Mao's revenge: subsuming one's identity into an electronically aggregated mass is akin to Mao's China.(Jaron Lanier)

Byline: Steven Levy

Jaron Lanier is a man of many talents--virtual-reality pioneer, New Age composer, visual artist and artificial-intelligence scientist. Now Lanier has taken on another role: dyspeptic critic of the surging trend of digital collectivism, an ethic that celebrates and exploits the ability of the Web to aggregate the preferences and behaviors of millions of people. In a recent essay posted on the Web site Edge.org, Lanier disparages the recent spate of efforts that rely on conscious collaboration (like the anyone-can-participate online reference work Wikipedia) or passive polling (the so-called meta sites like Digg, which draw on user response to rank news articles and blog postings). To Lanier these represent a rejection of individual expression and creativity. To emphasize the enormity of this movement, Lanier titled his essay "Digital Maoism."

Yes, to Lanier, subsuming one's identity into an electronically aggregated mass is akin to the mob fervor seen in China during the chairman's rule. "If you look at the history of youth cultural movements, they tend to go one of two ways," he explains. "One is in the direction of individual expression and creativity; the best example is the '60s. The other way is to lose themselves in the collective, binding themselves into a gang--as in the Cultural Revolution."