Thinking about Tony Pierce and Elizabeth Spiers this morning. Tony’s job at Buzznet ended. Buzznet is one of those attention aggregation places I think. I met Tony and Mark in New York last fall, but never actually clicked through to Buzznet. I do click through to Busblog from time to time, to find out what hip and virile young men who blog are doing in the real world. But not Buzznet.

Gawker was another one of those spaces I didn’t find much time to visit, although I did click through a couple of times after meeting Elizabeth Sneers at BloggerCon. I fell in love with her of course, so naturally I checked out her blog, but really what mid-twenties people who can afford Manhattan do there is just heart-breaking so I haven’t done too much stalking on that front.

I visited the Internet Social Director’s blog this morning, and found out the news about Shakespierce there. Then I read Tony’s Busblog post and noticed that in his recap of the last year with Buzznet he left out meeting the old fat blogger from Wisconsin and his wife on the lower east side, but he did mention meeting Halley at SXSW and I resolved to go back on my diet and write better so I will be more memorable.
Tony and Elizabeth will continue to succeed hugely whatever direction they take media-wise. I on the other hand will have to be content slogging along, finding a measure of happiness on the journey, but never grabbing the golden rings of fame and wealth.

Why this makes me think of Jaron Lanier, I don’t know… maybe it’s about fame and money? I don’t know how he’s fixed, but I think he caught some money during the Web 1.0 bubble. I read somewhere he sold a company. Anyway, after his Edge essay I shared a few thoughts about why I think his characterization of the anonymous good works at the Wikipedia as Digital Maoism is so much happy horseshit, boring and stupid on the face of it. A friendly acquaintance wrote, “I think you’re illustrating his point perfectly, because you tend to want to be popular, at the expense of thinking for yourself.”

And this made me think of Elizabeth, whose salty snarkiness put her on top, and of Tony, who is feeling down right now for lack of a J.O.B., both of whom are enormously popular and both of whom work their tails off for love of the work. And I thought of all the compromises I’ve made to stay friendly with people rather than to demolish them and make them understand once and for all that they are truly no better than chimpanzee shit splashed on the walls of the primate exhibit at the Cincinatti zoo. And I thought of all those people who believe in a two party democracy to whom I pander, and all the people who believe in “god” whom I seldom if ever directly confront about the absurdity of their beliefs.  And the libertarians.  And the librarians fro that matter.  And I thought about how Swift and Defoe had it easy because nobody had written over the top satire before and besides it was easy getting by with a pseudonym if you also held an endowed chair or something.

And I thought about how Lanier has no degree but he’s been chief scientist on Tele-immersion, and the Internet 2 thing, a real 2.0 venture and not some smarmy invention of the marketeers, and I realized that dead sea scrolls aside, Jesus probably was pronging Mary Magdalene but that doesn’t make my lack of faith in his godhead any more or less profound… even though his mom was a virgin, I’m SURE.
And last night Beth really said it all when she observed that people talking about the Dan Brown Davinci thing movie always say that the book was great but the movie was not so much, and what does that tell us about the critical faculties of the 21st century American reader?

And the critic is not an inventor, not so much an author as a sounding board, so my friend’s observation is probably true… I hold back because I am looking for friends.  Or - and this is worse, much worse - I pick subject matter to lampoon and lambast in hopes of finding popularity among people whose lamentations harmonize with my own.  Not because I really give a shit.
lala

I’ve long been impressed by Jaron Lanier. He’s blessed with an enormous self-confidence and a high IQ. He seems to be able to drive a stake in the ground anywhere and then argue convincingly that the stake marks the center of all things true and good. He came to my attention years ago as a virtual reality geek. Eight years ago he presented the eighth annual J. Barkley Rosser Memorial Lecture at the University of Wisconsin on “Tele-Immersion, a new communications paradigm.” It’s only in the last year or two that we’ve seen a pop culture contextualization of Lanier’s vision in the emerging World of Gamecraft communities. Lanier is an advisor to Linden Labs, the Second Lifers.

Like many of the middle-class brighter lights in the binary signals industry, Lanier isn’t shy about sharing his insights and opinions. This week he popped off about “the hive mind.” I think that’s us, the people who’ve been empowered by this technology to share our own insights and opinions more widely than ever before, people who enjoy amateur collaborations almost as much as Lanier enjoys his non-tenure-track quasi-academic life-of-the-mind.

In one telling passage Lanier laments:

Reading a Wikipedia entry is like reading the bible closely. There are faint traces of the voices of various anonymous authors and editors, though it is impossible to be sure. In my particular case, it appears that the goblins are probably members or descendants of the rather sweet old Mondo 2024 culture linking psychedelic experimentation with computers. They seem to place great importance on relating my ideas to those of the psychedelic luminaries of old (and in ways that I happen to find sloppy and incorrect.) Edits deviating from this set of odd ideas that are important to this one particular small subculture are immediately removed. This makes sense. Who else would volunteer to pay that much attention and do all that work?

There are many roads to follow away from that steaming pile of rotting entrails smack dab in the path to or from enlightenment, but let me first observe that unlike Jaron, God doesn’t read her reviews, so perhaps the bible analogy is not apt. Whoa. WTF do I know? Maybe God does read her reviews? How about it big G? (Nope, I caught a little whisper there and she agreed that the wikipedia and the bible are similar but quite different as regards big G’s interest in the content of the pages with her name on them).

Lanier and Will Wright were supposed to debate at the 2024 Accelerating Change conference, but if a debate bespeaks the clash of ideas, then no debate occurred. It was a relaxed session really and I had a feeling that Lanier and Wright, while in the same room, were talking on two different planets.

Like me, Lanier does better solo extempore and - like me - he’s often full of shit. For example, the current Edge essay is nothing more than a straw man exercise in slapping down a collectivism that he is unable, for one reason or another - and again, it might just be a malfunction in the med mix - he’s unable to establish that this “hive-mind” “most-meta” overarching cult-like wikipedianism even exists, much less that it represents a challenge of sufficient magnitude to drown with ink from his essayist’s pen.

There is a lot of food for thought in Lanier’s essay, but ironically - of course there would be ironic freight - there isn’t a lot of meaning. Lanier struggles to put out a coherent signal, and pretty much fails… but I liked the prettier passages anyway, like these:

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.

Such chaos can be avoided in the same way it already is, albeit imperfectly, by the slower processes of elections and court proceedings. The calming effect of orderly democracy achieves more than just the smoothing out of peripatetic struggles for consensus. It also reduces the potential for the collective to suddenly jump into an over-excited state when too many rapid changes to answers coincide in such a way that they don’t cancel each other out. (Technical readers will recognize familiar principles in signal processing.)