Lanier on Meta-Intelligence
Published by timbomb June 9th, 2006 in Pop Culture, OpinionsTo quote Bruce Sterling, “When Lanier cares enough to write it, you oughta care enough to read it”.
Jaron Lanier has a decent contrarian essay up on Edge about the stupidity of crowds, the decontextualising mess of Wikipedia and naivety of Google. Despite the fact that I have been spotted publicly raving about Wikipedia on a number of occasions, I like what he’s saying a lot. In some sense, summed up in this pithy quote from somewhere near the middle:
>The beauty of the Internet is that it connects people. The value is in the other people. If we start to believe the Internet itself is an entity that has something to say, we’re devaluing those people and making ourselves into idiots.
Hear, hear.
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That’s interesting. The downside of any loss of authority is certainly always the opening into the unknown. Especially, when it comes down to hot political debates even the swiftest work of passionate wiki-gnomes is rendered meaningless as they are outnumbered by nuts. However, the nice quote from above somehow paraphrases a bad bad tendency that has already been diagnosed ages ago: sometimes “the medium is [still] the message”. Unfortunately, there is no way out of it, since every medium ultimately inscribes its dispositive into what it tries to put across. I think Nietsche’s typewriter is usually seen as the first example of that and I would say that the Computational Representational Understanding of Mind employed by many working in AI and Cognitive Science is a further instance of it. However, it occurs to me as if especially Web 2.0, brings to the foreground what has elsewhere been debated under such abdominal buzzwords as “post-structuralism”. Especially the long forgotten, though quite entertaining debate between Derrida and Searl rushes to our google-damaged senses here. With the end of modernity and the notion of a “subject-agent” we ultimately face the end of any individually centred intentionality and I believe only few people are actually able to understand what that means. Maybe it’s a too hasty shortcut to equate “intelligence” with “intentionality”, but let’s do it for strategic purposes here: Thus: to assume some kind of meta-intelligence or “intentionality” is definitely a fetish that (un)consciously tries to mask the lack of answers for question it paradoxically introduces in the first place. Who is in charge ? As chance would have it, the Wikipedia is the best example of what Derrida has called “Dissemination”. What happens with the “intention” of an author, when it is freed or kidnapped from its context ? Who is to blame for accidental inferences when signs are reiterated in different contexts? Is that all just the Wittgensteinian Language Game? Or is there more to it? Well, there is obviously no outside of Web 2.0 and I hope that we can also turn it into the perfect venue for what, again the wise Jacque Derrida, has called “deconstruction” in short: the ongoing collective negotiation of “truth” and “meaning.”
Thanks for this thought provoking post !