Serial Conversations

An Interview with Jaron Lanier

Will Kurt, Contributor

Bonnie Parks, Column Editor

Kurt is Webmasterat BBN Technolowkurt@bbn.com.Parks is CatalogiLibraries, Cambridedu.

Editor’s Note: The(product managerfor making arranginterview.

doi:10.1016/j.serrev.

Will Kurt interviewed Jaron Lanier, the author of “Digital Maoism: The Hazards ofthe New Online Collectivism” and keynote speaker for the 2007 Allen PressEmerging Trends in Scholarly Communications Seminar. Lanier shares his thoughtson a variety of topics including the negative and positive effects of online collectives,the changing economics of information, and the future of scholarly communicationsin the online world. Serials Review 2007; 33:190–195.

Introduction

Well known for his early work in virtual reality, JaronLanier is a computer scientist and artist who was thekeynote speaker at the Allen Press Emerging Trends inScholarly Publishing Seminar, held on April 12, 2007,at the National Press Club in Washington, DC. Lastyear Lanier’s essay, “Digital Maoism,” created quite a

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editor and contributor thank Ted Freeman, Online Products and Services, Allen Press)ements for Serials Review to conduct this

2007.05.009

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stir in both Web and scholarly communities.1 In hisessay Lanier pointed out the dangers of what he termsthe “new online collectivism,” criticizing the popularonline encyclopedia project, Wikipedia, along withother emerging Web media. There have been a widevariety of responses to the article generating muchdiscussion, even reaching the pages of Serials Review.2

Will Kurt met with Jaron prior to his presentation atthe Allen Press seminar to talk more about his thoughtson online collectives and the future of scholarlycommunication.

Will Kurt (WK): It has been almost a year since “DigitalMaoism”was published. What, if anything, has changedin your thoughts on the topic of online collectives andsources like Wikipedia since you wrote the article?

Jaron Lanier (JL): There are a few things. One is that I aminterested in trying to look online and get a sense ofwhich sites seem to be bringing out at least what I judgeto be better or lesser qualities in people because there’squite a spectrum. The worst behavior seems to happen inthe context of blog-like designs. We’ve really seen somebad behavior; I mean, it’s very common in any context,not just something you might think is a hot button topiclike some controversial political blog, but you’ll see thesame pattern develop where people will become nastierand nastier and then at some point it degenerates intodeath threats. I have seen exactly the same pattern playitself out in blogs about pianos and bicycles, as well as inblogs about politics and music. But what is less known isthat it is happening in the sciences, and when it doeshappen, the incidents are sort of dealt with quietlybecause they are potentially embarrassing to everyone.There have been blogs about physics that degeneratedinto death threat matches. There have been blogs about

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math and physics that degenerated into payola schemesfor peer review corruption. None of this is absolutelyunheard of in the sciences, but I don’t think we’ve everseen a situation before in which people could slip into itso easily (if you think of digital technology as somethingthat removes friction or makes it easier for people to dothings that they might otherwise do but with a lot moretime and work). Unfortunately, the same principleapplies to the worst of people as well as to the best ofpeople. So we have, with that particular design of theanonymous blog role, created an efficiency machine forbullying and corruption.

WK: Are there cases in which online collectives are notso bad or even able to produce something reallygood?

JL: Let’s take something like the Wikipedia edit wars.They’re not as bad as anonymous blog roles, but they’repretty bad in many cases. It is just sort of a newepistemology in which reality is defined by the moststubborn person with the most time on their hands andthe least need to make a living with their time. It’s sort ofinteresting because it suggests a different social order. Itwould empower the people in low-cost real estate partsof the world for instance, who have more time on theirhands, usually to engage in edit wars. But, in a way, themost interesting question is if we compare online sites–which ones bring out the best behavior so far. I thinkthere are some successes that are interesting, for instance,in the scientific world the arXiv, a posting place for mathand physics. So far as I can tell, nothing bad has everhappened with the arXiv. It has a really good trackrecord. And the arXiv has done some experiments withbloggery, but that has never been its principal designfeature. Essentially, the arXiv is not as open as it mayseem because there’s a very quiet and non-explicit “kookfilter” at the front end of it, which is extremely importantbecause if my “Inbox” is any indication of the number ofpeople with new unified field theories who would like tosee them get attention, then I just can’t imagine what thearXiv must get. What we can learn from the arXiv is thata certain threshold of filtering can go a long way. And tome that is a little reminiscent of the kinds of socialcontracts that are created in some of the more pleasantsocieties that have existed on the planet. Where, if there’ssome sort of spectrum from anarchy to total control,there’s a point where you can add a modicum of controlon top what would otherwise be anarchy and suddenlyget a tremendously positive effect. And then you can startto see diminishing returns if you increase the amount ofcontrol beyond that. And so I think that maybe thesuccess of the arXiv gives us an indication that that sortof dynamic also applies to online design. I’ll mention acouple of other non-academic online designs that seem tome to bring out pretty good behavior in people overall.An interesting one is eBay. And the reason I say it’sinteresting is because there’s a sizable population ofpeople who are interested in performing criminalactivities on eBay. There’s a lot of fraud, and so you’dexpect that to create an environment of paranoia and

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recriminations but it hasn’t. Actually, the tone in thatenvironment is remarkably civil.I think the best explanation for the civility in eBay,

despite the criminality, is an economic one. It’s the sort ofexplanation that might please conservative social thin-kers. Here you have essentially private property andtransactions making people behave well. And I think it’san area in which social conservatives can make somelegitimate points. I don’t think it’s the only dynamic atwork, and I think there are some others that are also truethat they might be less happy with.

WK: How do you feel about Second Life, which verymuch mirrors a lot of your earlier work in virtualreality?

JL: Obviously, I have a bias to like Second Life because,to whatever degree, I’m partially the envisioner, and I’malmost formerly a science advisor for the organizationthat makes it. I think it’s interesting that people behaveon the whole. Once again you have to look at averageshere because there have certainly been outbreaks of badbehavior, but, on the whole, the tone in Second Life isremarkably civil, and I think that we don’t fullyunderstand why. I mean, in part, some of the dynamicsthat make people civil in eBay also apply in Second Life.But the economic situation is a little different. I think inSecond Life just who you are, your personality, yourpresentation, your avatar, your buildings require a lot ofwork and thought. And, I think just having that workcreates a sense of responsibility. The people who botherto go through the work and are really presentingthemselves in Second Life ultimately have put in morework than is needed to be offensive, so they tend to beless offensive. I think that’s an interesting dynamic too.Whether any of these things directly apply to academiccommunications or one particular scientific methodremains to be seen.

WK: You’ve been talking a lot about identity. What roledoes identity play in creating positive online commu-nities? Identity seems to be a real factor whether it ispseudonymous or not.

JL: If you go to pre-Internet days, anonymity has alwaysbeen considered important but in rather specialized uses.One use of anonymity is with some of the [wisdom of thecrowd] sorts of effects in democracy that [occur] invoting and economics [and] in setting the market price.And both of those are very long established andlegitimate. I have been asked to debate James Surowiecki(who wroteWisdom of Crowds)3 a few times, and I haveto say I don’t think we found any grounds fordisagreement. I think the interesting open researchquestion that we’re both profoundly interested in is,“What are the limits to the crowd effect—how can youdefine where it starts to break down?” since clearly itdoes. And I think digital networks demand that webecome more refined in our understanding of where thatborder is between an effective crowd and an ineffectiveone. At any rate, another use of anonymity wasn’t in

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crowds but in small groups of people such as peer reviewor juries in the legal system. In some cases, for instance ina grand jury, these cases were always consideredexceptional. Another example is the testimony of a“whistleblower.” For instance, recently the WashingtonPost published an anonymous op-ed, which they almostnever do, concerning the misuse by the justice depart-ment of national security letters.4 But these are all veryspecial cases, and indeed the reason theWashington Postop-ed had such an impact was because of how unusual itis to have an anonymous op-ed.

In pre-Internet days there were specific protectionsagainst anonymity because of recognition that anonym-ity can be mean. The best example of that is of the rightof the accused to face the accuser in our legal system. Sothe question is, given that there was a long social,political, economic and legal history of understandinganonymity, why on earth did anonymity becomeenshrined in the design of online worlds? Why mustone always make up fake names for oneself just to do anylittle thing? So the social history of that has to do with thecounterculture in America and the “war on drugs”.What happened was the original network design was aproduct of the Cold War. And the idea of theARPANET was in part to create a network that wouldsurvive a nuclear attack by being distributed. The nextlayers of code that included things like Usenet weresomething of a prototype for today’s blogs and otherWeb sites and e-mail. All these things were created alittle later and not entirely, but mostly, by people whowere part of the American counter-culture on the coastsat California universities and some other places likeMIT. And just to put it bluntly, these were people whowere always afraid of getting busted and for whom asense of anonymity was just deeply ingrained becausethey were used to living in a society that they feared to adegree. Many of them were old enough to have worriedabout the Vietnam draft and that might have played arole.

Interestingly, there’s a parallel phenomenon in whatwe now call “red state” America and that was CB radio.The interesting thing about CB radio that is hard torealize for somebody who’s young today is what a bigdeal it was for a period of time. In the seventies it was anoverwhelming cultural phenomenon. It was an exampleof a new media technology that really changed people. Itwas largely a reaction against laws that people in the redstates didn’t like. In particular the speed limits onhighways. And so CB radios were used to warn driversin a Web 2.0 like fashion with a collective, where driverswould warn each other where the police were waiting togive them tickets. And, of course, they used anonymoushandles, which sounded a lot like today’s e-mail names.So the cultural origins of anonymity on the Internet comeout of this sense of rebellion. The designs of rebelliondon’t work as mainstream designs. That’s the greatlesson of political history. And it’s a lesson that we haveto learn now for the digital era. I’m sorry to have to beone of the people who’s bringing that up because youdon’t get many thanks for bringing it up. But I reallybelieve that eventually even the most enthusiastic of the

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Web 2.0 youngsters are going to realize that it isn’tworking.

WK: Earlier you were talking to me about elitism whichseems to be parallel to this discussion of anonymity. Is itelitism that is already inherent in systems of scholarlycommunication, or is it elitism that is inherent in thesenew online communities? What role does elitism play inall this?

JL: In my view, it’s a question of balance. You remember Italked before about the spectrum of anarchy on one sideand absolute state control on the other side. I think thesweet spot is a lot closer to the anarchy side of thespectrum but certainly not all the way. And the sweet spotis not something you can define perfectly—you can onlysort of approximate it. There is no such thing as a perfectform of government or a perfect design of an Internetcommunity. But you can get close—I think closer thanyou might otherwise be. One way I’ve been interested inthinking about these questions is what you might callbiological realism. The notion there is that if we want tothink about issues related to the behavior of humans ingroups, one placewe should start is thinking about peopleas pack animals, a little more like dogs than we normallydo.We should think about the human species as one that’sobsessed with pecking orders and obsessed with thequestion of who the leadership is and who the leadershipwill be, the question of inner clan rivalries. A lot of ourethics can be understood on those terms. It’s sort of like asocial version of Lishner’s psychology. It’s a topic thatmakes me a little squeamish and yet I’ve come to feel thatit’s essential. It’s a big topic that we don’t have time to talkabout very much. The one thing I want to mention is thatsome of the rituals of elitism, I think, serve a function ofmanaging ormeliorating those tendencies in people that ifyou can give somebody a way to be part of an elite groupthat doesn’t involve violence to others then that’s verypositive. And I think in particular, the success of Americaat the times when it’s been most successful has come fromthe fact that we have multiple overlapping systems ofelitism so that individuals can find their way into differentgames of elitism rather than all having to be focused on asingle one. I think that is a way of avoiding bad behavior.One of the toughest lessons for young idealists to learn isthat if you have a system of complete openness youeffectively force everybody into a single system of peckingorder or elitism gaming because people aren’t able to haveany structure in which they can specialize and that isexactly what happens in open blogs and completely openforums. So just to emphasize, yet again, that doesn’t meanthat total control is what’s called for. I think both inAmerican democracy and in some of the democracies inthe world and also in online designs, like the arXiv, youcan see that what’s by historical standards a pretty lowlevel of control actually goes a long way. And I think thatthere’s sort of a sweet spot that that we should see eventhough we’ll never get it perfectly right.

WK: You mentioned a lot of established institutionslike democracy. Is there anything that’s essentially

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unique about the way online collectives operate or is itreally more of what we’ve seen before in the past?

JL: Once again there are two ways to think about thequestion of what goes on online. One is in the terms ofideals and the other is in terms of empiricism. And interms of my ideals, yeah, there’s a huge difference. I meanin terms of my ideals, I think people can gradually learnto develop fundamentally new ways to communicateideas to one another. For instance, within a world likeSecond Life, if it’s given a century to evolve and improve,I think we might see people being able to spontaneouslybuild simulations to express ideas, which might be reallydifferent than what we do right now. I think that wouldreally mark a qualitative change and help peoplecommunicate. And there are many other examples. If,instead, I’m going to be an empiricist and look at the dataavailable, it’s difficult because we’ve really only hadsubstantial numbers of people online for a brief time, weare talking about a decade. And for many of theparticular designs a few years so, it’s not really so easyto be an empiricist, but I’ve seen more unhappy surprisesthan happy surprises.

WK: So for these more negative manifestations of thesecollectives, do they pose a threat or are they going to fizzleout on their own? Where do you see the end game goingfor that? Is there a real risk that if they’re not checkedthey’ll contaminate healthier systems of communication?

JL: Well, I think they already have. Obviously I canspeak more about the fields I follow a little moreclosely. So I can collaborate a little bit with physicists atthe border of computer modeling and ideas aboutunified theories and cosmology and all. Because of thatI follow theoretical physics. And I’ll say if we had aworld without blogs, I think we’d have a civil con-versation going on between loop quantum gravity peopleand the string theory people that we don’t have rightnow. I don’t know if you appreciate how damning athing that is to say, but basically I think they’ve been adisaster.

WK: Scholarly communication has a deep history and awell-established system of communicating, and we’retalking about a very new emergent system of commu-nication, so how does an older system of com-munication integrate? Does it have to abandon certainthings? What is the best way for scholarly communica-tion to begin integrating and dealing with this newonline world?

JL: This is the trick. And if I knew the answer I’d bevery happy to share it. I think it’s really tricky becauseyou can’t just say, “We’ll take the old model and put itonline” and try to save everyone money because it’llcost less to do it with the Internet than with paper. Thereason you can’t do that is because when you changethe underlying economics of something, you change thepower structure of it, and inevitably the design of thething itself is going to change. So, you really do have to

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think about it as a whole. I think experiments aregood, there’s no reason that the whole of scholarlypublishing has to change at once. Little parts of it canexperiment in different ways, which is very, very for-tunate and is happening to a degree, and I think that’sobviously all for the good. But at the same time, it’stricky. Let’s say if you move to some of the expe-riments like the arXiv or PloS ONE that are changingthe flow diagram of science, they’re saying that a pub-lication is judged a posteriori instead of a priori. So,instead of having the review committee that is theguardian of publication, you have posting critics. Thatcompletely changes what a publication is and thenature of the duties of the review process and makes itmore distributed, more casual. Since the wisdom ofcrowds doesn’t work in that setting, I think it lowers itsquality as well.On the other hand, there might be good things about

it, and as I said, the arXiv’s been fantastic, but it’s beenfunctioning more as an additional structure to thetraditional publishing enterprise. It’s taken the publish-ing enterprise out of the center of the loop of doing thatkind of science and made it more of a career buildingtool that functions to the side of the process of doingthe science which is also, of course, essential to ourcareers.Another problem is just the economic one, in that it’s a

very natural thing to think that since you can sendinformation on the Internet much more cheaply than youcan with printed paper that your costs will becomenominal. And indeed paper and shipping paper areexpensive, so there’s some truth to that, but the problemis that paying the people to write and edit things anddesign them and all of that—the activities of writing andpublishing are not cheap because people have expenses.They have real estate they have to fund and children theyhave to educate and all that. What’s happened in someother business or other areas of activity throughoutbusiness has been a little dispiriting so far, and theobvious analogy is to music. Once again I’m strangelyout of phase, exactly out of phase, I’m 180 degrees out ofphase with a lot of younger people who’ve arrived at this,so there’s this enormous amount of energy for saying,“You know music should be freely tradable. Open musicis better.” I made that up along with a few of my friends. Iwas one of the early people who articulated that stuff,and I wrote a fire-breathing manifesto in the Times agesago (before a lot of the people who are into it were born)called “Piracy is Your Friend.”5 So I’ve been there. Iknow all the arguments.The problem is that there was an assumption that all of

us had [all of us] who believed that new business models,new commerce opportunities, new ways to make a livingwould keep pace with the changes. The problem is that itjust hasn’t happened. Now, I still believe ultimately it hasto happen. Ultimately, the system self corrects. Theproblem of this sort of dynamic is that there is noguarantee at all of how long that self-correction processwill take. We don’t know if it’s a year or ten years or onehundred years. If it is a hundred years, then that meanswe lose generations, we lose continuity with this culture

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and it’s bad. It’s a big problem. In the original “DigitalMaoism” essay I called that the “slow hive problem,” thefact that the dynamics of a complicated system can take along time to settle. That computation is never instant.These things seem absolutely obvious and yet we tend todiscount them when we think about these problems. Forthe moment if somebody is a publisher of music andwants advice for how they can stay in business, theadvice that can be offered to them is puny and pathetic. Ifthey can find a way to sell a piece of physicality, somehardware thing that’s attached to the music, then theycan come up with a scheme like that. That’s Apple withthe iPod. Or another example of something like that is atthe beginning of the Wikinomics book.6 The people hada gold mine but didn’t know where the gold was andpublished their geological data hoping someone elsewould help them find the gold. That’s great because theyown the land which is, from a logical point of view, theequivalent of the iPod. Therefore the open systemworked fine for them. If you can find some sort ofscam like that, that’s great. I don’t know what thatwould look like in academic publishing. Would it besome kind of special laptop that you’d have to use tolook at academic? I mean it just sounds so absurd. Somesort of weird dongle?

WK: The academic equivalent of the iPod?

JL: Yeah. Or you have to have a key ring filled withdongles for journals or something. I mean it just soundsridiculous; therefore, that strategy isn’t available.

The next strategy that’s worked is advertising. Thereare two problems with advertising. One is that unlesssociety transforms radically into some sort of massivenew version of something a little like potlatch andeverybody’s advertising as much as possible all the time,there just won’t be enough advertising revenue to goaround for everyone. There’s only so much that can bestretched out of advertising. I’m sure advertising is bigand, of course, the boosters of companies like Googlethink that it can get much bigger than it is now, but is itactually going to fund someone at a small but importantacademic journal? I doubt it.

The third option is some sort of honor systemsubscription. And there are examples of those whereyou just hope—you just ask people to pay subscrip-tions, but then you’re not too tough with them aboutsharing. The successes there are haven’t scaled, as wesay in the hacker world, in the techie world. The WallStreet Journal can do it. It happens, to a degree, in thesciences. Are we going get to a world ultimately that’lllead to such a huge amount of revenue reduction? Andit will vary a lot from field to field. For instance, somekinds of engineering journals might do a little bit betterthan journals related to the history of English, or some-thing like that. The impoverished graduate studentswould probably just steal the material at that pointand libraries will feel no need to support them because[the students] can steal it, and the whole thing willcollapse in one generation and everyone will starve inthe field.

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Unfortunately the problem is that while the ideals ofopen everything are good, the economic reality is stillbasically unsettled, and there’s no indication on howlong it will take to settle. Unfortunately, to mychagrin, no new coalesced revision has come out,and it’s bad. It’s a huge problem. Fortunately, a lot ofscholarly publishing is based upon the work ofindividuals who are somehow supported by scholarlyinstitutions and to a degree we might be able tosqueeze through this. I’m concerned about whether wereally can.

WK: When you published “Digital Maoism,” you hadsomething big to say. How do you feel about the reactionyou’ve gotten? Has the essay generated the conversationyou wanted to hear?

JL: What was interesting is that there were two con-versations. The conversation on the Internet had verydifferent tenure than the conversation off the Internet.On the Internet it was the usual sort of degraded low-quality conversation that we’ve come to expect. Forinstance, on Boing Boing,7 a popular site, theypublished a collection of people who were critical ofthe essay, [and that] generated enormous amount ofadditional flamey hate mail which included the usualdeath threats toward me. But [Boing Boing] didn’tactually include the original essay, so nobody actuallysaw that. And I wrote to them and asked them to post it,and they posted it much later which in Internet timemeant essentially that it was too late for anyone to see it.That’s the sort of thing that happens online quite a bit.There were some thoughtful responses online, and I’mnot saying that only a response that agrees with me hasto be thoughtful. I just have to say a lot of them, I mean,I got a lot of e-mail along the lines of, “You’re just ahater. You and your family deserve to die”. You know alittle bit of that is one thing, but when there’s a lot ofthat it’s something different. I have noticed withinmyself when I have written in blogs, I’ve noticed thisthing welling up in me which is exactly that personality,I don’t think I’m any better than the people who wroteto me in that way.Off of the Internet, it was very different. People who

wrote about it in magazines or, by this point, books, havetended to be much more thoughtful whether they agreedwith it or not. There was much more substance to it. It’sfunny that I thought this little essay would be quiteobscure because it was posted on an online site for sciencedebate. So, anyway, as far as what to tell publishers thesedays is that it’s really a perilous time. It’s a perilous time.This is a whole other large topic. I’m going try to talkabout a little of this at lunch. Remember I was talkingbefore, about how there could be ways of communicatingand people start to share assimilations and all that? Likethe possibilities for increasing the scope of what it meansto be published or what it means to communicate withother colleagues in a specialized field. I mean there’s somuch potential for an enhanced intellectual adventurehere. I think that down that road is where the solution lies.Some sort of a synthesis might be something like future

10/responses_to_jaron_l.html (accessed May 5, 2007).

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publisher of scientific assimilations might provide aspecial service making sure all the simulations can connectto each other, so they can become more of a scientificprocess by being reusable and more closely evaluated. Allthese sorts of things. And there are significant technicalproblems in doing that, as well as challenges. A publisherthat could do that well would be adding so much valuethat they might actually overcome some of the sorts ofproblems that have sunk the music industry. For instance,any kind of document that sits still like on a page oranything that isn’t interactive, even a movie, can betransformed between formats. But soon as you move tosimulation, you can’t transform automatically from onecold format to another. So therefore, there’s a new kind ofbarrier, which can serve the role of the gold mine or theiPod from those examples. It can serve as a sort of dongleor barrier to absolute openness, which can then serve as ahook for commerce. That might be the solution. And thatwould be the win–win solution. Where people would earna living but for a very good reason, and then we couldperhaps even find that very nice sweet spot that is closer toanarchy than fascism but not too close. Maybe everythingcomes together. The question is, “What to do until thatnew synthesis?” and that could be quite a long way in thefuture.

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WK: Thank you very much for taking this time to talkwith Serials Review.

Notes

1. Jaron Lanier, “Digital Maoism: The Hazards of the New OnlineCollectivism,” Edge May 30, 2006, http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/lanier06/lanier06_index.html (accessed May 5, 2007).

2. Markel Tumlin, Steven R. Harris, Heidi Buchanan, Krista Schmidtand Kay Johnson, “Collectivism vs. Individualism in aWiki World:Librarians Respond to Jaron Lanier’s Essay ‘Digital Maoism: TheHazards of the New Online Collectivism,’” “Balance Point,”Serials Review 33, no. 1 (2007): 45–53.

3. James Surowiecki, TheWisdom of Crowds (New York: Doubleday,2004).

4. “My National Security Letter Gag Order,” Washington PostMarch 23, 2007.

5. Jaron Lanier, “Piracy is Your Friend,” New York Times May 9,1999.

6. Don Tapscott and Anthony Williams, Wikinomics (New York:Portfolio, 2006).

7. David Pescovitz, “Responses to Jaron Lanier’s Crit of OnlineCollectivism,” Boing Boing, http://www.boingboing.net/2006/06/