A Long Way Out of the Well & the End of Elitism
Jeff Han – touchscreen demo – 2006!
Jaron Lanier faces the tail. (His home page on The Well.) Wikipedia ‘brochure‘
The Geek Freaks – Why Jaron Lanier rants against what the Web has become.
By Michael Agger SLATE Sunday, Jan. 3, 2010
In Lanier’s eyes, there is no longer a middle realm in which musicians can make music according to their own standards, sell it directly to fans, and not starve. Musicians are either kids in vans making just enough money for the next gig or dilettantes with a vanity career. The Facebook generation gets its music for free and doesn’t expect to pay for it, and this has helped bring about a musical Dark Age. That’s not a crazy idea, but it’s just Lanier’s hunch. When you start to poke around for data, you get a sense of the landscape. According to this U.K. study, artists now make the majority of their money doing live performances, and the total revenue accrued by artists has increased. Today’s theoretical middle-class musician would probably have to travel more, but he or she could still make a living.
There’s also the problem of the counterexample: What great artist has been left unrecognized by the Internet? Who hasn’t found a niche? Lanier, to his credit, is not a simple pessimist. He does propose a solution to the difficulty of how to compensate artists, artisans, and programmers in a digital era: a content database that would be run by some kind of government organization: “We should effectively keep only one copy of each cultural expression—as with a book or song—and pay the author of that expression a small, affordable amount whenever it’s accessed.” Again, not a bad concept, but a platonic idea that sounds great in theory. I don’t see the government opening an iTunes store anytime soon.
Lanier is a survivor and has good instincts: We need to be wary of joining in the wisdom of the crowds, of trusting that open collaboration always produces the best results, of embracing the growing orthodoxy that making cultural products free will benefit the actual producers of those cultural products. But his critique is ultimately just a particular brand of snobbery. Lanier is a Romantic snob. He believes in individual genius and creativity, whether it’s Steve Jobs driving a company to create the iPhone or a girl in a basement composing a song on an unusual musical instrument.
The problem is that the Web is much bigger now, and both Jobs and the bedroom oud player must, in their own ways, strive for attention from the hive mind. And the results can arrive like lightning: Just a few weeks ago, a man in Uruguay was given a $30 million dollar movie deal after posting a sci-fi short on YouTube. No one likes to become obsolete or cranky, but my sense is that Lanier doesn’t want to play on this new field. The talents and insights of Lanier and his peers were aimed at a tech-savvy elite whose impact will never be the same again. The innovative momentum is now about democratizing the Web and its uses—Flickr, Twitter, and, yes, Facebook. It was a lot of fun at the beginning, but virtual reality has moved on. It’s time to take off the goggles and gloves, and join us here on Earth.
Lanier appeared on PBS’s News Hour this week. My immediate impression was that he doesn’t have very developed television chops. In fact, I could personally relate to his rambling style and to his brave attempt to dare being expansive in the old medium. Lanier strikes a paradoxical position. On one hand he achieved one of the most public profiles of all those who could be said to represent the first wave of post-Mosaic web celebrity. (Howard Rheingold, Larry Lessig, Tim Berners-Lee, Meg Whitman, Sherry Turkle, and many many others achieved his kind of celebrity.) On the other hand, his pushing back against the ‘wild west’ of the internet is reactionary, is maybe even naive.
Mass behavior may be the most difficult-to-grasp impetus for internet trends. Being a social psychological phenomena, such behavior may especially befuddle the code warriors and technologists. That the behavioral and monetary costs have tended to depart from each other, with the former typified by how much time a user invests, while the latter in many examples approaches zero, do not constitute anything able to be put back in the box.
Take the example of music. The biggest challenge for the “sociopathic” consumer is managing their time, whereas the cost of content–in the world’s biggest record store–is already realized to be zero, free. Yet, at the same time, advertising space is utilized by, for example, global Fortune 100 companies in the form of pop-up and widgetized ads splashed at the very sites where the sociopathic takings are occurring.
All That Will Be Left Is Language
Is Technology Dumbing Down Japanese?
Emily Parker, New York Times, November 5, 2009 | src
excerpt:
Now the Japanese language is being transformed by blogs, e-mail and keitai shosetsu, or cellphone novels. Americans may fret over the ways digital communications encourage sloppy grammar and spelling, but in Japan these changes are much more wrenching. A vertically written language seems to be becoming increasingly horizontal. Novels are being written and read on little screens. People have gotten so used to typing on computers that they can no longer write characters by hand. And English words continue to infiltrate the language.
Map of the Social ‘net
click for large lightbox view
creatures of the house
the boundary between inside and outside is sometimes hard to determine. where is inside the house and where outside? i say the boundary lies at the flyscreen. insects not welcome past here. but insects and arachnids and other creatures do not abide by my rules occasionally. most people merely get out the killing apparatus of one form or another, when creatures cannot undertsand or will not acknowledge boundary-setting, but one of the abiding philosophies of eldon could be summed up in the prosaic aphorism, live and let live.
this rule is not adhered to in several specific instances. in the case of biting or sucking creatures on my person, or one potentially biting/sucking creature anywhere near me or my animal charges. i refer to mosquitos in my immediate hearing, ants biting my person, leeches anywhere on my person or any animal charge, and fleas in our immediate habitat. you will note the absence of spiders, snakes, and flies. actually i will swat a fly in the house if it keeps drawing attention to itself. a bee can sting me if i am careless enough to catch it on my arm or hand – but generally they do not bother me, even if i am cutting stalks in their vicinity.
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Wordpress 2.9
Wordpress 2.9 has been released; coming to a Netdynam2.0 blog near you.
Fox
Eldon asked, “hedgehog or fox?”. Fox.
Good example—and everyday for me is per force an ‘example’—occurred in the comments here to Downward Causation. Exposed to a quasi-foundational assertion, I wondered if it were wholly true. Meanwhile, I’m already digging to find if the assertion is actually controversial.
By the way, back in 1996, when I created my first personal web site, the Berlin quote was on offer. The original concept is given by Archilochus,
The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.
As a puer-intuitive, (per the Analytic Psychology,) I might benefit from more single-mindedness. However, it is a core bias of mine that I am skeptical, an anti-foundationalist, and a domain savvy relativist. Foxy.
