Digital Maoism
"Digital Maoism: The Hazards of the New Online Collectivism" is an essay, by Jaron Lanier, originally published in Edge – the third culture. Essay In his online essay, in Edge magazine in May 2006, Lanier criticized the sometimes-claimed omniscience of collective wisdom (including examples such as the Wikipedia article about himself), describing it as "digital Maoism". He writes "If we start to believe that the Internet itself is an entity that has something to say, we're devaluing those people [creating the content] and making ourselves into idiots." His criticism aims at several targets which concern him and are at different levels of abstraction: any attempt to create one final authoritative bottleneck which channels the knowledge onto society is wrong, regardless whether it is a Wikipedia or any algorithmically created system producing meta information, sterile style of wiki writing is undesirable because: it removes the touch with the real author of original information, it filters the subtlety of his opinions, essential information (for example, the graphical context of original sources) is lost, it creates the false sense of authority behind the information, collective authorship tends to produce or align to mainstream or organizational beliefs, he worries that collectively created works may