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I'm including these links because they seem highly apposite to the issues discussed in Bernard's piece.
1. Matt Welch, "Farewell to Warblogging", Reasononline (April 2006): "I used to think blogs would transform ideologues into nonpartisan truth-seekers. Man, was I wrong."
2. Steven Barrie-Anthony, "Take a number, pal: Web etiquette goes wacky when ranking friends becomes an exercise in lifeboat ethics", Calendarlive (May 10, 2006): "First, name the eight most important people in your life -- friends, family, rock stars. These are your Top 8. Now rank those people in order of importance. Finally, send a copy of this list to everybody you know, including people who didn't make the cut. Be careful not to hurt the wrong feelings, or you may end up getting bumped from other people's Top 8s. Go ahead and bite your nails. Realize the magnitude of these decisions."
3. Jaron Lanier, "Digital Maoism: The Hazards of the New Online Collectivism", Edge (May 30, 2006): "The hive mind is for the most part stupid and boring. Why pay attention to it? The problem is in the way the Wikipedia has come to be regarded and used; how it's been elevated to such importance so quickly. And that is part of the larger pattern of the appeal of a new online collectivism that is nothing less than a resurgence of the idea that the collective is all-wise, that it is desirable to have influence concentrated in a bottleneck that can channel the collective with the most verity and force. This is different from representative democracy, or meritocracy. This idea has had dreadful consequences when thrust upon us from the extreme Right or the extreme Left in various historical periods. The fact that it's now being re-introduced today by prominent technologists and futurists, people who in many cases I know and like, doesn't make it any less dangerous."
The Lanier article is the longest, but also (in my opinion) the most insightful, if just a little overstated. After all, there might well be a legitimate distinction between collectivism and collective action.
As one critic puts it,
Lanier's problem is all summed up in the last line of his article: "The best guiding principle is to always cherish individuals first."The problem that Lanier is concerned about--and it seems a legitimate concern--is the tendency to treat the outcome of aggregation as the "oracles" of a "collective voice". Contrary to what the critics might think, I don't think what he says need be incompatible with valuing collective action--individuals coming together to do things that can't be done, or can't be done as well, by individuals alone.The tension between the individual and the group is not something that can be permanently decided by an ad hoc moral decision that outputs a static rule to be applied in perpetuity. Rather, achieving a successful balance between individual and collective needs is an ongoing process (largely addressed by social and political theory).
In a way, this goes to the heart of something that is briefly considered in Bernard's piece. There is a genuine difference between the phenomenon of aggregation--the bringing together of content under one framework, portal or what not, and congregation, the bringing together of people in a common space.
But here's a philosophical conundrum for the advocates of "collective action" (and the related notion of "collective need"). What is this animal? Is it not ultimately reducible to a series of individual actions--coordinated, no doubt? Here are two possible ways to think of the collective action X of a group G composed of members A, B and C:
(a) "G does X" if and only if "A does X1, B does X2, C does X3, A has certain beliefs about B and C, B has certain beliefs about A and C, C has certain beliefs about A and B (including second order beliefs, e.g., A not only believes that B is such and such, or will do such and such, but also that B believes that A believes that...)..." In other words, "G does X" is equivalent to a shorthand for a complicated series of "A/B/C does/believes..."--the former is in principle dispensible (except for ease of normal communication).
(b) "G does X" is not reducible in the manner above. To say that G does X is to say more than that A/B/C does/believes... G stands over and against the individuals that compose it. X is more than the sum of the actions (and beliefs) undertaken by the members of G.
The question is: is what is involved in (b) ultimately fiction, an unnecessary personification of the collective? Or even worse?
