"The Serfdom of Crowds"

Jaron Lanier's article "The Serfdom of Crowds" (from You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto) in the February 2010 issue of Harper's raises questions around the effects that web 2.0 technologies such as Wikipedia and Facebook have on the way that users of these technologies think--literally influencing how users make decisions, interact with people, and write.

Lanier himself has long been an intriguing critic of the evolution of the internet and its sudden, accepted centrality in the lives of so many--see this passage from his Wikipedia entry:

• In Edge magazine in May 2006, Lanier criticized the sometimes-claimed omniscience of collective wisdom (including examples such as the Wikipedia article about himself), describing it as "digital Maoism." He writes: "If we start to believe that the Internet itself is an entity that has something to say, we're devaluing those people [creating the content] and making ourselves into idiots."

So then, some salient excerpts from "The Serfdom of Crowds":

• The central faith embedded in Web technologies whereby users not only consume information but widely generate it is the idea that the Internet as a whole is coming alive and turning into a superhuman creature.
  

• If you believe the distinction between the roles of people and of computers is starting to dissolve, you might express that—as some friends of mine at Microsoft once did—by designing features for a word processor that are supposed to know what you want—for example, when you want to start an outline within your document. You might have had the experience of Microsoft Word suddenly determining, at the wrong moment, that you are creating an indented outline. The real function of this feature isn’t to make life easier for you. Instead, it promotes a new philosophy: that the computer is evolving into a life-form that can understand people better than people can understand themselves. If you believe this, then working for the benefit of the computing cloud over that of the individual puts you on the side of the angels.