Lanier and Williams, 15 September 2001
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Contents |
September 14, 2010
Lanier, Jaron
- Works at MSRL
= Book reaction
- Mostly positive, "too good"
- "Bloggy" responses
- "I think it's quite hard"
= "It won't last"
- Is "lasting" our goal?
- Is "Sustainability" === Stability?
= Control the inner troll
September 15, 2010
Lanier opening remarks
Opens by arguing against a false binary: anti-tech/pro-tech
- Self-identified "techno-utopian"
Referring to a binary from his 1970s student experience
- Marxist-Left/Capitalist-Right
- "Marxists believed they were the young ... future"
Social software
- "Lazy"
- "Easy to write" (Hard to design? UX? Easy to get involved?)
Present designs
- "Short-sighted"
- Future of "trinkets"
- "Lazy, shallow kind of reward"
What we need
- "Something sustainable and long-term"
19th c. responses to central challenges:
- Marxism
- SF, "mostly wrong"
- Rousseau, "rejection of modernity", "wrong"
Advocating answers suggested by Ted Nelson
- "Fourth response"
- Economic "evolution"
Central problem:
"As machines get better, people ought to be able to earn a living from their hearts and brains. [Alternatively,] the people who aren't needed [because their jobs are replaced by machines] become peasants ... forgotten ... lost"
Middle class
- Required for democracy
- Working policy
- Sustainable society
- If the information economy does not create a middle class, then you will have a corruptible/corrupted system; "phony", "based on illusion"
- If capital were not concentrated in Google, etc., wealth would increase among greater players.
- "Silicon Valley and Hollywood would become richer"
Rhetorical dichotomy observed:
- Few major gatekeepers: Knopf, studio system
- Google, etc. make incidental money from no-cost volunteer labor
Recommendation engines
- Origins in AI
- "Perverse incentive", "commercial"
- Narrowing exposure for commercial exploitation
- Internet therefore prefers designs that pigeon hole people into groups
- "Blackmail", charge for connections that should happen naturally
Wanting to challenge "everything wants to be free"
- Is this a hip idea? Empirically?
- Among who? Young faculty? Students?
Dmitri response
Pessimism
- Increasing centralization
- Centralization in journalism contributes to small volume of "original" content: 16%
Optimism
- Will we reach a "consortium-like state" in which people are empowered to write their own stories and rewarded based on the interest
- More people empowered in more ways to make more things
- More stuff than ever, still at risk, but a "tidal wave that dwarfs what we had before"
Mixed bag of social technologies
- What is it doing to us?
- Dumbed-down, shallow relationships?
- Perhaps there are more dumbed-down relationship
- But there are quantitatively more relationships
- And qualitatively different kinds of relationships
Lanier response
"Artificial mysteriousness"
- Fetishization of Netflix recommendation engine
- When there are 50k videos available
"World before the internet..."
- "...people were finding each other"
- Criticizes examples for being "exaggerated"
Prefers the "quality" question separated from the argument
If you don't have middle class, politics is "screwed up"
- Capital, power is concentrated
- e.g. Koch brothers scandal, astroturf, "not that much money"
- "New thing wasn't" about to "uncover" this scandal
"Wisdom of crowds"
- Effects are real but limited
- Discussed and applied inappropriately
Dmitri
- Some indication that communities, groups became more "atomized"
- To some extent by suburbs, cars, etc.
- Might SNS have enabled people to respond to this
Lanier
- Believes age is a factor
Q&A
Digital divide, class implications
- Lanier: two approaches:
- One = "pirate bay"/p2p, hard to make $
- Two = itunes/walled garden, somewhat possible to make $, but censorship
- Lanier: Advocating single online currency
- Now: walled gardens for the rich, chaos for the poor
Role of education
- People being "conscious" and "skeptical", not accepting a "groove" provided
