Digital Maoism Avoides Realities

Lanier's Digital Maoism article meanders quite a bit but seems to avoid some of the most pressing questions it raises, such as: the importance of authorship, how to determine smartness from nonsense, the future of the individual in the humanities.

What Lanier completely forgets is that group work outside the web has been going on in the Sciences for a very long time. It is unusual that a peer-reviewed article from a laboratory research-based group is going to have fewer than five writers. Group work need not be anonymous.

There is plenty of historical precedent for the creator of information (especially authors) losing credit and rights to their work because the material is put into publication and used beyond the distribution a single writer could have created without the publishers. I don't find it particularly surprising that the future of Google is more secure than the future of a single journalist: as Lanier says, individuals are more vulnerable outside a collective. But in a world with this many people, beyond six billion and counting, the guiding principle cannot be to "always cherish individuals first." A balance must be struck, or we will end up in the world depicted in Lois Lowry's "The Giver," protected from true knowledge and experience by a well-meaning parental figure that saves us from anything intriguing, stimulating, or difficult in this life.