by aspenmayer | 2025-10-28 02:10:25+00:00
I have heard counters to your arguments put forth by Jaron Lanier, and I can't say I find all of his arguments convincing, but his concept of "digital Maoism" (his words) is a powerful one. I believe he also mentions modern systems of organization and/or control as being akin to "digital sharecropping" (a formulation I've heard others use; not ascribing it to Lanier, but he does reference sharecropping and its shortcomings iirc, and may even use the phrase, I just don't know for sure if he does; in any case, he compares modern social media to historical sharecropping, and the conditions of slavery that gave rise to it as essentially a continuation of slavery with extra steps, which is my humble attempt at contextualizing his work, and is not meant to denigrate historical or modern slavery or poor working conditions; in any case he does have things to say worth reading, and his works should not be ignored simply because I don't know his works well enough to explore the issues further in this comment).

I don't mean to throw him or his ideas under the bus, or to put him on a pedestal either, but because it's been a while since I've read anything by him, and because he's written more since and besides, in addition to his foundational work in VR (which is called into question by others) I don't want to wade too deeply into a discussion which I'm poorly equipped to carry to its logical conclusion; instead, I would simply signpost his work and his ideas, while mentioning that he also takes issue with Wikipedia for well-meaning reasons, but I will link to his page on Wikipedia anyway, as it is the best source I can think of for this venue.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jaron_Lanier

> Jaron Zepel Lanier (born May 3, 1960) is an American computer scientist, visual artist, computer philosophy writer, technologist, futurist, and composer of contemporary classical music. Considered a founder of the field of virtual reality, Lanier and Thomas G. Zimmerman left Atari in 1985 to found VPL Research, Inc., the first company to sell VR goggles and wired gloves. In the late 1990s, Lanier worked on applications for Internet2, and in the 2000s, he was a visiting scholar at Silicon Graphics and various universities. In 2006 he began to work at Microsoft, and from 2009 has worked at Microsoft Research as an Interdisciplinary Scientist.

Since you mentioned Stallman, I chose to include another quote from the above page:

> In his book You Are Not a Gadget (2010), Lanier criticizes what he perceives as the hive mind of Web 2.0 (wisdom of the crowd) and describes the open source and open content expropriation of intellectual production as a form of "Digital Maoism". Lanier accuses Web 2.0 developments of devaluing progress and innovation, as well as glorifying the collective at the expense of the individual. He criticizes Wikipedia and Linux as examples of this problem; Wikipedia for what he sees as: its "mob rule" by anonymous editors, the weakness of its non-scientific content, and its bullying of experts.

There is more on his Wikipedia entry under the heading for that particular book and in the entry linked below that dig more into these ideas; I wonder if his work at Microsoft might color his perceptions, and whether his own privilege and status as such an expert himself might blind him to actual contributions of open source to society, but that's neither here nor there.

> Lanier further argues that the open source approach has destroyed opportunities for the middle class to finance content creation, and results in the concentration of wealth in a few individuals—"the lords of the clouds"—people who, more by virtue of luck rather than true innovation, manage to insert themselves as content concentrators at strategic times and locations in the cloud.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Maoism

> In his online essay, in Edge magazine in May 2006, Lanier criticized the sometimes-claimed omniscience of collective wisdom (including examples such as the Wikipedia article about himself), describing it as "digital Maoism". He writes "If we start to believe that the Internet itself is an entity that has something to say, we're devaluing those people [creating the content] and making ourselves into idiots."

> DIGITAL MAOISM: The Hazards of the New Online Collectivism [2006]

https://www.edge.org/conversation/digital-maoism-the-hazards... | https://web.archive.org/web/20250905194628/https://www.edge.... | https://archive.is/8c3U9

Also alongside this somewhat notable essay (notable in the oeuvre of Lanier, at least) are responses from the following public intellectuals; I quote the introduction to the responses in full because some of these names are definitely of interest to HN and its readers:

> Responses to Lanier's essay from Douglas Rushkoff, Quentin Hardy, Yochai Benkler, Clay Shirky, Cory Doctorow, Kevin Kelly, Esther Dyson, Larry Sanger, Fernanda Viegas & Martin Wattenberg, Jimmy Wales, George Dyson, Dan Gillmor, Howard Rheingold

Presentation by Lanier on Who Owns the Future [one of his books], May 15, 2013, C-SPAN [on the program Book TV] https://www.c-span.org/program/book-tv/who-owns-the-future/3...

Presentation by Lanier on Dawn of the New Everything [another of his books], December 7, 2017, C-SPAN [Book TV] https://www.c-span.org/program/book-tv/dawn-of-the-new-every...