Collaboration, or collectivism? Joaron Lanier gets it wrong.
Jaron Lanier's piece in the Wall Street Journal this week is an interesting but ultimately flawed analysis of 'Digital Culture' strengths and weaknesses. He starts off with a bold statement, one that raises ominous questions about the article's accuracy and Lanier's own understanding of english:
All too many of today's Internet buzzwords— including "Web 2.0," "Open Culture," "Free Software" and the "Long Tail"—are terms for a new kind of collectivism that has come to dominate the way many people participate in the online world....
There's no escaping collectivism in our online world. If you search about most any topic online, for instance, you will likely be directed first to Wikipedia, a collective effort.
Hating on Wikipedia has turned into a pretty popular pursuit over the past couple of years: last year there was a nice run on "OMG I found an error that stayed online for several hours" articles, and I've had some harsh words to say about Wikipedia's devaluing of expertise in favor of citation. But none of that compares to Lanier's wrongheaded muddling of 'collaborative effort' and 'collectivism.'
Words have meaning -- "collectivism" has distinct connotations, even if its textbook definition can be sliced and diced to mean something apolitical. Especially in the op-ed pages of the Wall Street Journal, it's obvious that the word is meant to conjure up the dread specters of socialism and communism and the devaluing of the individual. The things Lanier actually talks about in his article are democratization, collaboration, and statistics-based automation. Interesting things can be said about all of those issues and their intersection in the new world of communication. Calling them 'collectivism' is not one of those interesting things, unfortunately.
At times, Lanier brushes up against an interesting premise. Putting publishing in the hands of everyone, and encouraging everyone to blog, tweet, post, stream, and so on has flooded our online media landscape with noise. (That's the dark side of democratization.) Handing off tasks to a herd of software-developer cats does frequently result in flawed feature-checklist fodder. (That's the dark side of collaboration.) And farming out all of our decisions to The Wisdom of Crowds does tug culture towards uniformity rather than uniqueness. (That's the dark side of statistical automation.) Strangely enough, though, each example he cites undercuts what could have been a more interesting article.
Blogging leads to the devaluing of individual work? The drift towards media hypersaturation (and the resultant value-crash of ideas) didn't start with online publishing. Every major shift in communication technology has produced a similar explosion in chaff: cheap printing, the phonograph, CB radio, cable television... Endless reality television and the rise of the 24/7 news cycle did far more than any Blogger or Twitter to kick-start the process of content inflation.
Collaborative work leads to mediocre products? I'd never argue that open source, collaborative development, and transparency produce inherently better results than closed teams. Bad ideas, inadequate skills, and dysfunctional groups can doom any project, whether it's a closed commercial venture or an open source project. His oddball examples of 'great proprietary software' do nothing to contradict this! Adobe Flash owes its success to the difficulty of presenting multimedia consistently across incompatible proprietary operating systems, and Google's PageRank algorithm relies on the same fire hose of information he rails against.
Citing PageRank as a positive example of individualism is especially ironic: his other objection is to the automation of taste in the form of computerized recommendations, statistical suggestions, and other 'Wisdom of Crowds' niceties. PageRank is the wisdom of crowds distilled into a 1-to-ten score, an automated tool for determining what pages 'the crowd' of Internet users consider the best source for information on particular subjects. I understand the distinction between the two -- the Internet as a whole didn't write the code that builds PageRank scores, and that work is what Lanier is applauding. But if the wisdom of crowds is a terrible tyrant, why applaud software that makes it even more influential?
Calling crowd-based knowledge 'collectivism' is even weirder. The ultimate case of crowd-based decision making is stock valuation: is Wall Street a hotbed of collectivism? Or has Lanier just hand-waved his way through the digital culture issues to get to the real meat? Buried in the middle of the article is the first hint of his real objections:
I was also part of a circle of friends who tried to imagine how computers would fit into the peoples' lives, including how people might make a living in the future.... We made a huge mistake in making [peoples' content on the internet] unpaid, and often anonymous, because those bad decisions robbed people of dignity.
Some would argue that dignity was robbed from individuals when creativity was productized -- not when tools were put into their hands to create, and distribute, as they saw fit. Lanier grouses about the difficulty of making a living composing music and printing T-shirts, thrashes to and fro complaining about the economic dangers of robot manufacturing, and waxes poetic about the value of intellectual property.
His diagnosis of the problem in the article's second half (collectivism undermined wages and intellectual property) is as lopsided as his language in the first half. Worker co-ops didn't push automated manufacturing in the 70s, and passionate hippie-artists didn't flood the market with Blink 182 soundalikes. The most radical of open source manifestos, the GNU Public License, relies on strong intellectual property protection to avoid being absorbed into commercial projects, and our nation's Founding Fathers cited the 'general good' as the primary motivation for copy protection. Griping against 'collective values' may be cathartic, but it is a fundamentally flawed reading of intellectual property's past, present, and future.
I am far from an 'online culture cheerleader', but Lanier's article is an unfocused, wrongheaded rant from someone with an axe to grind about hippie idealism. If he truly regrets joining a grocery co-op in college, he should write an autobiography, not a WSJ op-ed about digital culture. Perhaps some cathartic blogging would do him good.
Excusive rights
Let us always remember that copyrights and patents are government-created restraint of trade and artificial monopolies. A completely fluid flow of information without restriction is natural, unless you do something to prevent or inhibit it.
It may well be the case that it is sometimes useful to do so; I do not at all oppose copyrights or patents or such. But we must always remember that "intellectual property", besides being a misnomer, is by design an unfair restraint of trade designed to favor some at the expense of the many. I'd expect a sophisticated and generally conservative paper like the WSJ to understand that and appreciate that all copyright is inherently "big government". :-)
Besides, he forgets the first rule of culture: 90% of everything is crap. It doesn't matter if it comes from curated mega-corps or garage bands, 90% of it is crap. We just have a lot more stuff available now, 90% of which is still crap.
Intellectual Property, ho!
Your point about Intellectual Property being an artificial construct is an important one. It doesn't make them inherently bad, but it puts some significant kinks in Lanier's thesis.
You note that IP laws favor some at the expense of many, but I find it even more interesting that the justification for IP laws in the early years of our country was the public good. The concern was that without monetary recourse, fewer inventors and artists would take the time to create new works. In other words, it was not assumed that IP protection was an inherent good, just a way of ultimately furthering the public good. By Lanier's own jumbled framing, IP law itself could be called collectivism.
More than anything else, I think it's that abuse of language that angers me about the article. All of his fundamental complains can be made, and debated, worked on. (They often are, in the very digital communities he complains about.) But twisting language to group a host of complex concerns into a hot-button buzzword for WSJ readers is fundamentally dishonest. It is anti-knowledge, information that actually reduces peoples' understanding.
In that sense, Lanier's article is part of the problem he complains about.
Here's a subject I know a bit about - and you got me on a rant
I spent half a year of my life in the Soviet Union, and I know a little bit about collectivism, socialism, and the distant goal of communism. I would not dismiss the warning message of this article completely, but I don't agree with it entirely either.
Wikipedia is good enough and useful. Is it full of pilfered information? Absolutely. Is it an improvement on Encyclopedia Britannica or the Soviet Encyclopedia (which I spent a good chunk of my childhood pouring over)? In most ways, but it has a dark side as well - are you familiar with Wikigroaning?
Now, the interesting thing is, a specialist magazine article on the topic will almost always blow away a Wikipedia article. Same thing for a book.
Being paid for an effort consistently trumps unpaid effort. Unless there's some other kind of motivation (the kind that has a sid effect of inducing wikigroaning).
Every time I walk into a Barnes and Noble or a library I am amazed at how much better the information in books is to the stuff on the web. This information sits behind a number of walls: you have to pay for it (libraries are not free - you have to get there, you have to spend more time, there are late fees, etc) , you can't search it, there are papercuts. But it's not really as much of an echo chamber as is the web.
You really get the highest quality when you have a mix of free and paid things, which are mostly inexpensive, but with a scattering of more expensive items. Like the Apple app store.
Ted Nelson's Xanadu would seem like a perfect solution: you pay for what you use, you can have free and paid content.
Design by committee happens on the web and off, under socialism and capitalism, not so much with feudalism though. It's not entirely bad, and an entirely Objectivist society would likely become a total nightmare (even if with super cool Big Daddy dive suit monsters).
Central planning is never pure, and neither is decentralized one for big projects. It's always a crystal of individual contribution (or several) that are coated in layer of contributions. Dave Cutler's NT and Linus' Linux and Boeing Skunkworks SR-71 Blackbird and MiG's MiG 29 Fulcrum are individualistic and collective efforts at the same time.
Nikita Khrushchev visited America, and was very impressed by the corn. When he came back, he tried to make the whole country grow corn, which had a somewhat disastrous results (corn is not ideal in cold climates).
I remember buying boiled corn on some god-forsaken train station near Moscow. It was tiny, with huge kernels - the result of cold climate. It was also the tastiest corn I ever had. In fact produce of collective farms was in general horrible in quality and scarce, but much much tastier due to the lack of fertilizers.
Intellectual property is not like corn or any physical property, but the behavior of people producing it is a little similar. If you have a very locked down system with customary low prices and very little piracy policed by competent and semi-competent people you get a bloom. Examples include the paperback market at it's heyday, the Apple store, newspapers (again in the past). If you have a system where the prices are too high - like the Kindle store you get a somewhat meh ecosystem. A mostly free system like the web, Linux, or say Drupal - you get an explosion, but with a lot of quality issues and weird monetization schemes, and also, disruption to other sources of the same thing (newspapers, paid software, etc). Free competitors always take a chunk out of their competitors.
So, what happens when the whole marketplace becomes free? Things that people need never go away entirely, it's just the quality that changes. A friend of mine recently had an experience with socialized medicine in the Ukraine. The hospital was in a bad need of repair, a stray dog ran in from the street and ran around for a while. The surgery was free, but the doctor said that "it would be better with $200 and even better with $400" (he did not explain what "better" meant). Horrible? Maybe. Deadly? Probably not. Non-socialized medicine creates horrible experiences as well - the same situation at Coney Island Hospital might have included a huge near-fatal wait in a very shabby emergency room, and an astronomical bill. A stray dog may or may not have been present, but at least there would be no bribe.
There must be a middle ground somewhere, with healthy dozes of individualism and collectivism, free and paid items. Where those who implement ideas (which is harder than coming up with them) are compensated fairly, and where there's a marketplace for ideas (a good idea is still a valuable thing).
Things are rarely on the middle ground though, but systems survive due to loopholes. Yes, patents and IP are mostly good, and patent trolls and monopolies that jack up prices are bad, as well as pirates. But the overall health of the system is insured by the fact that a very small portion of IP disputes ends with litigation, and enough people get paid for their efforts. With open source development - people get paid for support, consulting, education, there's sponsorship, and there's ego stroking that makes up for the difference. It's a hack, a loophole, an injection of capitalism that makes socialism keep going.
Dude.
I wish you had written an editorial for the WSJ instead of Lanier.
I lived in communist Hungary, and I think Lanier is FOS
Furthermore, if what you're buying is, say, computer books, no. What's on the internet is better than what's encapsulated on those shelves. The reason is that books don't change fast enough; they can't.
Also, some things I saw in Hungary were better than what I saw in America - more craftsmanship, for one thing. Also, the ice cream was Italian gelato, and the government subsidized it, and it was dirt cheap. Yet way better than anything I could get in the US for years.
I also think Lanier should re-read the book about Stallmann. Lanier likes to lecture (WSJ, London School of Economics) about scientists' research culture and does not understand it at all. When you, the researcher, can't get a printout for days or weeks because of a proprietary driver you were never told about is locking you away from the printer your faculty bought, who's the individualist victim of collectivism (in this case, market fundamentalism) again?
Post new comment