Jaron Lanier's Virtual Reality

There is now a well-established class of writers about the digital world whom I fondly dub the Old Curmudgeons. Basically, they agree, things there are getting worse all the time; this modern online nonsense is bad for us, and will give us all fallen arches or something. Leading exponents of this view include Nicholas Carr, Andrew Keen and Jaron Lanier.

I think Mr Lanier is the most interesting of these, because he has a solid technical background and has been creative in the digital sphere a long time. That makes his Savonarola-like denunciations of the same particularly striking.

Against that background, it was perhaps inevitable that he would weigh in on the Wikileaks business – and equally inevitable what his line would be, as his title makes clear: “The Hazards of Nerd Supremacy: The Case of WikiLeaks”.

If I had several hours to spare, I might try to go through it addressing his various arguments, many of which amount to unsubtantiated assertions about “The ideology that drives a lot of the online world”; ad-hominem sniping (for example, “we didn't necessarily get to know where Mr. Assange was at a given moment” - maybe because he is doing things a lot of governments and organisations don't like, and so discretion is the better part of valour); outright misapprehension (“Wikileaks isn't really a "wiki," but it is designed to look and feel like the Wikipedia” - er, well, no actually, it doesn't look like it in the slightest); and various straw men: “What if we come to be able to read each other's thoughts? Then there would be no thoughts. Your head has to be different from mine if you are to be a person with something to say to me” - as far as I am aware, nobody is calling for mandatory telepathy.

But I'd rather examine Lanier's peroration, because I think it exposes the fundamental flaw in his indubitably entertaining essay:

Anarchy and dictatorship are entwined in eternal resonance. One never exists for long without turning to the other, and then back again. The only way out is structure, also known as democracy.

We sanction secretive spheres in order to have our civilian sphere. We furthermore structure democracy so that the secretive spheres are contained and accountable to the civilian sphere, though that's not easy.

There is certainly an ever-present danger of betrayal. Too much power can accrue to those we have sanctioned to hold confidences, and thus we find that keeping a democracy alive is hard, imperfect, and infuriating work.

The flip side of responsibly held secrets, however, is trust. A perfectly open world, without secrets, would be a world without the need for trust, and therefore a world without trust. What a sad sterile place that would be:A perfect world for machines.

What the Wikileaks cables show is precisely that those sanctioned “secretive spheres” are not currently accountable to the civilian sphere. They show all the shady deals made in backrooms, the outright lies told to the public to keep us quiet, the connivance with big business to ensure that profit comes before ethics.

Lanier's logic seems to be that everything's fine and the revelations of Wikileaks will only mess things up. And until Wikileaks' revelations, people might have gone along with that analysis, since that was the story that governments were feeding us. But in the wake of Wikileaks, that is simply not a tenable position: as the words of diplomats delineate time and again, everything is not fine, and the social pact of accepting those “secretive spheres” in return for a responsible use of the advantage they bring has been broken.

I would love it to be the case that Lanier's analysis were true, and in some scaled-up, digitised version of Athenian democracy we could have a responsible wielding of state powers, with secrecy applied wisely and justly. But Wikileaks has confirmed what many have suspected, but hitherto been unable to prove: that politicians use secrecy to hide their continual and continuing breaches of the trust we placed in them.

Until they change in the light of what Wikileaks is showing, we cannot trust them as we did before. And the more they – and their defenders, however well intentioned – deny the situation revealed by their own words through Wikileaks, and try to stop us seeing it, by hook or by crook, the longer that is likely to take, and the messier it will be.

And given that proven record of abuse, when they do finally change we will need more transparency about what they are doing – but not *total* transparency, which is neither feasible nor necessary – to make sure that they are not falling back into their bad old ways under the convenient, comforting cover of secrecy.

Follow me @glynmoody on Twitter or identi.ca.

The Sheer Ordinariness of Craig Newmark

I've written before about the excellent writing of Mark Pesce. He's at it again with a piece entitled "That Business Conversation". Although there's nothing hugely new there, it's well worth reading. I particularly liked the following section:

At one of the first of those meetings I met a man who impressed me by his sheer ordinariness. He was an accountant, and although he was enthusiastic about the possibilities of VR, he wasn’t working in the field – he was simply interested in it. Still, Craig Newmark was pleasant enough, and we’d always engage in a few lines of conversation at every meeting, although I can’t remember any of these conversations very distinctly.

Newmark met a lot of people – he was an excellent networker – and fairly quickly built up a nice list of email addresses for his contacts, whom he kept in contact with through a mailing list. This list, known as “Craig’s List”, because a de facto bulletin board for the core web and VR communities in San Francisco. People would share information about events in town, or observations, or – more frequently – they’d offer up something for sale, like a used car or a futon or an old telly.

As more people in San Francisco were sucked into the growing set of businesses which were making money from the Web, they too started reading Craig’s List, and started contributing to it. By the middle of 1995, there was too much content to be handled neatly in a mailing list, so Newmark – who, like nearly everyone else in the San Francisco Web community, had some basic web authoring skills – created a very simple web site which allowed people to post their own listings to the Web site. Newmark offered this service freely – his way of saying “thank you” to the community, and, equally important, his way of reinforcing all of the social relationships he’d built up in the last few years.

The rest, of course, is history.

Real Knowledge of Virtual Worlds

If anyone has the right to pontificate about virtual worlds, it's Howard Rheingold. Fifteen years ago, Rheingold wrote Virtual Reality: The Revolutionary Technology of Computer-Generated Artificial Worlds - and How It Promises to Transform Society. We're still waiting, of course, but that only makes his historical perpective on things even more valuable:

Some things about online social behavior seems to be eternal and universal--trolls and griefers and the eternal meta-debate about what to do about them, for example. There's a widespread amnesia, as if these kinds of cybersocializing were new. Not many people online have much sense of history. That's probably true of just about everything. What I really like is that it's so easy to roll your own these days. It used to be a big deal to set up your own chat or BBS or listserv. Now it's part of the tool set for millions of people, and it's mostly free.

Enter the Metaverse/Matrix/Neuronet

An eagle-eyed Mark Wallace spotted the International Association of Virtual Reality Technologies (IAVRT), a new Web site/organisation, with its intriguing - and possibly redundant - Neuronet:

IAVRT is working with its VR member peers and the global community to create and govern a new real-time virtual reality network, separate and distinct from the Internet, which will be called the Neuronet. The Neuronet will be designed from the ground up as the world's first - and only - network designed specifically for the transmission of virtual reality and next generation gaming data. The Neuronet will organize the virtual reality world and ensure its safety, reliability, and functionality.

The purpose of the Neurornet will be to facilitate cinematic and immersive virtual reality experiences across distances. These will include almost every type of experience imaginable with some of the most obvious being real-time video chat, video streaming, virtual reality travel, history, adventure, gaming, entertainment, sports, hobbies, business, education, medicine and training to name just a few.

The Neuronet will function similarly to the Internet in its ability connect users in different locations, but instead of the user interface mechanisms associated with the Internet, it will use Virtual reality (VR) technologies to facilitate cinematic and immersive virtual reality experiences for end-users.