L MAO

[sabotabby]

Apparently, we're all a bunch of Maoists. Digital Maoists. According to Some Guy, subsuming one's identity into an electronically aggregated mass is akin to Mao's China.

Go read this article. It's sillier than all those people claiming that the interwebs would bring us grassroots democracy and maybe ANARCHY. It's wonderful because it combines so many of my interests—crypto-Maoism, old media-types who fear and mistrust teh intarwebs, and a prime opportunity for Boomer*-bashing—all in less than 500 words. Some choice bits:

Now Lanier has taken on another role: dyspeptic critic of the surging trend of digital collectivism, an ethic that celebrates and exploits the ability of the Web to aggregate the preferences and behaviors of millions of people.

Yes, the intarwebs are just one big collective. We will add your biological and technological distinctiveness to our own. That's why everyone on the internet now likes furry pr0n.

IM IN UR INTERNETZ

COLLECTIVIZIN UR TUBEZ

In a recent essay posted on the Web site Edge.org, Lanier disparages the recent spate of efforts that rely on conscious collaboration (like the anyone-can-participate online reference work Wikipedia) or passive polling (the so-called meta sites like Digg, which draw on user response to rank news articles and blog postings). To Lanier these represent a rejection of individual expression and creativity.

If you collaborate with other people in a cooperative manner, the terrorists communists win! He's also against open-source software, if you were wondering.

But my favourite bit is this:

If you look at the history of youth cultural movements, they tend to go one of two ways," he explains. "One is in the direction of individual expression and creativity; the best example is the '60s. The other way is to lose themselves in the collective, binding themselves into a gang—as in the Cultural Revolution.

My generation's mindless trend-following is better than your generation's! Because we smoked marijuana! And grew our hair long! We were such rebels. Our generation changed the world forever, which is why it was back to lock-step conformity once we all sold out, bought SUVs, and those annoying Gen Xers came along with their world-weary cynicism and OMG short hair.

Hat-tip to rohmie, who knew this would make my day.

* No, I don't mean you.