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a fascinating analysis reveals that for the keyword-blocking aspects of the Chinese firewall, there is a simple workaround where you can just ignore its effects. This doesn't get around the sites which are blocked, but as the report points out, those are relatively costly to maintain accurate lists of. Regardless, score one for the hackers.
Edge.org is running an article by Jaron Lanier on the current drive towards meta-content and collective-rule on the Internet (think Wikipedia, BoingBoing, Digg, etc.), and some responses from leaders of "The Collective".
A core belief of the wiki world is that whatever problems exist in the wiki will be incrementally corrected as the process unfolds. This is analogous to the claims of Hyper-Libertarians who put infinite faith in a free market, or the Hyper-Lefties who are somehow able to sit through consensus decision-making processes.
What we are witnessing today is the alarming rise of the fallacy of the infallible collective. Numerous elite organizations have been swept off their feet by the idea. They are inspired by the rise of the Wikipedia, by the wealth of Google, and by the rush of entrepreneurs to be the most Meta. Government agencies, top corporate planning departments, and major universities have all gotten the bug.
What I've seen is a loss of insight and subtlety, a disregard for the nuances of considered opinions, and an increased tendency to enshrine the official or normative beliefs of an organization. Why isn't everyone screaming about the recent epidemic of inappropriate uses of the collective? It seems to me the reason is that bad old ideas look confusingly fresh when they are packaged as technology.
There's a trade-off that we've not yet dealt with as a society; with the networked world, we have massive flows of data sitting in front of us on a daily basis. Multiple sources of 24 hours news feeds on the TV, via RSS, in newspapers, radio, and original (media-based) websites. We have emails and press releases, journal entries by our friends, IM conversations, online essays, email listservs and virtual communities which we keep up with. It's data overload. So the current pushback is the Google, BoingBoing and Wikipedia collective approach; we trade the diversity of voices talking at us for trust in these sites to distill the information into more manageable channels. so instead of surfing the net and news for amusing oddities and cyber-libertarian chatter for 3 hours a day, I read BoingBoing. Instead of reading news articles from the Post, Times, or watching CNN, I'll check Google's news page for articles I'm interested in (and fine, I'll admit to reading the BBC World newsfeed). Instead of sifting through Google search results for a piece of factual information, I'll check out Wikipedia.
What I suppopse is troubling is that we've always filtered information this way; I challenge anyone to argue that new agencies don't filter what stories they print (though I'd like to think that at some golden age in the past it wasn't as partisan). I trust Google to implement their filtering programmatically and reasonably fairly. Wikipedia is less trustworthy, particularly on touchy subjects, but the tradeoff there is that Wikipedia is likely to have almost instantaneously updated information, whereas Brittanica simply can't.
I echo some of the other critiques by saying that his argument doesn't scale out very well. Is Open Source also blind trust in the collective intelligence? It would seem that, for the most popular and mission-critical OSS projects, they provide more stable and powerful solutions than their closed-source competitors.
I think there's definitely some worry in placing too much trust in the Collective/Hive Mind -- but one need look no further than his discussion page on wikipedia, where there's a short debate on what should and should not be part of his bio, or the semi-democratic deletion attempt made on the bio of Henry Farrell, a political scientist who studies IT and privacy issues at GWU. There are very definite conflicting personalities under the hood of Wikipedia, the monolithic collective movement of its articles is just a pleasant facade.
Also, and this I think is the root of the matter, I have problems taking cheek about digital collective maoism from a white guy with dreads.
Russia's copyright law is different from ours. I imagine there's lots of differences in lots of laws, some of which may be distasteful or just odd to anyone but Russian citizens. This is part of being a sovereign nation, with a different set of institutions and a distinct history, you develop laws according to what you need in your society.'
But America is threatening to quash Russia's joining the WTO due to AllOfMP3.com, an iTunes-like mp3 selling site that takes advantage of certain oddities in Russia's copyright law that enables the legal licensing of media that has not been "released" by its original holder. This means that you can buy Beatles MP3s off of AllOf, but not iTunes, as the copyright holders refuse to allow iTunes to sell digital copies.
Now, folks, if they join the WTO, they become bound by the TRIPS agreement, which would probably close the loophole that allows this. Further, they'd be within a governance stucture where formal complaints could be lodged, with enforcable outcomes. (Whether that's a good thing or a really bad thing is a whole different topic) Shutting Russia out of the WTO for something so trivial just reveals how much power the media industry wields over here, but worse, it's self-defeating.
Now, consider the fact that the US Copyright office has recently quintupled their records-search fees and added a $100 fee for estimating what your cost will be to find records and possibly get copyrighted material that's been orhpaned/abandoned or expired legally release to public domain.
There was a lesson to be learned with iTunes, which is that if you lower the barriers, you increase legal usage -- dramatically. Putting power in the hands of consumers at reasonable costs creates whole new industries (just ponder the VHS revolution!). But it seems that no matter how many times this lesson gets taught, our fine government and the media industry keep wanting to make it more difficult and expensive to act legally, without providing any incentive for jumping through these extra hoops (indeed, often making the end result more restrictive!).
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