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The serfdom of crowds
By Jaron Lanier
By Jaron Lanier, from You Are Not a Gadget, published in January by Knopf. Lanier, a computer scientist, popularized the term “virtual reality.” His “Moving Beyond Muzak” was published in the March 1998 issue of Harper’s Magazine.
The central faith embedded in Web technologies whereby users not only consume information but widely generate it is the idea that the Internet as a whole is coming alive and turning into a superhuman creature. The designs 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 technologists can: in the design of software.
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| SEE ALSO: Information technology; Internet; Social networks; Technological innovations | |||||
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