Howard Rheingold's hilarious yet serious response to Jaron Lanier's Digital Maoism:

Collective Action is not Collectivism

I'm not going to get into a critique of Jaron Lanier's Digital Maoism -- indeed, I agree that new notions about collective intelligence and peer production should be viewed critically and not embraced in a spirit of magical thinking -- but I find it strange that someone as educated as Jaron should fall into the same simple fallacy the Cato Institute fell for: collective action is not the same as collectivism. Commons-based peer production in Wikipedia, open source software, open source biology, prediction markets is collective action, not collectivism. Collective action involves freely chosen self-election (which is almost always coincident with self-interest) and distributed coordination; collectivism involves coercion and centralized control; treating the Internet as a commons doesn't mean it is communist (tell that to Bezos, Yang, Filo, Brin or Page, to name just a few billionaires who managed to scrape together private property from the Internet commons). Hello? Can anybody spot the differences?

Lanier's problem is all summed up in the last line of his article: "The best guiding principle is to always cherish individuals first." The tension between the individual and the group is not something that can be permanently decided by an ad hoc moral decision that outputs a static rule to be applied in perpetuity. Rather, achieving a successful balance between individual and collective needs is an ongoing process (largely addressed by social and political theory). Frankly, I've gotten used to expecting this attitude ever since Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates described free culture advocates as a "modern-day sort of communists." Oddly enough, I actually think a lot of collective activity that is currently evolving is collectivist, but only if you stretch the meaning to include things like basic cooperation. Self-election and distributed coordination are important and interesting but new technologies like wikipedia still rely on centralization and coercion. In wikipedia's case, there is centralized ownership of servers and DNS, and social coercion is used to marginalize some comments and legitimate others. Even p2p "commons" like BitTorrent use coercion built right into the tool itself: you have to upload more than you download (something Lawrence Lessig prophesied way back in his book Code but re: DRM). I agree with Howard that people conflate collective action (or phenomena) with collectivism, but we can have good or bad collectivism just as we can have good or bad liberal individualism or democracy. Moreover, even if overcoming collective action problems using cooperative technology is a new form of collectivism, my question would be "what's wrong with that?" Followup (6/20/2006): BoingBoing has even more responses....