Jaron, wishing for crowd science
Digital Maoism Revisited lays out Jaron Lanier’s concerns that we don’t know how to build an open, optimistic kind collective intelligence. (I seem to have started collecting instances of people talking about The Age of Complexity.)
There is a third empirical problem to tackle, and it is the least comfortable. To what degree is mob behavior an inborn element of human nature? There are competing clichés about human identity: that we naturally and inevitably form into competing packs or that we would refrain from doing so if only we had decent gang-free peer groups in our teens. These theories can actually be tested. The genetic aspects of behavior that have received the most attention (under rubrics like sociobiology or evolutionary psychology) have tended to focus on things like gender differences and mating strategies, but my guess is that clan orientation will turn out to be the most important area of study.
I always find Jaron such a calm and polite writer, in contrast to the shit storms he occasionally stirs up around himself. I like this. “It is the least comfortable.” Such a considerate warning.