Jaron Lanier (un aspirante a da Vinci de la era digital, pionero de la teleinmersión y la realidad virtual) no tiene buena opinión del modo de funcionamiento colectivista que está de moda en la Red: la Wikipedia, los blogs populares que se someten al gusto del colectivo, los agregadores de información basados en el gusto de la masa (digg, popurls), las creaciones colectivas por consenso en las que se pierde el matiz de lo personal, la creatividad, la opinión, el criterio individual.
Alerta sobre el peligro que conlleva para la sociedad confiar en la inteligencia colectiva emanada de la mente de la colmena (hive mind), peligro de atontamiento, conformismo, llegando a comparar incluso el resultado de esta tendencia con los totalitarismos del pasado siglo.
Aboga por la canalización de la actividad del colectivo (otros dirían el pastoreo) por medio de individuos inteligentes con criterio propio, ataca la uniformización y medianía que conlleva el consenso,... Interesante lectura.
Concluye así su ensayo:
"Some wikitopians explicitly hope to see education subsumed by wikis. It is at least possible that in the fairly near future enough communication and education will take place through anonymous Internet aggregation that we could become vulnerable to a sudden dangerous empowering of the hive mind. History has shown us again and again that a hive mind is a cruel idiot when it runs on autopilot. Nasty hive mind outbursts have been flavored Maoist, Fascist, and religious, and these are only a small sampling. I don't see why there couldn't be future social disasters that appear suddenly under the cover of technological utopianism. If wikis are to gain any more influence they ought to be improved by mechanisms like the ones that have worked tolerably well in the pre-Internet world.
The hive mind should be thought of as a tool. Empowering the collective does not empower individuals — just the reverse is true. There can be useful feedback loops set up between individuals and the hive mind, but the hive mind is too chaotic to be fed back into itself.
These are just a few ideas about how to train a potentially dangerous collective and not let it get out of the yard. When there's a problem, you want it to bark but not bite you.
The illusion that what we already have is close to good enough, or that it is alive and will fix itself, is the most dangerous illusion of all. By avoiding that nonsense, it ought to be possible to find a humanistic and practical way to maximize value of the collective on the Web without turning ourselves into idiots. The best guiding principle is to always cherish individuals first."
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