“Accuracy in a text is not enough,” Jaron Lanier says of the “wiki world” in a superb new essay, titled Digital Maoism, in Edge. “A desirable text is more than a collection of accurate references. It is also an expression of personality.” About the most celebrated of the wikis he writes:
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.
He goes on from there to eviscerate the web’s new fetish for “foolish collectivism” and its manifestation in, among other things, machine aggregators that “remove the scent of people.” He asks, “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.” Packaging them as technology is a good way to get them broadly adopted, too – without even requiring people to make a conscious choice.
“This idea has had dreadful consequences when thrust upon us from the extreme Right or the extreme Left in various historical periods.”
Huh, wonder where I’ve heard that before? Putting Web 2.0 ideology in a historical context will only get you flamed or worse. Who needs history, anyway? Human nature is different now — all the rules have changed. So stop questioning. Drink up. Nothing to be concerned about. It’s all good, a priori.
Collective intelligence is how our brains work. Processing millions of competing ideas in parallel, and then reducing them to the most useful one is a really good thing when the reduction process works. It’s can also be a really bad thing when the sorting method doesn’t work.
The reduction process of the Wiki engine is to declare the most recent edit as the most useful. As could be expected, this method leads only to fighting and attempts to suppress useful information.
Yet, even with this design flaw, Jaron Lanier notes that Wikipedia has quickly become elevated to importance, regarded and used. The obvious explanation is that people regard the Wiki engine to be most useful for getting certain jobs done, jobs that require wider collective intelligence. Even with its flaws, there currently isn’t anything better.
Collective intelligence is the fabric of our society. It exists when one person writes a book based partially on the research of another. It has been present throughout recorded history in the way that we accept and build upon the definitions of our words. The only difference now is that increased technology has made part of the process more efficient: the part that enables a broad range of thinking and communication. The other part—the consensual reduction method—has yet to catch up. That’s the next step.
“Collective intelligence is the fabric of our society.”
Zephram: I believe what you are actually referring to is *knowledge sharing*, a perfectly valid concept. “Collective intelligence” is rather a package deal which sorta-means knowledge sharing, but an ugly side comes along for the ride: the notion that intelligence is an attribute of not just individual minds, but of the masses as well. I think Nicholas has stated well in this and other posts that the fundamental motivation for this view is mystical: effortless salvation.
“Knowledge sharing” is a contradiction of terms. It assumes that conclusions can be pushed into the realm of someone else’s values. What I meant was collective intelligence: “the notion that intelligence is an attribute of not just individual minds, but of the masses as well.”
My knowledge of collective intelligence is available for you to accept or reject. If you accept it, I didn’t “share” it with you because I never owned it in the first place; I made a case its existence. You can either recognize it as reality, or not. If not, it could be said that you and I have differing views of reality. Eventually, one of our views will receive overwhelming support by the collective mind.
Being co-founder of Wikipedia and a very strong defender of online collaboration, the introduction to Jaron Lanier’s essay made me nervous. Then I read it and discovered that I actually agree with most of it. I wrote up a reply this evening, posted on my blog.
My views are here
http://rajatgupta.wordpress.com/2006/06/03/peer-production-boon-or-bane/
nicholas negroponte spoke about making a customised documentary for a trip to some part of turkey. basically, it was a hodge podge of clips, put together, because a suitable documentary did not exist. what lanier is saying, is that is now happening to text on the web, with search engines finding the wiki pages before the web pages themselves.
Brian O’ Hanlon.
i think, internet co-creator bob kahn, said one of the most true things. He wished he had thought about the network for carrying information, rather than just carrying bits.
Brian O’ Hanlon.
two things about the paragraph below. It is like Big Brother on Channel 4, British TV, the information, about the information is more valuable. Negroponte knew this over ten years ago.
The other thing, is you cannot properly read online news over morning coffee, as yet anyhow.
As I argue here:
https://www.roughtype.com/archives/2006/05/the_hybrid_util.php
Quote by Lanier:
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.
Dealt a little with some of Lanier’s points here too:
https://www.roughtype.com/archives/2006/06/the_grid_land.php
One great reason to go for e-voting, could be found in nicholas negroponte’s debate about the fax machine, a japanese driven invention, which negroponte thinks was a great setback. Check out Being Digital for more on this. Basically, you can not ‘search’ through faxes, in the same way you could search through your emails potentially.
One more important reference on his debate, which should not be left out here. Joe Stiglitz’s book ‘The Roaring Nineties’, where he discussed the republican desire for ‘small government’. Which is, in no small way reflected by this quote:
“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.”
On his blog, Mr. Sanger says “Lanier makes the claim that collaborative work is becoming attractive to many organizations because it allows people to find security in the productions of unadventurous ‘group mind.’ This is interesting, but a bit oversimplified.”
Lanier’s implication that collective intelligence is the same as group averaging is indeed oversimplified. Compromise is one of the lesser methods used to reduce competing ideas to a single resolution because of its lose-lose nature (each side concedes part of what they believe to be useful). The only reason one would consent to compromise is to keep a system alive that would die without it. Yet, such a system would blatantly fail to achieve the most useful output. The fact that many of Wikipedia’s articles are found by its readers to be advantageous is evidence that the Wiki engine enables the consensus method of reduction to some extent. The fact that other Wikipedia articles are considered to be less than beneficial even though useful information exists in their histories (see Coving for example) indicates the added presence of detrimental reduction or limiting agents: suppression of others’ ideas from ever reaching the reduction stage, elimination of editors that propose ideas outside of a pre-determined box, reversion to less useful articles as a method of punishing the contributing editor, reduction methods that favor deviousness and confrontation and/or threats of using official rules or social exclusion to force acquiesce.
When we see evidence that detrimental limiting agents are some of the most powerful methods used with the Wiki engine, the solution isn’t to scrap the idea of collective intelligence (something that won’t happen anyway, as long as anyone finds it useful). A more constructive aim would be to create a better engine.
I wrote about crowds / mad ¦ wise on my blog a week or two ago: http://www.badlanguage.net/?p=134