04-25-18

An Internet Pioneer™ on why & how we now live in a digital hell  (American Conservative)
"[Jaron] Lanier has some unnerving remarks about what he calls 'Digital Maoism,' which is the idea that everybody is going to be empowered by the Internet, but what ends up happening is that only a few people get power, and all the meanness of people is set loose on each other, on the Internet. He says that Internet utopians only thought about the good things that the Internet and social media could do, and didn’t think about the terrible things — like, for example, how there is an equal and opposite reaction to every positive social movement facilitated by the Internet. In fact, Lanier believes that the Internet ends up causing net damage."