Yorick Wilks

As a professional technophile, I have always dismissed outbursts of anti-technology feeling as agreeably retro but harmless, like the effusions of those who still write real letters on paper and tell us all so. I have begun to question my stance only recently when thinking a little about Jared Lanier’s new book “You are not a gadget”. He cannot be dismissed as a grumpy who has never known the inner joys of modern computing: he is a virtual reality man himself.

His fear is a very old one: the mob. In his words: “I wonder if some aspect of human nature evolved in the context of competing packs. We might be genetically wired to be vulnerable to the lure of the mob.” The mob is an old political player, especially in British politics where it traditionally functioned as a substitute for anything like a real revolution. In 1768, John Wilkes—to whom we owe many of our liberties—– was in the Kings Bench prison while the mob surrounded it for days, demanding his release. Wilkes was a great orchestrator of the mob, which would stone judges’ houses till he was released yet again to continue his campaigns. The mob is not only a negative phenomenon in politics therefore, but what it always does is to terrify authorities that it might “get out of hand”.

In the classic Marxist analysis of the Reformation, the hero is not Luther but Muenzer, who stirred up mobs against rulers to a point where Luther, terrified of what reform had unleashed, said that princes were right to massacre the rioters, thus exposing himself, so the analysis went, as no more than a tool of the ruling class. Lanier is suggesting that some aspects of the internet are bringing back a new form of the mob, not in the streets but in cyberspace, hounding and destroying not only authorities but helpless individuals against whom they arbitrarily gang up.

I saw something of what he meant in the recent UK case of the junior school headmistress who sent her school’s pet lamb to a butchers and had it brought back to serve as food, all so as to teach the children the realities behind their everyday meals. Her action was backed by the school governors, the parents, and even enough of the children, but a world-wide campaign of hate email and blogging was let loose on her, and she gave up her job to the school’s distress and loss. It all seems absurd and hateful but will be no surprise to anyone who has observed a chatroom and the way in which they routinely degenerate into obscentity and hatred, all anonymous of course. I have only anecdotal evidence but I am sure the percentage of postings removed by moderators from the major newspaper blogs following opinion articles is rising.

Lanier is pointing to a real phenomenon: not just our newly discovered “wisdom of crowds” —-itself a rediscovery of the marxist’s positive sponteneity of the masses —-but also their madness, a concept long known to Adorno, Le Bon (“The Crowd”) and Canetti (“Crowds and Power”). Lanier is thus in a great tradition when he writes: “It’s amazing that details in the design of online software can bring out such varied potentials in human behavior. It’s time to think about that power on a moral basis”. Perhaps his originality is just that he is the first of the technorati to say it.