The P2P Foundation Blog has an excellent blog posting by Michel Bauwens on Jaron Lanier's new essay for Edge.
The basic ideas of Lanier's essay are (quoted from CommunityWiki):
- There is a resurgance of the idea that the collective is all-wise, and that this is bad.
- There is an attempt to erase the individual, and this is dumb.
- AI is dumb. The Internet is dumb. Only people are smart.
The P2P foundation blog posting by bauwens borrows from his own P2P Manifesto, which looks at human collective action through the lens of Clare W Graves's
theory of human nature. Clare W. Graves's theory shows that the
fundamental nature of communist "collectivism" is different from the
collective action of people voluntarily cooperating, as discussed by
author Howard Rheingold here.
I also talk about this in the discussion section of this CommunityWiki page. I talk about how we are lacking a general "literacy of human nature",
and how I believe that this lack of understanding is what is driving
people to place labels where they do not belong. The reasons "why"
people voluntarily collaborate are different than the reasons "why"
people go along with state-imposed "collectivism" rules.
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