Jaron Lanier just published a brillant, if not seminal essay on the pitfalls of all implications of Web 2.0 in John Brockman's online forum Edge.org. It's titled 'Digital Maoism - The Hazards of the New Online Collectivism' and starts with the question "The hive mind is for the most part stupid and boring. Why pay attention to it?" and delves deep into the new forms of collectivism that start to transform the public sphere. I remember the dreadlocked Lanier from the early cyberpunk days in the San Francisco of the ealry 90s, when R.U. Sirius was publishing Mondo 2000 and Timothy Leary praised the psychedelic qualities of virtual reality. Lanier was another VR believer, a fact that he now describes as youthful hype.
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Read the essay Digital Maosim
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