I'm tempted to feel a little sympathy for Jaron Lanier. He certainly doesn't invite the emotion, and I doubt he needs it, but nonetheless. He's gotten old. And there but for the grace of god go we. Clearly a very intelligent man once on the cusp of the greatest cultural wave anyone has ever imagined, he's gotten his dividends (Microsoft, Google and Second Life?). Yet the Internet never lived up to his young man's ideals. Perhaps given the nature of the companies he's ended up working for neither did he.
He's not truly saying a lot here, simply that the system doesn't quite work (true, so far). It's his pretence of a solution which irks me. Affordable. What is affordable but an attempt to convince someone to buy? One surfer's affordable is another's months pay, and there's no simple way around that other than what we have already. Community.
Yes, creator's deserve results. Profit, even. Without a doubt. And community can give those results, look after it's own. But all I see in Lanier is someone trying to sell Second Life, which has little to nothing to do with the utopian society of the web some of us yearn for so dearly. Don't mess with utopia, Jaron. Hopefully, it's capable of messing back.
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