Digital Maoism: Jaron Lanier on CBC - Podcast
Wikipedia is the biggest fish in what is becoming a very big pond of community developed websites. These are pages where the public, the online collective, act as volunteer editors responsible for gathering content from a number of sources. Some people call it Hive Mind. Jaron Lanier calls it Digital Maoism. Earlier this summer, Lanier wrote a provocative essay explaining why he thinks the spread of collectivism online is a dangerous thing. Since then, it’s created a digital duststorm of debate. Jaron Lanier is a digital pioneer. He’s a computer scientist and a columnist for Discover Magazine. He also coined the term virtual reality.
Nora Young’s interview with Lanier (MP3, 15.6 Mb) starts right after the introduction, above.
Lanier’s original article, Digital Maoism, appeared in the June issue of Edge.
(IMHO, Nora does a much better job than the regular host, M. Enright, ever would with such a “cutting edge” topic.)
