Citizendium Blog

An exercise for the reader: compare and contrast the radical, dystopian, Internet-inspired futures imagined by Clay Shirky (though I admit I might have gotten Clay’s actual position wrong) and Mark Pesce. Quite apart from shared theoretical themes, note some subtle rhetorical similarities: the notion of historical inevitability; the failure to describe fully the features and virtues of the brave new world the theorist evidently desires; the gaping holes in logic and the use of very loose analogies; the subtle suggestion that any disagreement with their position indicates backwardness, conservatism, Luddism, unhipness, and the like; and last but certainly not least, the outrageous and absurd suggestions that the futures envisioned — one entailing the collapse of liberal education and many of the basic documents of civilization, the other entailing the collapse of democracy — are actually somehow to be hoped for.

Fascinating.

Here’s another essay, which I’ve been saving up.

Mark Pesce, in a talk that appeared on Edge.org, appears to argue that the plugged-in world of the future will foster an anti-democratic revolution. Stated briefly and clearly, his argument goes like this:

(1) As more and more people get online and get connected, they join communities, like Wikipedia, that empower (”hyperempower”) them.

(2) Wikipedia and other successful online communities are not democratic; they combine anarchy with mob rule.

(3) Increasingly, these empowered people will turn their collective attention to the problems of politics, as Barack Obama’s online campaign community does.

(4) In embracing politics, they will not become less anarchical, or less apt to be organized by mob rule. Political action will look like Wikipedia’s anarchical, mob-rule community.

(5) So, sooner or later, these mob-like political groups will seize power from democracies.

Apparently, Pesce thinks such an event would be a good thing; as he says in his speech, “representative democracies are a poor fit to the challenges ahead, and rebooting them is not enough.”

This is a transparently poor argument. Why think all online communities are or will be anarchical or mob-like, like Wikipedia? They aren’t. Why think that, just because people become politically mobilized online, groups like Obama’s will eventually try to start a real (bloody) political revolution? Maybe they will, but any strong claim like this requires strong evidence, and Pesce hasn’t given any. Finally, why think it follows that just because online communities are anti-democratic, the meatspace societies such communities favor will also be anti-democratic? Of course, this does not follow. Ignoring the more radical outliers, Obama’s followers are Democrats. I am quite sure that if you were to survey even some of the most radical and annoying of Wikipedians, you would find the number of them who actually oppose democracy to be very small indeed.

I think Pesce, and many other would-be Internet revolutionaries, have forgotten that we are still in the early stages of the Internet. Most people who spend much time in the Wikipedia community find that they dislike its governance; many would prefer something more sensible, with a few clear, established rules and a reasonably reliable way to enforce them. Since I was there, I can assure you that Wikipedia could have been instituted that way. Moreover, Wikipedia has flourished precisely because of certain definite policies. It’s not a stretch to say that the only reason Wikipedia has been as successful as it has been has been its commitment to certain policies (which a certain non-anarchist, yours truly, helped to establish in its first year), such as creating encyclopedia articles (as opposed to personal essays, for example), neutrality, and not signing articles, with discussion about an article happening on a separate (”talk”) page. There was a time — in the project’s first year — when these policies were, each of them, at least somewhat controversial. We easily could have gone farther and added a low-key, bottom-up role for experts. Also, it would have caused a fork, but we could have instituted the use of real names as a policy, at least for administrators. Such policies would have made it possible to enforce rules and approve articles, as the growing Citizendium now does. The point is that Wikipedia’s development has not been wholly anarchical, and indeed its success has depended precisely on its not being so. Moreover, less anarchical projects might well do better in the long run; I hope so, but we’ll see.

Pesce is not the first to suggest that the Internet will result in a massive anarchist revolution. At the risk of banality, let me say that I favor good old-fashioned democracy both on-line and off, and I obviously oppose the anti-democratic, mob-rule society Pesce appears to desire. I do not think that the mere fact that Wikipedia has a dysfunctional anarchical/mob-rule governance system indicates that democracy itself is somehow outmoded — that seems to be Pesce’s inference, and it is as silly as it sounds. In his talk, I should clarify, Pesce does not really say what he’s in favor of. But I can make a reasonable guess. He says that our inevitable destiny is the destruction of democracy and the “hyper-empowerment” of individuals. Well, in politics, democracy is the only way to “hyper-empower” people; anarchy leads to mobocracy, and mobocracy disempowers all but those with the stomach and ability to lead the mob.

However all that is, and as many people have said, I would say instead that the Internet is more likely to strengthen our democracies. Pesce has nothing like a coherent or plausible argument to the contrary — merely a “just so story,” wishful thinking delivered with breathless, barely concealed hopefulness.

UPDATE (July 30): an almost identical version of this appears on the Britannica Blog.

The part of the Britannica Blog “Your Brain Online” debate that I am interested in is this question: does Web 2.0, or whatever you want to call it, mean the end of the Great Books or of liberal education? And is anybody really saying that it does mean that? I’ve written once before on this question, but I would like to clarify my position.

Let’s get clear on what the problem here is. The problem is not that most people are in danger of becoming “uncultured”; there never was a time or a place in which most people were particularly cultured, i.e., thoroughly familiar with the history, literature, science, religion, and so forth that defines a culture. The problem — if we can believe what some Web 2.0 revolutionaries say — is that those who are cultured are doomed to become uncultured, by the inevitable influence of the Internet on our minds, at least by the standards of liberal education. And our children will never be cultured again, not by the standards of liberal education. Rather, they will be acculturated by the Internet. It seems that Clay Shirky, just for example, believes that the only things of cultural importance in the future will take place in “the crowd” online, a “group mind” or a “collective intelligence” — even if the crowd looks in the future a lot different from how it looks in 2008. Of course, I could easily be misunderstanding Clay, and so I want to make this point very generally, and not as an attack on Clay. My concern is that, if we are on a vector toward the radical collectivization of knowledge in this way, the products of the best individual minds of the past will become less and less valued by anybody. Yet they plainly do have considerable value, on virtually any educated person’s view now. If we did not think so, we would not buy the books of the people who have posted on the Britannica Blog, for instance: no individual mind would be worth spending so much time on.

If you are not convinced by the example of Tolstoy, think of various dense, system-building philosophers. If anyone were to say — and I dare not accuse anyone of actually saying this, as that truly would be damning — that such thinkers are no longer relevant, because they weren’t part of anything like a Blogosphere, that would be to declare your own personal intellectual bankruptcy, your utter failure to benefit from a liberal education. Let’s be serious, here. If you actually think the Internet’s “group mind” somehow renders passé all the difficult, great books, which shaped our civilizations — if that is what you really want to do — then you certainly are not, not in any way, “on the cutting edge.” I don’t concede that one inch. If you say such a thing, then it seems to me you have merely given us embarrassing evidence that you not really fit to be reasoned with.

But I very much doubt that such philistinism — and that might be too good a word for it, because what it is, is just crude, unserious, uneducated, or silly nonsense — is actually the direction we are travelling in. There are far too many people who still actually appreciate all those old books, and the value of the liberal education that only they can impart. Moreover, if we are travelling toward such widespread philistinism, I have not seen the case made convincingly that we are. Merely to point to the power of the Wikipedia model, or the sheer amount of information in the Blogosphere and all the rest of the Internet, does not even come close to making the case. Pointing out that some of us as it were compulsively check for e-mail and other short Internet communications, and have little time or concentration for long reading, also does not prove that we are, all of us, doomed to become philistines.

Do I really need to point out the virtues of liberal education and how they apply in the present case? Sadly, perhaps I do. “How soon we forget.” Liberal education is so called because it liberates the mind from a million prejudices, replacing them with knowledge of history, science, and culture, and above all making it possible to think through new problems. (For those who are not familiar with the phrase, “liberal education” refers to “the liberal arts,” not to a position on the political spectrum.) So far from being irrelevant, nothing could be more useful in the proper evaluation and appreciation of newfangled stuff like Web 2.0 than a liberal education. Is it any wonder that the principals in the debate are all, quite obviously, possessed of a liberal education and so familiar with great artists and thinkers like Tolstoy, Nietzsche, and Proust?

My concern is not “nostalgic,” of course — why would it be? To say so assumes, first of all, that the Great Books (not just Tolstoy of course) are in fact passé, that we have somehow “moved on” from them. But nobody has established that, not in the slightest way. More importantly, nobody in the Britannica debate ever clarified in what sense the Internet poses any sort of threat to how we value the Great Books — other than that we might have to rouse ourselves a little if we want to read them. It has absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with nostalgia or with silly romanticization of a novel-gobbling past. It has to do with a proper valuation of human minds and of what they have produced, both individually and in the aggregate, from around the world and from the dawn of recorded history until the present. If someone really did want to dismiss the power and interest of individual human minds and what they are capable of producing as somehow passé, he would thereby do away with all those great books, and the strange, ever-conflicted, varied culture that resulted from them, and I suppose replace them with the Borg. You will be assimilated; resistance is futile. Right? It’s techno-socially determined. You can’t do anything about it.

Does anybody in this debate really believe that Web 2.0 spells the end of the great books and of liberal education, and its entire replacement by the productions of undifferentiated “crowds”?

Surely nobody really believes that, or even anything like it. I do wonder, of course, what the perceived merits of the Great Books and liberal education will be, once we have gone through the massive societal transformation that, I fully agree, the Internet is bringing us. I would like to point out that if we do give up the foundations of Western civilization, indeed the written records of all civilizations, and if we give up even any pretention to having to become acquainted with those records, we give up a very great deal.

The prospect is nothing short of horrifying. It would be quite literally the death of civilization as we have known it. That means all the good parts as well as the bad. It essentially would herald not a bright new world, cleaned of bad old influences, but very probably a new dark age. After all, those who do not know history are doomed to repeat it.

As an aside, I should also state (apparently, it’s necessary) that I am not opposed to Web 2.0. If you know me, you’ll realize this is just silly. I just have a different idea about what direction we should take, that’s all. (For some clues, see 1, 2, 3, 4.) I am much more optimistic about the prospects of the Internet and what it means for human civilization. I think it will enhance liberal education as never before, and more likely to usher in a new enlightenment than to cause the death of civilization.

Three major new encyclopedia projects have come on the scene lately. Last month, Britannica Online was announced, then more recently a new expert-led encyclopedia called Medpedia appeared, then finally yesterday Knol launched at http://knol.google.com/.

These are competitors to CZ, or to subjects within CZ, for eyeballs or traffic, and we certainly will not be complacent.

Some people have billed these as “Citizendium-killers,” but they consistently fail to appreciate is that all three of these projects are not primarily collaborative community projects, as CZ is. Both Britannica and Knol say that authors can determine the extent to which other people can collaborate on one’s article. On CZ, all articles are owned and controlled in common, and are unsigned. The designers of those projects seem not to realize just how crucially important that is to building an online community that takes on a life of its own.

In the end, as I have argued on multiple occasions (most recently here), the advantages of radical collaboration could, I think, outweigh even the natural advantages of Google, Britannica, and Medpedia’s distinguished partners.

Besides, the uncollaborative Knol and Britannica Online model has already been tried, a few years ago, by a couple of behemoths: the BBC’s H2G2, and Everything2. And while Medpedia might be billed as collaborative, it won’t be — not if experts-only projects like Encyclopedia of Life, Encyclopedia of Earth, Encyclopedia of the Cosmos, and Scholarpedia are indicators.

All this said, may the best encyclopedia win. The world needs a better encyclopedia than the 800-pound gorilla, Wikipedia.

I just think that, in the fullness of time, that will be the Citizendium!

Not that I’m particularly proud of that.

The Britannica Blog invited responses to Nick Carr’s Atlantic essay: This is your brain; this is your brain on the Internet. Shirky wrote yet another of his provocative yet completely implausible posts, to which Carr responded. I wrote a reply in defense of Tolstoy and the individual thinker. If you’re curious why I might need to defend Tolstoy and the individual thinker — well, leave it to Clay to come out against them.

Just for your interest, I have put together a “best of this blog” category. I’ve included only stuff written and “published” originally in this blog — not papers or CZ pages.

…yep, it’s my birthday, so I’m taking the day off, but I thought I’d pop in here long enough to thank the people who have been writing me articles for my birthday.

Edge (you should check it out if you never have) has a discussion of Nick Carr’s Atlantic article, “Is Google Making Us Stupid: What The Internet is doing to Our Brains.” The discussion features W. Daniel Hillis, Kevin Kelly, George Dyson, yours truly, and probably more will be arriving in the next few days.

OK, so there was a call for papers on PhilUpdates, a philosophy announcement list. It seems Robert Arp is compiling a volume on the pressing topic of The Onion and Philosophy. This wouldn’t be particularly notable except that it called my attention to this classic article in The Onion: “Guy In Philosophy Class Needs To Shut The F— Up” (they solicit articles about the article; yep they really do):

HANOVER, NH—According to students enrolled in professor Michael Rosenthal’s Philosophy 101 course at Dartmouth College, that guy, Darrin Floen, the one who sits at the back of the class and acts like he’s Aristotle, seriously needs to shut the f— up.

His fellow students describe Floen’s frequent comments as eager, interested, and incredibly annoying.

“He thinks he knows about philosophy,” freshman Duane Herring said. “But I hate his voice, and I hate the way he only half raises his hand, like he’s so laid back. We’re discussing ethics in a couple weeks, but I don’t know if I can wait that long before deciding if it’s morally wrong to pound his face in.”

“Today he was going on and on about how Plato’s cave shadows themselves represent the ideal foundation of Western philosophical thought,” said freshman Julia Wald moments after class let out Monday. “I have no idea what Plato’s ideal reality is, but I bet it doesn’t include know-it-all little shits.”

…

The outspoken student has not gone unremarked by the course’s professor.

“Mr. Floen is a valuable contributor to our in-class discussions,” Rosenthal said. “His tendency to question and challenge everything before him captures the very essence of philosophy itself.”

Rosenthal added: “Having said that, I do wish he would occasionally do me the valued service of shutting his damn cake hole.”

Actually I think I would enjoy writing that commentary for The Onion and Philosophy. Maybe — just maybe — because I once was that guy. No snide comments from the peanut gallery there!