{"id":621,"date":"2006-12-11T11:14:31","date_gmt":"2006-12-11T18:14:31","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/wp\/?p=621"},"modified":"2006-12-11T11:14:31","modified_gmt":"2006-12-11T18:14:31","slug":"thinking_outsid","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/?p=621","title":{"rendered":"Thinking outside the hive"},"content":{"rendered":"

The New York Times Magazine yesterday ran its annual survey of the four zillion most interesting ideas to emerge in the past year. One of the ideas that made the cut was Jaron Lanier’s characterization<\/a> of the collectivist ideology of one of the main sects of the digital intelligentsia as “Digital Maoism.” Steven Johnson does a nice job of summing up<\/a> Lanier’s argument and the reactions to it. He points out, for one thing, that some of the most often cited examples of the New Collectivism lack a certain, well, collectivism: “Wikipedia may be not too far from the historical reality of Maoism itself: a system propagandized with the language of collectivism that was, in practice, actually run by a small power elite.” And he ends by putting the so-called hive mind in perspective: “A swarm of connected human minds is a fantastic resource for tracking down software bugs or discovering obscure gems on the Web. But if you want to come up with a good idea, or a sophisticated argument, or a work of art, you\u2019re still better off going solo.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The New York Times Magazine yesterday ran its annual survey of the four zillion most interesting ideas to emerge in the past year. One of the ideas that made the cut was Jaron Lanier’s characterization of the collectivist ideology of one of the main sects of the digital intelligentsia as “Digital Maoism.” Steven Johnson does […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-621","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/621","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=621"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/621\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=621"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=621"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=621"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}