The Facebook Kid and The Cloud Lord

Of many reasons Walt Whitman wrote Leaves of Grass, one was not so much to make a statement of the truth as to make a statement which, thrown in the scales against accredited views, would correct their bias and leave the balance adjusted accurately. He felt, for example, how much there was to be said on the side of conservatism, and would sometimes insist in conversation that he was a conservative himself. But he could trust the case of conservatism to get itself stated elsewhere; brute nature iterated it tirelessly. He, therefore, threw his whole weight upon the side of progress by writing Leaves of Grass as a liberal-charged opus to sex, gay relationships, blasphemy, and the holiness of the common man.

Whitman’s intent came to mind as I read this self-proclaimed manifesto in Harper’s Magazine. While no Leaves of Grass, “The Serfdom of Crowds” is a diatribe thrown in the scales against accredited views of open culture to correct their bias and leave the balance adjusted accurately.

I quote pieces below, but be sure to read the whole article.

The central faith embedded in Web technologies whereby users not only consumer information but widely generate it is the idea that the Internet as a whole is coming alive and turning into a superhuman creature. The design guided by this perverse kind of faith leave people in the shadows. Computers will soon get so big and fast, and the Internet so rich with information, that people will be obsolete, either left behind like the characters in Rapture novels or subsumed into some cyber-superhuman something. Silicon Valley culture has taken to enshrining this vague idea and spreading it the only way technologies can: in the design of software.
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People degrade themselves all the time in order to make machines seem smart….We have repeatedly demonstrated our species bottomless ability to lower our standards to make information technology good, but every manifestation of intelligence in a machine is ambiguous. The same ambiguity that motivated dubious academic artificial intelligence projects in the past has been repackaged as mass culture. Did that search engine really know what you want, or are you playing along, lowering your standards to make it seem clever?...
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An individual who is receiving a flow of reports about the romantic status of a group of friends must learn to think in terms of the flow if it is to be perceived as worth reading at all. Am I accusing all those hundreds of millions of users of social-networking sites of reducing themselves in order to be able to user the services? Well, yes, I am. I know quite a few people, most of them young adults, who are proud to say that they have accumulated thousands of friends on Facebook. Obviously, their statements can be true only if the idea of friendship is diminished.
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The Facebook Kid and the Cloud Lord are serf and king of the new order. In each case, human creativity and understanding, especially one’s own creativity and understanding, are treated as worthless….The whole artifice, the whole idea of fake friendship, is just bait laid by the cloud lords to lure hypothetical advertisers – we might call them messianic advertisers – who could someday show up….
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There is, unfortunately, only one entity that can maintain its value as everything else is devalued under the banner of the noosphere. At the end of the rainbow of open culture lies an eternal spring of advertisements. Advertising is elevated by open culture from its previous role as an accelerant and placed at the center of the human universe. Advertising is now singled out as the only form of expression meriting genuine commercial protection in the new world to come. Any other form of expression is to be remashed, anonymized and decontextualized to the point of meaninglessness. Ads, however, are to be made ever more contextual, and the content of the ad is absolutely sacrosanct….
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If you want to know what’s really going on in a society or ideology, follow the money. If money is flowing to advertising instead of to musicians, journalists, and artists, then a society is more concerned with manipulation than with truth or beauty. If content is worthless, then people will start to become empty-headed and contentless. The combination of hive mind and advertising has resulted in a new kind of social contract. The basic idea of this contact is that authors, journalists, musicians, and artists are encouraged to treat the fruits of their intellects and imaginations as fragments to be given without pay to the hive mind. Reciprocity takes the form of self-promotion. Culture is to become precisely nothing but advertising.