Not surprising, he is also a musician (which neither confirms nor invalidates his opinion).
----- Original Message ---- From: Constance Warner <[email protected]> To: [email protected] Sent: Wed, January 13, 2010 12:55:07 AM Subject: [CGUYS] An internet pioneer rethinks his position A provocative article in Tuesday's Science Times (the New York Times Science pages, http://www.nytimes.com/pages/science/): "The Madness of Crowds and an Internet Delusion" by John Tierney Internet pioneer Jaron Lanier is having second thoughts about the brave new world of the Internet, for example: "His new book, "You Are Not a Gadget," is a manifesto against 'hive thinking' and 'digital Maoism,' by which he means the glorification of open-source software, free information and collective work at the expense of individual creativity...He acknowledges the examples of generous collaboration, like Wikipedia, but argues that the mantras of 'open culture' and 'information wants to be free' have produced a destructive new social contract. "'The basic idea of this contract,' he writes, 'is that authors, journalists, musicians and artists are encouraged to treat the fruits of their intellects and imaginations as fragments to be given without pay to the hive mind. Reciprocity takes the form of self-promotion. Culture is to become precisely nothing but advertising...Creative people--the new peasants--come to resemble animals converging on shrinking oases of old media in a depleted desert...'" Mr. Lanier, once an advocate for piracy but now one of its strongest critics, argues that the ability of consumers to copy music and other artistic products without paying for them--or adequately compensating the artists in any other way--has effectively frozen music and other arts in their pre-digital format. He asserts that most of the acts that have done well by selling t-shirts on the Web, or offering downloads for what the consumer wants to pay for them, were actually well established before music and other arts were fully digital and downloadable. Denied meaningful compensation for their efforts, artists have little reason to put out anything really new and different, and new groups have a much harder time getting established. Food for thought. --Constance Warner ************************************************************************* ** List info, subscription management, list rules, archives, privacy ** ** policy, calmness, a member map, and more at http://www.cguys.org/ ** ************************************************************************* ************************************************************************* ** List info, subscription management, list rules, archives, privacy ** ** policy, calmness, a member map, and more at http://www.cguys.org/ ** *************************************************************************
