Why the web has gone sour

For example, on page 12 Lanier elucidates the idea that "entrenched software philosophies become invisible through ubiquity." It begins, "An even deeper locked-in idea is the notion of the file. Once upon a time, not too long ago, plenty of computer scientists thought the idea of the file was not so great." The section ends, "The idea of the file has become so big that we are unable to conceive of a frame large enough to fit around it in order to assess it empirically."

In between are three sparse paragraphs. The first paragraph mentions Xanadu and the original iteration of the Mac OS as examples of systems that didn't use files. The second and third paragraphs complain that now every system uses files, that we're locked in to using filesystems, and we can't even conceive of systems without files.

At this point while reading I'm very curious about Xanadu and trying to conceive of file-less systems myself. I'm desperately waiting for the author to support the analogy, but he quickly moves on to claim that "[lock-in] could happen soon to the definition of a human being."

Wait, what? Stop, and tell me about these file-less organizational systems. Why can't we conceive of them anymore? Why didn't they gain traction? Prove to me that we're really locked-in and that's a bad thing. I'm not accepting your segue -- how exactly is this a worthy example for your larger point?

And so it goes. I've picked one example, but it's truly page after page of baseless assumptions, spacey ideas, thin examples, and doubtful conclusions. Where is the evidence? I'm screaming at the pages imagining my high school english teacher scribbling "illustrate!" in red ink across the margins.

I think the larger problem is that technology is not merely the addition of something new, but it's the addition of something new at the expense of something else, because technology abstracts. It's only a win if you don't care about the "something else" that you lose in the abstraction.

With the Internet, we can communicate with more people and more quickly than ever before. That's a gain. We lose the body language, human touch, voice intonations, etc. More than merely making the communication more difficult, experiences like seeing someone smile at what you just said (rather that merely getting an upvote) and getting actual physical contact like a handshake or a hug are part of our necessary social nutrition. The Internet is making us more productive but if we aren't careful we can become socially malnourished.

Valid.

"... Lanier believes that by fetishising and over-stating the power of this collective so-called intelligence we undervalue individual humans ..."

Anonymous are doing some interesting things to highlight Internet censorship in Australia ~ http://www.google.com/search?q=australia+cyber+attacks+anony... Individuals would have a lot of difficulty in undertaking these - legally questionable and technically difficult tasks ~ http://www.google.com/search?q=australia+cyber+attacks+anony... The down side of this of course is moderation and control. The instability of the mob. The possibility to do good one day, evil the next.

I do see something of a progressive decrease in community in my cyberspace dealings, as everything gets more connected and networky: the BBSs I was on had typically very strong community that persisted over time, early web stuff was not quite the same but still reasonably strong (mailing lists, the heydey of kuro5hin.org), and that's increasingly gotten sort of diluted.

But Lanier's right: it's not all just wine and roses. Things come with trade-offs. We need to keep having intelligent conversations about the things we're giving up. Sometimes I get the feeling that instead of some master plan, because of a lack of natural selection, we're not automatically evolving into some better form of existence. Instead we're just randomly screwing around with what makes us human, like a kid trying to fly a 747 by remote control by pulling various levers and seeing how much "fun" the reaction is.

Jaron Lanier is a contrarian, and like most contrarians, gives a bad reputation to discerning skeptics everywhere.