Free You are not a Gadget: A Manifesto by Jaron Lanier

to be harnessed.
    Certainly there is broad agreement that there are huge numbers of people who are undereducated. Of those who are well educated, many are underemployed. If we want to talk about unmet human potential, we might also mention the huge number of people who are desperately poor. The waste of human potential is overwhelming. But these are not the problems that Shirky is talking about.
    What he means is that quantity can overwhelm quality in human expression. Here’s a quote, from a speech Shirky gave in April 2008:
    And this is the other thing about the size of the cognitive surplus we’re talking about. It’s so large that even a small change could have huge ramifications. Let’s say that everything stays 99 percent the same, that people watch 99 percent as much television as they used to, but 1 percent of that is carved out for producing and for sharing. The Internet-connected population watches roughly a trillion hours of TV a year … One percent of that is 98 Wikipedia projects per year worth of participation
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    So how many seconds of salvaged erstwhile television time would need to be harnessed to replicate the achievements of, say, AlbertEinstein? It seems to me that even if we could network all the potential aliens in the galaxy—quadrillions of them, perhaps—and get each of them to contribute some seconds to a physics wiki, we would not replicate the achievements of even one mediocre physicist, much less a great one.
Absent Intellectual Modesty
    There are at least two ways to believe in the idea of quality. You can believe there’s something ineffable going on within the human mind, or you can believe we just don’t understand what quality in a mind is yet, even though we might someday. Either of those opinions allows one to distinguish quantity and quality. In order to confuse quantity and quality, you have to reject both possibilities.
    The mere possibility of there being something ineffable about personhood is what drives many technologists to reject the notion of quality. They want to live in an airtight reality that resembles an idealized computer program, in which everything is understood and there are no fundamental mysteries. They recoil from even the hint of a potential zone of mystery or an unresolved seam in one’s worldview.
    This desire for absolute order usually leads to tears in human affairs, so there is a historical reason to distrust it. Materialist extremists have long seemed determined to win a race with religious fanatics: Who can do the most damage to the most people?
    At any rate, there is no evidence that quantity becomes quality in matters of human expression or achievement. What matters instead, I believe, is a sense of focus, a mind in effective concentration, and an adventurous individual imagination that is distinct from the crowd.
    Of course, I can’t describe what it is that a mind does, because no one can. We don’t understand how brains work. We understand a lot about how parts of brains work, but there are fundamental questions that have not even been fully articulated yet, much less answered.
    For instance, how does reason work? How does meaning work? The usual ideas currently in play are variations on the notion that pseudo-Darwinian selection goes on within the brain. The brain tries out different thought patterns, and the ones that work best are reinforced. That’s awfully vague. But there’s no reason that Darwinian evolution could nothave given rise to processes within the human brain that jumped out of the Darwinian progression. While the physical brain is a product of evolution as we are coming to understand it, the cultural brain might be a way of transforming the evolved brain according to principles that cannot be explained in evolutionary terms.
    Another way to put this is that there might be some form of creativity other than selection. I certainly don’t know, but it seems pointless to insist that what we already understand must suffice to