Jaron Lanier walked onto the speaking floor with ease as he addressed an overflow crowd at Yahoo!'s Mission College Campus on Wednesday, May 23. The collector of over 1,500 Balinese instruments delivered a talk entitled “Can Networks Be Better Designed to Suppress the Worst Qualities in Human Nature?” Lanier introduced his talk by referring to his essay, "Digital Maoism," which resulted from the unearthing of an incorrect Wikipedia entry on him. His essay describes a phenomenon in the online world in which people have the desire to lose their identity and blend into a "big mush" and digital mobs.
According to Lanier, there are 2 directions that have driven societal change in history: a) creativity in individuals, such as the Silicon Valley boom and the 1960’s hippie movement; or b) cultural revolution, a concept in which people lose themselves into the masses and adopt mob identities. Lanier reminisced to the days when the spirit of the Web was amazing and people expressed themselves. There was a Burning Man sensation to online communities because young people were getting online with the notion of "going to reinvent myself." He explained that there's a counter-trend to this happening today, which he referred to as the Wiki way of doing things. To Lanier, this represents a rejection of individual expression and creativity. He feels that Wikipedia has transformed the Web from a Burning Man site to a library.
As a result of Lanier's strong opposition to Wikipedia, he made a lot of people angry and his essay ignited a series of hate blogs and death threats. He posed the questions, "What makes an environment unfriendly? What makes people behave like creeps online" Lanier believes that there are 2 potential theories. The user interface theory presents the idea that the more you represent personas and facial features online (e.g. avatars), the better the behavior. The economic theory suggests that people might behave better because they are heavily invested in earning goodwill from their online personas. The downside to the user interface theory is that human nature is perverse and unpredictable. Presenting a more realistic persona might have reverse effects. Lanier cited the Kathy Sierra story, a woman who ran a blog about training people in Web design. Out of the blue, Sierra became the subject of a vicious online hate blog. Why her? What happened? Lanier believes there’s no good explanation. He read all of her blog posts and she seemed to be a positive-minded woman, which makes him think that creating a fake persona, "like some guy," would have prevented the malicious acts online.
Lanier sees the use of avatars as a viable solution, where you can create enough to evoke empathy, but not enough to evoke brutality. According to Lanier, this is a sweet spot that could work, but will require testing different theories about it to figure out what's possible.
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