<incom> Lanier, The Hazards of the New Online Collectivism

[Soenke Zehle]

Remember C. P. Snow, his 1964 vision of a 'third culture' (humanities 
meet natural sciences), and John Brockman's attempt of bringing it all 
together with the digerati on THE EDGE? Latest in a series, this one is 
suggesting that "it's time to speak out against the collectivity fad 
that is upon us ... The best guiding principle is to always cherish 
individuals first", hmm, sobering realism meets fear of the multitude? 
Soenke

DIGITAL MAOISM:
The Hazards of the New Online Collectivism [5.30.06]
By Jaron Lanier

An Edge Original Essay
<http://www.edge.org/documents/archive/edge183.html>

Introduction

In "Digital Maosim", an original essay written for Edge, computer 
scientist and digital visionary Jaron Lanier finds fault with what he 
terms the new online collectivism. He cites as an example the Wikipedia, 
noting that "reading a Wikipedia entry is like reading the bible 
closely. There are faint traces of the voices of various anonymous 
authors and editors, though it is impossible to be sure".

His problem is not with the unfolding experiment of the Wikipedia 
itself, but "the way the Wikipedia has come to be regarded and used; how 
it's been elevated to such importance so quickly. And that is part of 
the larger pattern of the appeal of a new online collectivism that is 
nothing less than a resurgence of the idea that the collective is 
all-wise, that it is desirable to have influence concentrated in a 
bottleneck that can channel the collective with the most verity and 
force. This is different from representative democracy, or meritocracy. 
This idea has had dreadful consequences when thrust upon us from the 
extreme Right or the extreme Left in various historical periods. The 
fact that it's now being re-introduced today by prominent technologists 
and futurists, people who in many cases I know and like, doesn't make it 
any less dangerous".

And he notes that "the Wikipedia is far from being the only online 
fetish site for foolish collectivism. There's a frantic race taking 
place online to become the most "Meta" site, to be the highest level 
aggregator, subsuming the identity of all other sites".

Where is this leading? Lanier calls attention to the "so-called 
'Artificial Intelligence' and the race to erase personality and be most 
Meta. In each case, there's a presumption that something like a distinct 
kin to individual human intelligence is either about to appear any 
minute, or has already appeared. The problem with that presumption is 
that people are all too willing to lower standards in order to make the 
purported newcomer appear smart. Just as people are willing to bend over 
backwards and make themselves stupid in order to make an AI interface 
appear smart (as happens when someone can interact with the notorious 
Microsoft paper clip,) so are they willing to become uncritical and dim 
in order to make Meta-aggregator sites appear to be coherent."

Read on as Jaron Lanier throwns a lit Molotov cocktail down towards Palo 
Alto from up in the Berkeley Hills...

—JB

DIGITAL MAOISM

(JARON LANIER:) My Wikipedia entry identifies me (at least this week) as 
a film director. It is true I made one experimental short film about a 
decade and a half ago. The concept was awful: I tried to imagine what 
Maya Deren would have done with morphing. It was shown once at a film 
festival and was never distributed and I would be most comfortable if no 
one ever sees it again.

In the real world it is easy to not direct films. I have attempted to 
retire from directing films in the alternative universe that is the 
Wikipedia a number of times, but somebody always overrules me. Every 
time my Wikipedia entry is corrected, within a day I'm turned into a 
film director again. I can think of no more suitable punishment than 
making these determined Wikipedia goblins actually watch my one small 
old movie.

Twice in the past several weeks, reporters have asked me about my 
filmmaking career. The fantasies of the goblins have entered that 
portion of the world that is attempting to remain real. I know I've 
gotten off easy. The errors in my Wikipedia bio have been (at least 
prior to the publication of this article) charming and even flattering.

Reading a Wikipedia entry is like reading the bible closely. There are 
faint traces of the voices of various anonymous authors and editors, 
though it is impossible to be sure. In my particular case, it appears 
that the goblins are probably members or descendants of the rather sweet 
old Mondo 2000 culture linking psychedelic experimentation with 
computers. They seem to place great importance on relating my ideas to 
those of the psychedelic luminaries of old (and in ways that I happen to 
find sloppy and incorrect.) Edits deviating from this set of odd ideas 
that are important to this one particular small subculture are 
immediately removed. This makes sense. Who else would volunteer to pay 
that much attention and do all that work?

The problem I am concerned with here is not the Wikipedia in itself. 
It's been criticized quite a lot, especially in the last year, but the 
Wikipedia is just one experiment that still has room to change and grow. 
At the very least it's a success at revealing what the online people 
with the most determination and time on their hands are thinking, and 
that's actually interesting information.

No, the problem is in the way the Wikipedia has come to be regarded and 
used; how it's been elevated to such importance so quickly. And that is 
part of the larger pattern of the appeal of a new online collectivism 
that is nothing less than a resurgence of the idea that the collective 
is all-wise, that it is desirable to have influence concentrated in a 
bottleneck that can channel the collective with the most verity and 
force. This is different from representative democracy, or meritocracy. 
This idea has had dreadful consequences when thrust upon us from the 
extreme Right or the extreme Left in various historical periods. The 
fact that it's now being re-introduced today by prominent technologists 
and futurists, people who in many cases I know and like, doesn't make it 
any less dangerous.

There was a well-publicized study in Nature last year comparing the 
accuracy of the Wikipedia to Encyclopedia Britannica. The results were a 
toss up. While there is a lingering debate about the validity of the 
study. The items selected for the comparison were just the sort that 
Wikipedia would do well on: Science topics that the collective at large 
doesn't care much about. "Kinetic isotope effect" or "Vesalius, Andreas" 
are examples of topics that make the Britannica hard to maintain, 
because it takes work to find the right authors to research and review a 
multitude of diverse topics. But they are perfect for the Wikipedia. 
There is little controversy around these items, plus the Net provides 
ready access to a reasonably small number of competent specialist 
graduate student types possessing the manic motivation of youth.

A core belief of the wiki world is that whatever problems exist in the 
wiki will be incrementally corrected as the process unfolds. This is 
analogous to the claims of Hyper-Libertarians who put infinite faith in 
a free market, or the Hyper-Lefties who are somehow able to sit through 
consensus decision-making processes. In all these cases, it seems to me 
that empirical evidence has yielded mixed results. Sometimes loosely 
structured collective activities yield continuous improvements and 
sometimes they don't. Often we don't live long enough to find out. Later 
in this essay I'll point out what constraints make a collective smart. 
But first, it's important to not lose sight of values just because the 
question of whether a collective can be smart is so fascinating. 
Accuracy in a text is not enough. A desirable text is more than a 
collection of accurate references. It is also an expression of personality.

For instance, most of the technical or scientific information that is in 
the Wikipedia was already on the Web before the Wikipedia was started. 
You could always use Google or other search services to find information 
about items that are now wikified. In some cases I have noticed specific 
texts get cloned from original sites at universities or labs onto wiki 
pages. And when that happens, each text loses part of its value. Since 
search engines are now more likely to point you to the wikified 
versions, the Web has lost some of its flavor in casual use.

When you see the context in which something was written and you know who 
the author was beyond just a name, you learn so much more than when you 
find the same text placed in the anonymous, faux-authoritative, 
anti-contextual brew of the Wikipedia. The question isn't just one of 
authentication and accountability, though those are important, but 
something more subtle. A voice should be sensed as a whole. You have to 
have a chance to sense personality in order for language to have its 
full meaning. Personal Web pages do that, as do journals and books. Even 
Britannica has an editorial voice, which some people have criticized as 
being vaguely too "Dead White Men."

If an ironic Web site devoted to destroying cinema claimed that I was a 
filmmaker, it would suddenly make sense. That would be an authentic 
piece of text. But placed out of context in the Wikipedia, it becomes 
drivel.

Myspace is another recent experiment that has become even more 
influential than the Wikipedia. Like the Wikipedia, it adds just a 
little to the powers already present on the Web in order to inspire a 
dramatic shift in use. Myspace is all about authorship, but it doesn't 
pretend to be all-wise. You can always tell at least a little about the 
character of the person who made a Myspace page. But it is very rare 
indeed that a Myspace page inspires even the slightest confidence that 
the author is a trustworthy authority. Hurray for Myspace on that count!

Myspace is a richer, multi-layered, source of information than the 
Wikipedia, although the topics the two services cover barely overlap. If 
you want to research a TV show in terms of what people think of it, 
Myspace will reveal more to you than the analogous and enormous entries 
in the Wikipedia.

The Wikipedia is far from being the only online fetish site for foolish 
collectivism. There's a frantic race taking place online to become the 
most "Meta" site, to be the highest level aggregator, subsuming the 
identity of all other sites.

The race began innocently enough with the notion of creating directories 
of online destinations, such as the early incarnations of Yahoo. Then 
came AltaVista, where one could search using an inverted database of the 
content of the whole Web. Then came Google, which added page rank 
algorithms. Then came the blogs, which varied greatly in terms of 
quality and importance. This lead to Meta-blogs such as Boing Boing, run 
by identified humans, which served to aggregate blogs. In all of these 
formulations, real people were still in charge. An individual or 
individuals were presenting a personality and taking responsibility.

These Web-based designs assumed that value would flow from people. It 
was still clear, in all such designs, that the Web was made of people, 
and that ultimately value always came from connecting with real humans.

Even Google by itself (as it stands today) isn't Meta enough to be a 
problem. One layer of page ranking is hardly a threat to authorship, but 
an accumulation of many layers can create a meaningless murk, and that 
is another matter.

In the last year or two the trend has been to remove the scent of 
people, so as to come as close as possible to simulating the appearance 
of content emerging out of the Web as if it were speaking to us as a 
supernatural oracle. This is where the use of the Internet crosses the 
line into delusion.

Kevin Kelly, the former editor of Whole Earth Review and the founding 
Executive Editor of Wired, is a friend and someone who has been thinking 
about what he and others call the "Hive Mind." He runs a Website called 
Cool Tools that's a cross between a blog and the old Whole Earth 
Catalog. On Cool Tools, the contributors, including me, are not a hive 
because we are identified.

In March, Kelly reviewed a variety of "Consensus Web filters" such as 
"Digg" and "Reddit" that assemble material every day from all the myriad 
of other aggregating sites. Such sites intend to be more Meta than the 
sites they aggregate. There is no person taking responsibility for what 
appears on them, only an algorithm. The hope seems to be that the most 
Meta site will become the mother of all bottlenecks and receive infinite 
funding.

That new magnitude of Meta-ness lasted only a month. In April, Kelly 
reviewed a site called "popurls" that aggregates consensus Web filtering 
sites...and there was a new "most Meta". We now are reading what a 
collectivity algorithm derives from what other collectivity algorithms 
derived from what collectives chose from what a population of mostly 
amateur writers wrote anonymously.

Is "popurls" any good? I am writing this on May 27, 2006. In the last 
few days an experimental approach to diabetes management has been 
announced that might prevent nerve damage. That's huge news for tens of 
millions of Americans. It is not mentioned on popurls. Popurls does clue 
us in to this news: "Student sets simultaneous world ice cream-eating 
record, worst ever ice cream headache." Mainstream news sources all lead 
today with a serious earthquake in Java. Popurls includes a few mentions 
of the event, but they are buried within the aggregation of aggregate 
news sites like Google News. The reason the quake appears on popurls at 
all can be discovered only if you dig through all the aggregating layers 
to find the original sources, which are those rare entries actually 
created by professional writers and editors who sign their names. But at 
the layer of popurls, the ice cream story and the Javanese earthquake 
are at best equals, without context or authorship.

Kevin Kelly says of the "popurls" site, "There's no better way to watch 
the hive mind."  But the hive mind is for the most part stupid and 
boring. Why pay attention to it?

Readers of my previous rants will notice a parallel between my 
discomfort with so-called "Artificial Intelligence" and the race to 
erase personality and be most Meta. In each case, there's a presumption 
that something like a distinct kin to individual human intelligence is 
either about to appear any minute, or has already appeared. The problem 
with that presumption is that people are all too willing to lower 
standards in order to make the purported newcomer appear smart. Just as 
people are willing to bend over backwards and make themselves stupid in 
order to make an AI interface appear smart (as happens when someone can 
interact with the notorious Microsoft paper clip,) so are they willing 
to become uncritical and dim in order to make Meta-aggregator sites 
appear to be coherent.

There is a pedagogical connection between the culture of Artificial 
Intelligence and the strange allure of anonymous collectivism online. 
Google's vast servers and the Wikipedia are both mentioned frequently as 
being the startup memory for Artificial Intelligences to come. Larry 
Page is quoted via a link presented to me by popurls this morning (who 
knows if it's accurate) as speculating that an AI might appear within 
Google within a few years. George Dyson has wondered if such an entity 
already exists on the Net, perhaps perched within Google. My point here 
is not to argue about the existence of Metaphysical entities, but just 
to emphasize how premature and dangerous it is to lower the expectations 
we hold for individual human intellects.

The beauty of the Internet is that it connects people. The value is in 
the other people. If we start to believe the Internet itself is an 
entity that has something to say, we're devaluing those people and 
making ourselves into idiots.

Compounding the problem is that new business models for people who think 
and write have not appeared as quickly as we all hoped. Newspapers, for 
instance, are on the whole facing a grim decline as the Internet takes 
over the feeding of the curious eyes that hover over morning coffee and, 
even worse, classified ads. In the new environment, Google News is for 
the moment better funded and enjoys a more secure future than most of 
the rather small number of fine reporters around the world who 
ultimately create most of its content. The aggregator is richer than the 
aggregated.

The question of new business models for content creators on the Internet 
is a profound and difficult topic in itself, but it must at least be 
pointed out that writing professionally and well takes time and that 
most authors need to be paid to take that time. In this regard, blogging 
is not writing. For example, it's easy to be loved as a blogger. All you 
have to do is play to the crowd. Or you can flame the crowd to get 
attention. Nothing is wrong with either of those activities. What I 
think of as real writing, however, writing meant to last, is something 
else. It involves articulating a perspective that is not just reactive 
to yesterday's moves in a conversation.

The artificial elevation of all things Meta is not confined to online 
culture. It is having a profound influence on how decisions are made in 
America.

What we are witnessing today is the alarming rise of the fallacy of the 
infallible collective. Numerous elite organizations have been swept off 
their feet by the idea. They are inspired by the rise of the Wikipedia, 
by the wealth of Google, and by the rush of entrepreneurs to be the most 
Meta. Government agencies, top corporate planning departments, and major 
universities have all gotten the bug.

As a consultant, I used to be asked to test an idea or propose a new one 
to solve a problem. In the last couple of years I've often been asked to 
work quite differently. You might find me and the other consultants 
filling out survey forms or tweaking edits to a collective essay. I'm 
saying and doing much less than I used to, even though I'm still being 
paid the same amount. Maybe I shouldn't complain, but the actions of big 
institutions do matter, and it's time to speak out against the 
collectivity fad that is upon us.

It's not hard to see why the fallacy of collectivism has become so 
popular in big organizations: If the principle is correct, then 
individuals should not be required to take on risks or responsibilities. 
We live in times of tremendous uncertainties coupled with infinite 
liability phobia, and we must function within institutions that are 
loyal to no executive, much less to any lower level member. Every 
individual who is afraid to say the wrong thing within his or her 
organization is safer when hiding behind a wiki or some other Meta 
aggregation ritual.

I've participated in a number of elite, well-paid wikis and Meta-surveys 
lately and have had a chance to observe the results. I have even been 
part of a wiki about wikis. What I've seen is a loss of insight and 
subtlety, a disregard for the nuances of considered opinions, and an 
increased tendency to enshrine the official or normative beliefs of an 
organization. Why isn't everyone screaming about the recent epidemic of 
inappropriate uses of the collective? It seems to me the reason is that 
bad old ideas look confusingly fresh when they are packaged as technology.

The collective rises around us in multifarious ways. What afflicts big 
institutions also afflicts pop culture. For instance, it has become 
notoriously difficult to introduce a new pop star in the music business. 
Even the most successful entrants have hardly ever made it past the 
first album in the last decade or so. The exception is American Idol. As 
with the Wikipedia, there's nothing wrong with it. The problem is its 
centrality.

More people appear to vote in this pop competition than in presidential 
elections, and one reason why is the instant convenience of information 
technology. The collective can vote by phone or by texting, and some 
vote more than once. The collective is flattered and it responds. The 
winners are likable, almost by definition.

But John Lennon wouldn't have won. He wouldn't have made it to the 
finals. Or if he had, he would have ended up a different sort of person 
and artist. The same could be said about Jimi Hendrix, Elvis, Joni 
Mitchell, Duke Ellington, David Byrne, Grandmaster Flash, Bob Dylan 
(please!), and almost anyone else who has been vastly influential in 
creating pop music.

As below, so above. The New York Times, of all places, has recently 
published op-ed pieces supporting the pseudo-idea of intelligent design. 
This is astonishing. The Times has become the paper of averaging 
opinions. Something is lost when American Idol becomes a leader instead 
of a follower of pop music. But when intelligent design shares the stage 
with real science in the paper of record, everything is lost.

How could the Times have fallen so far? I don't know, but I would 
imagine the process was similar to what I've seen in the consulting 
world of late. It's safer to be the aggregator of the collective. You 
get to include all sorts of material without committing to anything. You 
can be superficially interesting without having to worry about the 
possibility of being wrong.

Except when intelligent thought really matters. In that case the average 
idea can be quite wrong, and only the best ideas have lasting value. 
Science is like that.

The collective isn't always stupid. In some special cases the collective 
can be brilliant. For instance, there's a demonstrative ritual often 
presented to incoming students at business schools. In one version of 
the ritual, a large jar of jellybeans is placed in the front of a 
classroom. Each student guesses how many beans there are. While the 
guesses vary widely, the average is usually accurate to an uncanny degree.

This is an example of the special kind of intelligence offered by a 
collective. It is that peculiar trait that has been celebrated as the 
"Wisdom of Crowds," though I think the word "wisdom" is misleading. It 
is part of what makes Adam Smith's Invisible Hand clever, and is 
connected to the reasons Google's page rank algorithms work. It was long 
ago adapted to futurism, where it was known as the Delphi technique. The 
phenomenon is real, and immensely useful.

But it is not infinitely useful. The collective can be stupid, too. 
Witness tulip crazes and stock bubbles. Hysteria over fictitious satanic 
cult child abductions. Y2K mania.

The reason the collective can be valuable is precisely that its peaks of 
intelligence and stupidity are not the same as the ones usually 
displayed by individuals. Both kinds of intelligence are essential.

What makes a market work, for instance, is the marriage of collective 
and individual intelligence. A marketplace can't exist only on the basis 
of having prices determined by competition. It also needs entrepreneurs 
to come up with the products that are competing in the first place.

In other words, clever individuals, the heroes of the marketplace, ask 
the questions which are answered by collective behavior. They put the 
jellybeans in the jar.

There are certain types of answers that ought not be provided by an 
individual. When a government bureaucrat sets a price, for instance, the 
result is often inferior to the answer that would come from a reasonably 
informed collective that is reasonably free of manipulation or runaway 
internal resonances. But when a collective designs a product, you get 
design by committee, which is a derogatory expression for a reason.

Here I must take a moment to comment on Linux and similar efforts. The 
various formulations of "open" or "free" software are different from the 
Wikipedia and the race to be most Meta in important ways. Linux 
programmers are not anonymous and in fact personal glory is part of the 
motivational engine that keeps such enterprises in motion. But there are 
similarities, and the lack of a coherent voice or design sensibility in 
an esthetic sense is one negative quality of both open source software 
and the Wikipedia.

These movements are at their most efficient while building hidden 
information plumbing layers, such as Web servers. They are hopeless when 
it comes to producing fine user interfaces or user experiences. If the 
code that ran the Wikipedia user interface were as open as the contents 
of the entries, it would churn itself into impenetrable muck almost 
immediately. The collective is good at solving problems which demand 
results that can be evaluated by uncontroversial performance parameters, 
but bad when taste and judgment matter.

Collectives can be just as stupid as any individual, and in important 
cases, stupider. The interesting question is whether it's possible to 
map out where the one is smarter than the many.

There is a lot of history to this topic, and varied disciplines have 
lots to say. Here is a quick pass at where I think the boundary between 
effective collective thought and nonsense lies: The collective is more 
likely to be smart when it isn't defining its own questions, when the 
goodness of an answer can be evaluated by a simple result (such as a 
single numeric value,) and when the information system which informs the 
collective is filtered by a quality control mechanism that relies on 
individuals to a high degree. Under those circumstances, a collective 
can be smarter than a person. Break any one of those conditions and the 
collective becomes unreliable or worse.

Meanwhile, an individual best achieves optimal stupidity on those rare 
occasions when one is both given substantial powers and insulated from 
the results of his or her actions.

If the above criteria have any merit, then there is an unfortunate 
convergence. The setup for the most stupid collective is also the setup 
for the most stupid individuals.

Every authentic example of collective intelligence that I am aware of 
also shows how that collective was guided or inspired by well-meaning 
individuals. These people focused the collective and in some cases also 
corrected for some of the common hive mind failure modes. The balancing 
of influence between people and collectives is the heart of the design 
of democracies, scientific communities, and many other long-standing 
projects. There's a lot of experience out there to work with. A few of 
these old ideas provide interesting new ways to approach the question of 
how to best use the hive mind.

The pre-Internet world provides some great examples of how 
personality-based quality control can improve collective intelligence. 
For instance, an independent press provides tasty news about politicians 
by reporters with strong voices and reputations, like the Watergate 
reporting of Woodward and Bernstein. Other writers provide product 
reviews, such as Walt Mossberg in The Wall Street Journal and  David 
Pogue in The New York Times. Such journalists inform the collective's 
determination of election results and pricing. Without an independent 
press, composed of heroic voices, the collective becomes stupid and 
unreliable, as has been demonstrated in many historical instances. 
(Recent events in America have reflected the weakening of the press, in 
my opinion.)

Scientific communities likewise achieve quality through a cooperative 
process that includes checks and balances, and ultimately rests on a 
foundation of goodwill and "blind" elitism — blind in the sense that 
ideally anyone can gain entry, but only on the basis of a meritocracy. 
The tenure system and many other aspects of the academy are designed to 
support the idea that individual scholars matter, not just the process 
or the collective.

Another example: Entrepreneurs aren't the only "heroes" of a 
marketplace. The role of a central bank in an economy is not the same as 
that of a communist party official in a centrally planned economy. Even 
though setting an interest rate sounds like the answering of a question, 
it is really more like the asking of a question. The Fed asks the market 
to answer the question of how to best optimize for lowering inflation, 
for instance. While that might not be the question everyone would want 
to have asked, it is at least coherent.

Yes, there have been plenty of scandals in government, the academy and 
in the press. No mechanism is perfect, but still here we are, having 
benefited from all of these institutions. There certainly have been 
plenty of bad reporters, self-deluded academic scientists, incompetent 
bureaucrats, and so on. Can the hive mind help keep them in check? The 
answer provided by experiments in the pre-Internet world is "yes," but 
only provided some signal processing is placed in the loop.

Some of the regulating mechanisms for collectives that have been most 
successful in the pre-Internet world can be understood in part as 
modulating the time domain. For instance, what if a collective moves too 
readily and quickly, jittering instead of settling down to provide a 
single answer? This happens on the most active Wikipedia entries, for 
example, and has also been seen in some speculation frenzies in open 
markets.

One service performed by representative democracy is low-pass filtering. 
Imagine the jittery shifts that would take place if a wiki were put in 
charge of writing laws. It's a terrifying thing to consider. 
Super-energized people would be struggling to shift the wording of the 
tax-code on a frantic, never-ending basis. The Internet would be swamped.

Such chaos can be avoided in the same way it already is, albeit 
imperfectly, by the slower processes of elections and court proceedings. 
The calming effect of orderly democracy achieves more than just the 
smoothing out of peripatetic struggles for consensus. It also reduces 
the potential for the collective to suddenly jump into an over-excited 
state when too many rapid changes to answers coincide in such a way that 
they don't cancel each other out. (Technical readers will recognize 
familiar principles in signal processing.)

The Wikipedia has recently slapped a crude low pass filter on the 
jitteriest entries, such as "President George W. Bush." There's now a 
limit to how often a particular person can remove someone else's text 
fragments. I suspect that this will eventually have to evolve into an 
approximate mirror of democracy as it was before the Internet arrived.

The reverse problem can also appear. The hive mind can be on the right 
track, but moving too slowly. Sometimes collectives would yield 
brilliant results given enough time but there isn't enough time. A 
problem like global warming would automatically be addressed eventually 
if the market had enough time to respond to it, for instance. Insurance 
rates would climb, and so on. Alas, in this case there isn't enough 
time, because the market conversation is slowed down by the legacy 
effect of existing investments. Therefore some other process has to 
intervene, such as politics invoked by individuals.

Another example of the slow hive problem: There was a lot of technology 
developed slowly in the millennia before there was a clear idea of how 
to be empirical, how to have a peer reviewed technical literature and an 
education based on it, and before there was an efficient market to 
determine the value of  inventions. What is crucial to notice about 
modernity is that structure and constraints were part of what sped up 
the process of technological development, not just pure openness and 
concessions to the collective.

Let's suppose that the Wikipedia will indeed become better in some ways, 
as is claimed by the faithful, over a period of time. We might still 
need something better sooner.

Some wikitopians explicitly hope to see education subsumed by wikis. It 
is at least possible that in the fairly near future enough communication 
and education will take place through anonymous Internet aggregation 
that we could become vulnerable to a sudden dangerous empowering of the 
hive mind. History has shown us again and again that a hive mind is a 
cruel idiot when it runs on autopilot. Nasty hive mind outbursts have 
been flavored Maoist, Fascist, and religious, and these are only a small 
sampling. I don't see why there couldn't be future social disasters that 
appear suddenly under the cover of technological utopianism. If wikis 
are to gain any more influence they ought to be improved by mechanisms 
like the ones that have worked tolerably well in the pre-Internet world.

The hive mind should be thought of as a tool. Empowering the collective 
does not empower individuals — just the reverse is true. There can be 
useful feedback loops set up between individuals and the hive mind, but 
the hive mind is too chaotic to be fed back into itself.

These are just a few ideas about how to train a potentially dangerous 
collective and not let it get out of the yard. When there's a problem, 
you want it to bark but not bite you.

The illusion that what we already have is close to good enough, or that 
it is alive and will fix itself, is the most dangerous illusion of all. 
By avoiding that nonsense, it ought to be possible to find a humanistic 
and practical way to maximize value of the collective on the Web without 
turning ourselves into idiots. The best guiding principle is to always 
cherish individuals first.

Jaron Lanier is film director. He writes a monthly column for Discover 
Magazine.

Jaron Lanier's Edge Bio Page