Screaming Penguin

So I want to make a comment on some stuff I heard on the last (to me) podcast of Open Source. This episode featured three guys, two of whom I would call my personal heroes, and one of whom I read and respect. And I have to say, one of those heroes let me down. [please listen to the episode now] Now a lot of this fall into the category of what I like about "Open Source" as a show: you get a few smart, well intentioned people in a room and what they disagree about will be levels of semantics and degree, not fundamentals. However, Jaron Lanier -- literally a hero of mine since my teens -- completely went off the rails here. It isn't that I even disagree with him at a fundamental, narrowly defined level, as most of the program proceeds. Where I think he blew it was in categorizing David as "not getting it." There are a couple of factors as to why this is important. While I am perfectly willing to accept certain people as "not getting it" (seriously, search for 45 percent on the right), David is not one of those people. Where I think the disconnect comes in here is the distinction between the level that Jaron and his friends operate vs. the rest of the world. Jaron doesn't consider what goes on in a Wikipedia thread to be "conversation" because it doesn't even remotely map to the conversations he has with the intelligentsia and technorati he encounters. What I think he forgets, though, is that the average person in this country almost never actual participates in political, ideological or philosophical discourse at all. Even the relative rudimentary thrashings that go on in the (I have come to hate this word) blogosphere, or on Wikipedia represents a vast leap forward for our culture and our democracy in the aggregate, which was entirely Davids point. The worst part is, I feel, he fell into the Fox News trap and rather than argue his anecdotal experiences vs David's, he had to go on the attack and label David out of touch and not getting what was happening, which may be true in his circle, but I think that is a limited level relative to the rest of the world. Gibson said -- and this is a common quote on OS -- "The future is here, it just isn't evenly distributed yet." Lanier tries to make the arguement that he has seen the narrowly distributed future, but what he ends up doing is making an ad hominem attack. It is actually funny, because I got quoted recently on Boing Boing making a not dissimilar argument against one of the Open Source producers. Honestly, in retrospect, I think the tone of my comments was a bit too harsh. However, I think there is a significant distinction between making an argument about historical trends and axiomatic wisdom and arguing that "I can see the future better than you." Though I am open to correction here.