated into a giant wiki-like project—well you'd be laughed out of Silicon Valley so fast you wouldn't have time to tweet about it.
On the perils of Freeconomics
Over the last decade, many of us cheered as a lot of software, music and news became free, but we were shooting ourselves in the collective feet.
On the one hand we want to avoid physical work and instead benefit from intellectual property. On the other hand, we're undermining intellectual property so that information can roam around for nothing, or more precisely as bait for advertisements. That's a formula that leaves no way for our nation to earn a living in the long term.
On why selling T Shirts instead of content is not a viable option
Before too long—in 10 years, I'd guess—cheap home robots will be able to make custom T-shirts from free designs off the Internet. When that day comes, then a T-shirt's design will be no more valuable than recorded music is today.
The T-shirt-making robot is only one example of a general principle. As technology gets better and better, more and more jobs will essentially become threatened, just like today's jobs for reporters or recording musicians.
On Advertising in a Freeconomic world
The owners of big computer resources on the Internet, like Google, will be able to make money from the open approach for a long time, of course, by routing advertisements, but middle-class people will be increasingly asked to accept a diet of mere kudos. No one should feel insulated from this trend. Poverty has a way of trickling up. Once everyone is aggregated, what will be left to be advertised?
The downsides of Social Media mentality and why online Whuffie will opt for popular, not good
This is all harmless enough, but the pattern can be manipulated in dangerous ways. I don't want our young people aggregated, even by a benevolent social-networking site. I want them to develop as fierce individuals, and to earn their living doing exactly that. When they work together, I hope they'll do so in competitive, genuinely distinct teams so that they can get honest feedback and create big-time innovations that earn royalties, instead of spending all their time on crowd-pleasing gambits to seek kudos. This is not just so that they and their children will thrive, but so that they won't become a mob, which, as history has shown us again and again, is a vulnerability of human nature.
Pessimistic? Sure. And even worse, its against the current US mental model of Positive Thinking rather than rational analysis when it comes to such matters , but Jaron Lanier has been fairly prescient in this space so the boy has form.
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