Bloggish-type Rant

WHAT AMERICA MEANS TO ME:
JARON LANIER WANTS TO BE PARIS HILTON
A Polemical Manifesto
Searching for as Many Subtitles as Possible

In Harper's magazine, February 2010, Jaron Lanier bemoans a certain lack in contemporary life, writing, "I know quite a few people, most of them young adults, who are proud to say that they have accumulated thousands of friends on Facebook. Obviously, their statements can be true only if the idea of friendship is diminished."

Yeah, I know -- I'm starting this rant in media res; sue me.

Lanier fills his precious little manifesto with a host of grievances: the Facebook Kid, the Cloud Lord, the oracle illusion, hive mind. Heck, the only reason to believe they're grievances is cuz he seems pissed about something. I believe Lanier has a point he wishes to communicate, but his language is trenchantly imprecise -- he often introduces terms which he does not define -- and inflates the concepts they seem to be meant to illustrate. "School" reduces to "information system", friends reduce to "social network". The most innately human of jobs is defined in pseudo-scientific terms: a music or book critic is a "filter". But what irks me the most is his insistence that the Interweb is a platonic thing, from which other platonic things are called into being. The Interweb is, of course, the greatest information system ever, seeing as how it liberates information (whatever the fook that means) and gives it to The People. The flaw, Lanier maintains, is in the design of the system; for example, a piece of software that responds as though the writer wants to create an indented outline when such is not what the writer intends is one such flaw, though in this example, Lanier maintains such "flaws" are responsible for fomenting the human idea that the Interweb is a gigantic, superhuman intelligence -- that engineers deem the best software is a software which "anticipates" the user's desires (a user, in this case, being defined as a particular set of characteristics, a demographic assembled by flesh). This is where Lanier goes hideously, horribly wrong, because there is no design for what he truly laments, which seems to be human nature itself.

Lanier asserts that Facebook diminishes the idea of friendship, cuz on that site such friends are amassed, one presumes, without any face-to-face interaction in the mundane world; thus, no friendships can be founded on correspondence alone (I'm sure Tchaikovsky and von Meck would be astonished to learn that, by Lanier's standards, their friendship was inauthentic). Facebook diminishes the idea of friendship cuz these friends are amassed, Lanier begs his reader to presume, for the sake of being amassed. Garsh, Lanier -- you're younger than me and you've forgotten high school popularity games already? Alright, I'll quit dancing around my point -- from whom else have we heard recently about a social institution being diminished? From whom have we heard dire warnings that a social institution would be degraded, debased, diminished, if more people partook of it? From those who fight against same-sex marriage. Cuz if those queers get married, it'll make my marriage mean less; it'll change not just the definition of marriage, but the very idea of marriage itself, the platonic ideal of marriage. If Lanier wishes to put himself in bed with such twerps, that's his business; he puts himself there by using the same venomous and monomaniacal logic they use. My friends are true and authentic friends because I know them in the mundane world (which is what god intended); my spouse is a true and authentic spouse because I'm a man and she's a woman (which is what god intended). Thing is, Platonists always raise my hackles. Always. I have a big problem with reification. Oh, fooken look it up; you have a better chance of finding "reification" in Webster's Collegiate than you do of finding "digital peasant". (I got yer digits right here, pal.)

The problem isn't a design flaw. The problem is not, as Lanier claims, that software engineers are trying to create programs which anticipate the user's desires, nor, as he further claims, is it that people willingly make themselves stupid for the sake of a machine. The problem, if such there be, is that there is an information system at all. An information system -- well, any system, really -- is concerned with one thing, and one thing only: flow.

Did your website get two million hits today? Six million? 12 million in the past two hours? Let's say it did; does your site's viability and/or validity increase with the number of hits? No; the number of hits reflects the number of hits. The number does not indicate anyone's opinion of your site, or what their impression was of the stimuli, if any, presented. Your opinions aren't validated simply because you have them. It's just flow. This sort of flow terrifies me, because it unwitting yanks me out of my own being, denies me my personhood, my autonomy. It's chatter, it's white noise, it is the endless errata and minutiae of the mundane world. (We're not talking the Tao here. Neither the Tao nor one's participation in it are forced. Quit trying to find fault; just suck it up and read.)

Okay, off we go on a tangent: Lanier's article (in the print edition, anyway) is called a manifesto; I imagine this is how editors beg us to look for nuanced argument and logic elsewhere, manifestos being, by their nature, something of a cri de coeur. Manifestos argue with passion and imagery. But blowhard lines like, "No one in the pre-digital-cloud era had the mental capacity to lie to himself in the way we routinely are able to now," and, "The limitations of organic human memory and calculation put a cap on the intricacies of self-delusion," reflect either a lack of knowledge regarding general human history, or a ridiculously inflated belief in the on-going guileless of all humanity. Further, there's an oddly anti-intellectual bent built in to this attitude toward the Interweb -- information is free and must be liberated from the strict confines of libraries, and books and medical journals and the DSM IV, and various other scientific papers. Because it's a question of how can someone other than you know better than you what's best for you. Experts are dinosaurs now; I *know* my two-year-old daughter is autistic due to vaccines, I know because I've read other parents say the same thing. There must be something to it, and the medical establishment certainly doesn't care. I am fat because male doctors kept from me information that diet and exercise would help me lose weight. I'm not stalking you; it's your problem if you think inappropriate anonymous and context-less communications indicate sociopathy in a person -- you're the one who put that blog up, so you clearly invite such commentary.

Exsqueeze me? Technology enables us to lie to ourselves to a degree unknown in previous eras? Really? Adam and Eve lied to God according to Genesis; does a greater lie exist than a lie one makes about oneself to the Deity?

Now, I'm hardly the first to say this, much less the first to notice it. We'll say it started with Marshall McLuhan -- "The medium is the message." Television is all about flow. And flow turns humanity into a global village; this is a bad thing. McLuhan spoke of it to warn us. (Kinda like Eisenhower's remark about "the military-industrial complex" -- he didn't mean it was something good. A few scant decades later, it's the greatest thing since, well, some fooken cliche.)

Oops oops oops! Here comes Lanier and the internet. At first, 'It's a global village! YAY!!!' Away with the antediluvian paid experts; after all, how can someone other than you know better than you what's best for you? It's the ultimate marketplace of ideas; the crowd knows best because the crowd will self-correct much as a market will self-correct. (I'm Ayn Rand; pull my finger.) When everyone contributes to the knowledge base, we'll all of us have all the knowledge in the world; when everyone speaks their truth, the truth shall set us all free. My truth is truer than yours, because it is God's truth. But mine sounds truthier. Truthiness -- let's go with the flow. Leonardo da Vinci never got paid; art belongs to all time, to all people, not to a museum or a country (though his code was killer). Mozart didn't get paid; I saw it in that movie. You don't pay for the books at the library, so why should you pay for music? Have you heard this new band? This band's newer. You've never heard of them; they'll change your life. Web 2.0 changed everything; the iPod changed everything (and 9/11 changed everything; it simply did). (And taxes pay for libraries, but, hey, you can use facts to prove anything.)

Yeah, I'm a bit of a snark. Am I the only one who got creeped out at the idea that "paid experts" -- whatever that means -- were antediluvian? That one may devote a lifetime in study of, say, music or philosophy or medicine, only to find it discounted and meaningless simply because one spent one's life studying it? Does that strike no one as anti-intellectual somehow? We have the interweb now. Let everyone be a writer so that no one is a writer. We control the horizontal. We control the vertical. It's got a meter that is tricky, a kind of wiki waki wiki...

Okay, I need another tangent -- consider the blogger. How the blogger is hailed as the Great Digital Hope; The Blogger is There when some reporter-cum-callboy is planted in the press room. The Blogger is There when ACORN allegedly gave pointers to a pimp and one of his bitches about how to game the system. The Blogger is There when Joe Stack smashes his plane into the IRS building in Austin. And, uh, the blogger gets many of the facts wrong. But that's okay -- since you can use facts to prove anything, it doesn't matter; what matters is the story. Reagan knew that when he told us about a welfare recipient who bought a Cadillac with food stamps. Facts don't matter; the only thing which matters is the story. Get the story right, and you'll have billyuns and billyuns of friends, kings and potentates will kow-tow, and Pia Zadora herself will break into a rousing version of 'This May Be the Start of Something Big.' Just for you. The most important person in the whole wide world is you, and you hardly even know you.

Here we are, years later, and Lanier rants about how cheapened society and the social contract have become, how meaningless, how inauthentic and fraudulent. What is the difference now, when at first you worked to encourage these crowds, Jaron? And now that the clouds have formed and you don't like the formation, being more a cumulonimbus than stratus kind of guy, what do you do? What do you do when the issue becomes one of Creator revolting against creation? Does the Creator search for his Noah and try to spare creation, redeem it somehow? Does the Creator foment another revolution, using his status of Creator to lend street cred to his pronouncements? Lanier writes, "We... entered a persistent somnolence, and I have come to believe that we will escape it only when we kill the hive." To kill the hive mind, we must kill the hive? Dude, the hive is merely a messenger, and you do not look good on wood.

And this is where things get weird. Cuz this is how the set known as Paris Hilton intersects with the set known as Jaron Lanier -- Hilton encouraging her 'fans' (her FaceySpace friends, enemies, etc. -- insert your label here cuz the fact that you define yourself in relation to Hilton makes you part of the flow); Lanier encouraging his 'fans' (anyone who has an affinity for his writing and ideas, FaceySpace friend or no, again defines oneself in terms of relation to Lanier, making one part of the flow). Flow flows; you can't ask what its function is -- that's like asking what the function of a galaxy is, what the function of a grain is. Inquiring anent the function of some thing which simply is begs for a wrathful and vengeful god. (Just trust me on this one; I cut a whole bunch of really good shit as to why this is so, but it just ain't germane. If you feel compelled to discuss it, drop me a line.)

And this is why I'm irked about popping the ripe, red zit which is Armistead Maupin's head. In so doing, I call attention to him when the last thing I wish to do is call attention to him. The meaning behind my desire to pop the ripe, red zit which is his head is a desire to highlight how poor his writing is, and what a sad place the world is that it encourages such poor, delusional, craptastic writing. Alas, there will always be an abundance of intellectual rubbish, unquote. (I am reminded of a week-long writing workshop in which I participated. Toward the end of the workshop, the leader shared a story which was told to encourage us in our writing careers -- he spoke of a student writer whom he knew, who faithfully attended class, who wrote and re-wrote and persisted until she was not just published, but published to much acclaim. At the end of this anecdote, our leader revealed the writer -- Amy Tan -- and this was his point: that if a twit as brazenly pedestrian, as boldly hackneyed as Tan can get published, so can you. It was another illustration of Flannery O'Connor's quote about writing programs: "Everywhere I go I'm asked if I think the university stifles writers. My opinion is that they don't stifle enough of them. There's many a best-seller that could have been prevented by a good teacher." So perhaps I can't muster anything original, but I can muster a solid, idiosyncratic text. Fook knows, discouragement has its place in education; it is a tool.

Lanier's hive mind has existed for millennia; the World Wide Woo-Woo didn't create it, or foster it, or caress it like a warrior caresses his beloved. Lanier does nothing but contribute an unfortunate vocabulary; he fusses and fumes, militates and obfuscates, then reinvents the word "wheel", and for this we are to pay him heed? There is only one way to destroy the hive, and that is to shut up.

Now, be a good little acolyte -- point to the moon just like you believe I showed you, so that I may chop off your hand.

"Art never responds to the wish to make it democratic; it is not for everybody; it is only for those who are willing to undergo the effort needed to understand it." -- Flannery O'Connor, 'Mystery and Manners'