- Andrew Keen’s Manifesto – Eleven Unfashionable Thoughts on Digital Utopianism
The next Great Seduction is digital utopianism. Think of it as the Silicon Valley version of communism. Its outline can now be glimpsed in the fantasies now being peddled by utopians in a revolution that Silicon Valley insiders call “Web 2.0.â€
Monthly Archives: April 2007
The Anti Web2.0 Manifesto (Adorno for idiots) by Andrew Keen
From an email sent to the mailing list of the Institute for Distributed Creativity. I didn’t check if Andrew Keen really said or wrote this text. I tend to disagree with the arguments but I think it is not good for me (and for everyone) to only read opinions of like-minded people, Web2.0 enthusiasts in this case. I agree with Sunstein when he states in Republic.com:
Unplanned, unanticipated encounters are central to democracy itself. Such encounters often involve topics and points of view that people have not sought out and perhaps find quite irritating.
So without further ado, here it is:
THE ANTI WEB 2.0 MANIFESTO (Adorno-for-idiots) by Andrew Keen
1. The cult of the amateur is digital utopianism’s most seductive delusion. This cult promises that the latest media technology — in the form of blogs, wikis and podcasts — will
enable everyone to become widely read writers, journalists, movie directors and music artists. It suggests, mistakenly, that everyone has something interesting to say.
2. The digital utopian much heralded “democratization” of media will have a destructive impact upon culture, particularly upon criticism. “Good taste” is, as Adorno never tired
of telling us, undemocratic. Taste must reside with an elite (“truth makers”) of historically progressive cultural critics able to determine, on behalf of the public, the value of a
work-of-art. The digital utopia seeks to flatten this elite into an ochlocracy. The danger, therefore, is that the future will be tasteless.
3. To imagine the dystopian future, we need to reread Adorno, as well as Kafka and Borges (the Web 2.0 dystopia can be mapped to that triangular space between Frankfurt,
Prague and Buenos Aires). Unchecked technology threatens to undermine reality and turn media into a rival version of life, a 21st century version of “The Castle” or “The Library
of Babel”. This might make a fantastic movie or short piece of fiction. But real life, like art, shouldn’t be fantasy; it shouldn’t be fiction.
4. A particularly unfashionable thought: big media is not bad media. The big media engine of the Hollywood studios, the major record labels and publishing houses has
discovered and branded great 20th century popular artists of such as Alfred Hitchcock, Bono and W.G. Sebald (the “Vertigo” three). It is most unlikely that citizen media will
have the marketing skills to discover and brand creative artists of equivalent prodigy.
5. Let’s think differently about George Orwell. Apple’s iconic 1984 Super Bowl commercial is true: 1984 will not be like Nineteen Eighty-Four the message went. Yes, the “truth”
about the digital future will be the absence of the Orwellian Big Brother and the Ministry of Truth. Orwell’s dystopia is the dictatorship of the State; the Web 2.0 dystopia is the
dictatorship of the author. In the digital future, everyone will think they are Orwell (the movie might be called: Being George Orwell).
6. Digital utopian economists Chris Anderson have invented a theoretically flattened market that they have christened the “Long Tail”. It is a Hayekian cottage market of small
media producers industriously trading with one another. But Anderson’s “Long Tail” is really a long tale. The real economic future is something akin to Google — a vertiginous
media world in which content and advertising become so indistinguishable that they become one and the same (more grist to that Frankfurt-Prague-BuenosAires triangle).
7. As always, today’s pornography reveals tomorrow’s media. The future of general media content, the place culture is going, is Voyeurweb.com: the convergence of
self-authored shamelessness, narcissism and vulgarity — a self-argument in favor of censorship. As Adorno liked to remind us, we have a responsibility to protect people from
their worst impulses. If people aren’t able to censor their worst instincts, then they need to be censored by others wiser and more disciplined than themselves.
8. There is something of the philosophical assumptions of early Marx and Rousseau in the digital utopian movement, particularly in its holy trinity of online community,
individual creativity and common intellectual property ownership. Most of all, it’s in the marriage of abstract theory and absolute faith in the virtue of human nature that lends
the digital utopians their intellectual debt to intellectual Casanovas like young Marx and Rousseau.
9. How to resist digital utopianism? Orwell’s focus on language is the most effective antidote. The digital utopians needs to be fought word-for-word, phrase-by-phrase,
delusion-by-delusion. As an opening gambit, let’s focus on the meaning of four key words in the digital utopian lexicon: a) author b) audience c) community d) elitism.
10. The cultural consequence of uncontrolled digital development will be social vertigo. Culture will be spinning and whirling and in continual flux. Everything will be in motion;
everything will be opinion. This social vertigo of ubiquitous opinion was recognized by Plato. That’s why he was of the opinion that opinionated artists should be banned from his
Republic.
Links for 2007 04 23
- Bokardo » How Aggregate Displays Change User Behavior – NYTimes "Is Justin Timberlake the product of Cumulative Advantage?"
Paper by Duncan Watts. They created 8 different environments for music download with the same songs. After some time, the top10 lists on the different worlds were different. No intrinsic quality induces popularity but aggregated activity and display - RatePoint for Second Life
RatePoint is an easy and FREE way for you and your friends to rate and review Residents you encounter in Second Life. Uses a local trust metric (collaborative filtering like)(tags: ditto, reputation, trust_metric, secondlife, rating, local, trust, metric, collaborative_filtering, whuffie) - Fostering Online Communities by Tara Hunt » SlideShare
Presentation by Miss Rogue at FOWA. It mentions CouchSurfing. - xkcd – A webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math, and language – By Randall Munroe
Cartoon: And over there we have the labyrinth guards, one always lies, one always tells the truth, and one stabs people who ask tricky questions. - xkcd – A webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math, and language – By Randall Munroe
Optical illusion, disgusting but it might probably work with many of my friends (myself included) ;-) - xkcd – A webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math, and language – By Randall Munroe
Richard Stallman fighting the microsoft ninjas ;-) - xkcd – A webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math, and language – By Randall Munroe
Cartoon: "What are you doing?" "Spinning counterclockwise / each turn robs the planet of angular momentum / slowing its spin the tiniest bit / lenghtening the night, pushing back the dawn / giving me a little more time here / with you" - gapingvoid: "cartoons drawn on the back of business cards": sheep
It’s OK to act like a sheep (just so long you act like a COOL sheep) – cartoon
Links for 2007 04 22
- Wired 15.03: Herding the Mob
Reputation hacking: survey of different ways to attack trust metrics, i.e. manipulate reputation systems such as digg, del.icio.us, ebay - GNU GENERAL PUBLIC LICENSE
A heat map for the draft version of the new Free software GNU General Public Licence version. "Phrases that are subject to more comments are highlighted more intensely". Very useful to visually grasp in 2 seconds which parts are more controversial. - Presentation Zen: PowerPoint: sometimes you have to laugh to keep from crying
Powerpoint presentations used for making you laugh. Extremely funny, and instructive. - 3rd Global Summit on Peace through Tourism – paper on CouchSurfing
3rd Global Summit on Peace through Tourism – There is a paper on Couchsurfing and Social Capital "Sustainability of Worldwide Connections by and for Travel: Applying Social Capital in Virtual Travel Community"(tags: CouchSurfing, hospitality, peace, social, capital, social_capital, tourism, papers, research, pdf) - DoMyStuff.com – Main Menu
Bu giving it a pay-it-forward, totally non monetary twist, it might become a gift network supporting the gift economy. Need to think about it more. "DoMyStuff.com is an online community where busy people can quickly find Assistants to complete their chore
The founder of Dell uses Ubuntu
Michael Dell is the founder of Dell, the largest seller of computers in the world. What kind of operating system does Michael Dell have? According to his institutional page on dell.com, his computer runs the GNU/Linux distribution Ubuntu (plus OpenOffice.org 2.2, Automatix2, Firefox 2.0.0.3)! Ubuntu rocks, it is so much better than Windows (very easy since Windows totally sucks) and MacOS that you cannot even imagine. The new version of Ubuntu, 7.04 Feisty Fawn, was just released yesterday. Try it, you will be delighted! If you fear about losing your data or having to spend some time in installing Ubuntu, don’t fear. You can download the Live CD that is a complete installation of Ubuntu installed on the CD itself: you can run Ubuntu directly from the CD without having to install anything and without fearing to lose your data. After some time, if you are satisfied (you will!) you can decide to backup all your data and take the leap into freedom, install Ubuntu. If you are not able to download the Ubuntu CD you can even ask to request Ubuntu CD for free (then please don’t forget to share them with your friends, free software lives for being shared!).
Links for 2007 04 14
- Photos: Nigerian students power up their laptops | CNET News.com
I have very mixed feeling about the One Laptop Per Children project. I’m very curious to see what happens in future about this project. - Crisis in Darfur – Museum’s Genocide Prevention Mapping Initiative – on Google Earth
The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum has joined with Google in an unprecedented online mapping initiative. Crisis in Darfur enables more than 200 million Google Earth users worldwide to visualize and better understand the genocide currently unfoldi - YouTube – Human Ball – Médécins Sans Frontière Ad Video
Video Commercial from Médécins Sans Frontières regarding the access to Aids treatment. Clever use of 3d animation technique by an NGO. - White Lights Lead to Red Lights
Mark Pilgrim’s presentation on "the future of Web". Simple and clear. The future of the Web is … HTML. I agree! ;-) - Human Connectedness / Projects / Iso-phone
I want it. I don’t know where to place it but I want it. Check photos! "The user wears a helmet that blocks out all peripheral sensory stimulation while keeping the head above the surface of the water. The water is heated to body temperature, dulling the - 3pointD.com » Blog Archive » User-Created Trust Networks in Second Life [UPDATED]
The attention economy as MMORPG
I don’t like too much the concept “Attention Economy”. I prefer focus my attention on grasping concepts such as Reputation Economy and Gift Economy. Nevertheless I loved the following definition from “The Real Nature of the Emerging Attention Economy” 2006 Etech by Michael H. Goldhaber (slides in PDF).
An Economy, Most Generally…..
• is a massively multiplayer
• SINGLE-LEVEL game
• that involves some kind of passing of
• scarce entities
• between players
• so as to knit all players intricately together
So, don’t you think it is time we all level up together? Maybe not just one but two or three levels?
Links for 2007 04 13
- The Tyranny of Structurelessness (Jo Freeman)
People would try to use the “structureless†group and the informal conference for purposes for which they were unsuitable out of a blind belief that no other means could possibly be anything but oppressive. - Sympathetic point of view – Wikinfo
On Wikinfo, if you wish to write an article about Al Qaeda being a charitable organization, then you can go ahead, and we are not going to stop you.(tags: Sympathetic, neutral, wikipedia, Wiki, point_of_view, relativism, objective, subjective, culture) - Positive Point of View – GetWiki
A "neutral" policy, such as Wikipedia’s, strives to represent all perspectives in a balanced, unified manner. But all too often, it leads to endless bickering and "edit wars" over what is the balanced view. PPOV (adapted from SPOV) allows each perspective - Wikipedia:Neutral point of view – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
All Wikipedia articles and other encyclopedic content must be written from a neutral point of view, representing views fairly, proportionately and without bias. Neutral point of view is a fundamental Wikipedia principle.
Edelman Trust Barometer 2007 presentation
If you are interested in Trust on a global scale, this presentation by Edelman titled “Edelman Trust Barometer 2007” might be interesting for you.
Links for 2007 04 12
- Why Use Software Illegally When You Can Use Legally …. « Linux and Open Source Blog
You can find a free replacement for most of the proprietary software out there. Here’s a list of some proprietary software, and their Free Software equivalents : - London, Tokyo Submerged by Rising Seas — In "Second Life"
"The idea was, this happened virtually, but this could really happen in real life and you need to do something about it,". Interesting hactivism strategy. I didn’t get how they were able to flood so much of the virtual world but this is because I don’t se