READINGS
[Manifesto] have had the experience of Microsoft Word sud-
THE SERFDOM
OF CROWDS
By Jaron Lanier, from You Are Not a Gadget,
published in January by Knopf. Lanier, a com-
puter scientist, popularized the term “virtual real-
ity.” His “Moving Beyond Muzak” was published
in the March 1998 issue of Harper’s Magazine.
T he central faith embedded in Web tech-
nologies whereby users not only consume in-
formation but widely generate it is the idea
that the Internet as a whole is coming alive
and turning into a superhuman creature. The
designs guided by this perverse kind of faith
leave people in the shadows. Computers will
soon get so big and fast, and the Internet so
rich with information, that people will be ob-
solete, either left behind like the characters in
Rapture novels or subsumed into some cyber-
superhuman something. Silicon Valley culture
has taken to enshrining this vague idea and
spreading it the only way technologists can: in
the design of software.
If you believe the distinction between the roles
of people and of computers is starting to dissolve,
you might express that—as some friends of mine
at Microsoft once did—by designing features for
a word processor that are supposed to know what
you want—for example, when you want to start
an outline within your document. You might
February ReadingsFinal2 Rev2.indd 15
denly determining, at the wrong moment, that
you are creating an indented outline. The real
function of this feature isn’t to make life easier
for you. Instead, it promotes a new philosophy:
that the computer is evolving into a life-form that
can understand people better than people can
understand themselves. If you believe this, then
working for the benefit of the computing cloud
over that of the individual puts you on the side
of the angels.
People degrade themselves all the time in
order to make machines seem smart. Before
the 2008 stock-market crash, bankers believed
in supposedly intelligent algorithms that
could calculate credit risks before the bank
makes bad loans; we ask teachers to teach to
standardized tests so a student will look good
to an algorithm. We have repeatedly demon-
strated our species’s bottomless ability to low-
er our standards to make information tech-
nology good, but every manifestation of
intelligence in a machine is ambiguous. The
same ambiguity that motivated dubious aca-
demic artificial intelligence projects in the
past has been repackaged as mass culture. Did
that search engine really know what you
want, or are you playing along, lowering your
standards to make it seem clever? The frag-
ments of human effort that have flooded the
Internet are perceived by some to form a hive
mind or noosphere—terms used to describe
what is thought to be a new superintelligence.
A significant number of AI enthusiasts, after
a protracted period of failed experiments in
READINGS 15
12/21/09 6:02:00 PM
 tasks like understanding natural language,
eventually found consolation in the hive
mind, which yields better results because
there are real people behind the curtain.
Wikipedia, for instance, works through
what I call the “oracle illusion,” in which
knowledge of the human authorship of a text
is suppressed in order to give the text super-
human validity.
From an engineering point of view, the dif-
ference between a social-networking site and
the Web as it existed before such sites is a
small detail. You could always create a list of
links to your friends on your website, and you
could always send emails to a circle of friends
announcing whatever you cared to. All the
social-networking services offer is a prod to
use the Web in a particular way, according to
a particular philosophy. If you read something
written by someone who used the term
“single” in a custom-composed, unique sen-
tence, you will inevitably get a first whiff of
the subtle experience of the author, something
you would not get from a multiple-choice da-
tabase. The benefits of semi-automated self-
presentation are illusory. Enlightened design-
ers leave open the possibility of metaphysical
specialness either in humans or in the poten-
tial for unforeseen creative processes that we
can’t yet capture in software systems. That
kind of modesty is the signature quality of be-
ing human-centered.
An individual who is receiving a flow of re-
ports about the romantic status of a group of
friends must learn to think in terms of the
flow if it is to be perceived as worth reading at
all. Am I accusing all those hundreds of mil-
lions of users of social-networking sites of re-
ducing themselves in order to be able to use
the services? Well, yes, I am. I know quite a
few people, most of them young adults, who
are proud to say that they have accumulated
thousands of friends on Facebook. Obviously,
their statements can be true only if
the idea of friendship is diminished.
T he wave of financial calamities that took
place in 2008 was cloud-based. No one in the
pre–digital-cloud era had the mental capacity
to lie to himself in the way we routinely are
able to now. The limitations of organic hu-
man memory and calculation put a cap on the
intricacies of self-delusion. In finance, the rise
of computer-assisted hedge funds and similar
operations has turned capitalism into a search
engine. You tend the engine in the comput-
ing cloud, and it searches for money. In the
past, an investor had to be able to understand
at least something about what an investment
would actually accomplish. No longer. There
16 HARPER’S MAGAZINE / FEBRUARY 2010
February ReadingsFinal2.indd 16
are now so many layers of abstraction between
the elite investor and actual events that he no
longer has any concept of what is actually be-
ing done as a result of his investments.
True believers in the hive mind seem to
think that no number of layers of abstraction
in a financial system can dull the system’s effi-
cacy. The crowd works for free, and statistical
algorithms supposedly take the risk out of
making bets if you are a lord of the cloud. But
who is that lord who owns the cloud that
connects the crowd? Not just anybody. A
lucky few (for luck is all that can possibly
be involved) will ow n it. Entitlement
has achieved its singularity and
become infinite.
T he Facebook Kid and the Cloud Lord are
serf and king of the new order. In each case,
human creativity and understanding, especial-
ly one’s own creativity and understanding, are
treated as worthless. Instead, one trusts in the
crowd, in the algorithms that remove the risks
of creativity in ways too sophisticated for any
mere person to understand. A hedge-fund
manager might make money by using the com-
putational power of the cloud to create fantas-
tical financial instruments that make bets on
derivatives in such a way as to invent the pho-
ny virtual collateral for stupendous risks. This
is a subtle form of counterfeiting, and it is pre-
cisely the same maneuver a socially competi-
tive teenager makes in accumulating fantasti-
cal numbers of “friends” through a service like
Facebook. But let’s suppose you disagree that
the idea of friendship is being reduced. Even
then one must remember that the customers
of social networks are not the members of
those networks. The real customer is the ad-
vertiser of the future, but this creature has yet
to appear in any significant way. The whole
artifice, the whole idea of fake friendship, is
just bait laid by the cloud lords to lure hypo-
thetical advertisers —we might call them
messianic advertisers —who could someday
show up.
The hope of a thousand Silicon Valley start-
ups is that firms like Facebook are capturing
extremely valuable information called the “so-
cial graph.” Using this information, an adver-
tiser might be able to target all the members of
a peer group just as they are forming their hab-
its, opinions about brands, and so on. Peer pres-
sure is the great power behind adolescent be-
havior, goes the reasoning, and adolescent
choices become life choices. So if someone
could crack the mystery of how to make perfect
ads using the social graph, an advertiser would
be able to design peer-pressure biases in a popu-
lation of real people who would then be primed
12/16/09 12:34:17 PM
 COURTESY THE ARTIST AND FREY NORRIS GALLERY, SAN FRANCISCO
Lecture on Prolonging the Interim, a watercolor with collage by Mary Anne Kluth, whose work was on exhibit last fall at Frey Norris Gallery, in
San Francisco.
to buy whatever the advertiser is selling for
their whole lives.
The situation with social networks is lay-
ered with multiple absurdities. The advertis-
ing idea hasn’t made any money so far, be-
cause ad dollars appear to be better spent on
search-specific placements and on relevant
Web pages. If the revenue never appears, then
a weird imposition of a database-as-reality
ideology will have colored generations of teen
peer group and romantic experiences for no
business or other purpose. If, on the other
hand, the revenue does appear, evidence sug-
gests that its impact will be negative. When
Facebook has attempted to turn the social
graph into a profit center in the past, it has
created ethical disasters. A famous example
was 2007’s Beacon. This was a suddenly im-
posed feature that was hard to opt out of.
When a Facebook user made an online pur-
chase from a variety of participating retailers,
the event was broadcast to his friends. The
February ReadingsFinal2.indd 17
motivation was to find a way to package peer
pressure as a service that could be sold to ad-
vertisers. But it meant that, for example, there
was no longer a way to buy a surprise birthday
present. The commercial lives of Facebook
users were no longer their own.
Personal reductionism has always been pres-
ent in information systems. You have to declare
your status in reductive ways when you file a
tax return. Most people are aware of the differ-
ence between reality and database entries when
they file taxes, yet you perform the same kind
of self-reduction in order to create a profile on a
social-networking site. You fill in the data: pro-
fession, relationship status, and location. In this
case digital reduction becomes a causal ele-
ment, mediating between new friends with
whom most information is exchanged online.
That is new.
It might at first seem that the experience of
youth is now sharply divided between the old
world of school and parents and the new world of
READINGS 17
12/17/09 2:11:59 PM
 social networking on the
Internet, but actually school
now belongs on the new
side of the ledger. Education [Poem]
has gone through a parallel
transformation, and for THEIR FACES SHALL
similar reasons. Information
systems need to have infor-
BE AS FLAMES
mation in order to run, but
information underrepre- By G. C. Waldrep. Published in 2009 in the New England Review.
sents reality. Demand more
from information than it
That was the spring the bees disappeared, we didn’t know
can give and you end up
with monstrous designs. where they went, where they’d gone, where they were going, it was a
Under the No Child Left rapture of the bees, only the weak, the young, the freshly dead
Behind Act of 2002, for ex- left behind, a rapture of bees, my neighbor with the ducks had begun to walk
ample, U.S. teachers are like a duck, Follow follow follow Sam he sang as he walked, and they followed,
forced to choose between it was that simple, of course I thought of the Piper, although
teaching general knowledge this procession was more benign, my neighbor’s I mean, though he intended
and “teaching the test.” The to have each for dinner, eventually, and he did not name them,
best teachers are thereby as we don’t name bees, because we don’t see clearly enough
often disenfranchised by to distinguish them as persons, person in the grammatical sense, first second
the improper use of educa- or third, which is why we refer to them in the collective, usually,
tional-information systems. they breed, they swarm, they milk their honey for us
W hat computer i zed in the collective, and they vanish collectively, is this then the true
analysis of all the country’s rapture, was the one true God after all a god of bees, and now she is taking
school tests has done to them home, is this any more comforting than all the other proposed explanations,
education is exactly what
pesticide, fungus, mites, electromagnetism, even the infrasound the giant
Facebook has done to
friendships. In both cases, windmills make, that sends the bats and raptors
life is turned into a data- to their deaths, all invention gone awry, hive after hive
base. Both degradations suddenly empty, as if they’d all flown out less than purposefully, casually,
are based on the same and somehow forgotten to come back, held up at the doctor’s or the U-Haul
philosophical mistake, dealer’s, swarms of them, hundreds, thousands vagabond
which is the belief that in some other landscape, or rising, we shall meet them in the air,
computers can presently at the post office to mail a letter to a woman who might or might not be my love
represent human thought because a rate change had caught me with insufficient postage
or human relationships. I had to wait, the clerk was preoccupied with a sort of crate
These are things comput- made of wire mesh, through which I could see bees, Resistant the clerk said
ers cannot currently do. as she filled out the forms and sent them, registered parcel post, somewhere
Whether one expects com- else, only then did she sell me the stamp I needed,
puters to improve in the
future is a different issue.
In a less idealistic atmo-
sphere it would go without
saying that software should
be designed only to perform tasks that can be sphere. At the end of the rainbow of open cul-
successfully carried out at a given time. That is ture lies an eternal spring of advertisements.
not the atmosphere in which Internet software Advertising is elevated by open culture from
is designed, however. When technologists de- its previous role as an accelerant and placed at
ploy a computer model of something like learn- the center of the human universe. Advertising
ing or friendship in a way that has an effect on is now singled out as the only form of expres-
real lives, they are relying on faith. When they sion meriting genuine commercial protection
ask people to live their lives through their in the new world to come. Any other form of
models, they are potentially reducing expression is to be remashed, anonymized, and
life itself. decontextualized to the point of meaningless-

T here is, unfortunately, only one entity

that can maintain its value as everything else
is devalued under the banner of the noo-
ness. Ads, however, are to be made ever more
contextual, and the content of the ad is abso-
lutely sacrosanct. No one dares to mash up ads
served in the margins of their website by

18 HARPER’S MAGAZINE / FEBRUARY 2010

February ReadingsFinal2.indd 18 12/16/09 12:34:17 PM

 whitening of yellow teeth,
and the search for a lover.
All that paid persuasion
or thought I needed, or hoped to need (there is a season ought to be mooted. Every
when one hopes to need), and I thought about what it would be like penny Google earns sug-
to mail a crate of bees, Resistant, to my love, if I had a love, and have them gests a failure of the
vanish en route, the mesh crate arriving dusty, empty, one or two crowd—and Google is
broken, desiccated bodies rattling lightly around inside, like seeds in a gourd, earning a lot of pennies.
or like a child you’ll never have, that is, the possibility of that child, the rattling If you want to know
blood of it, a different sort of vanishing, we would all like to believe what’s really going on in a
in the act, that Houdini was a man, only a man, as he proved in the moment
society or ideology, follow
the money. If money is
and by the precise circumstance of his death, and the fact of his body,
flowing to advertising in-
lifeless but extant, rattling around the arcade, the park, the amusement pier
stead of to musicians, jour-
of disturbing coincidences, while in Missouri another hobbyist beekeeper nalists, and artists, then a
walks out to her tomblike hives on a spring morning society is more concerned
to find nothing there, just boxes, empty boxes, a sort of game with manipulation than
a child might invent, this rapture, same sort of funny story with truth or beauty. If
a child will invent, when shown a photograph, This is the policeman, content is worthless, then
and this is the woman with two heads, and this, which looks like a modest people will start to become
red house in a suburb, this is really the ghost of the bees, empty-headed and content-
a small ghost, a modest ghost, like the ghosts of the locusts and the elms, less. The combination of
not a ghost to trouble us, until (in the photograph) the house spreads its wings hive mind and advertising
and vanishes, as houses do, or as houses will when the rapture extends has resulted in a new kind
to architecture, the god of small houses having, first, existed, and then wed of social contract. The ba-
the bee god, so that we are left sleeping alone again, and out of doors, in spring, sic idea of this contract is
as one more source of sweetness is subtracted from this world
that authors, journalists,
musicians, and artists are
and added to another, perhaps, as we would like to think, one of the
encouraged to treat the
more comforting ideas, a sort of economics, a grand
fruits of their intellects and
accounting, until what angel of houses or of bees blows what trumpet, imaginations as fragments
and we fall as mountains upon the insects, devour them as seas, to be given without pay
scorch the houses as with fire, we become the ground that hollows beneath to the hive mind. Reciproc-
them and the air they fly through, their wormwood star, as all the bees of heaven ity takes the form of self-
watch from heaven and all the houses of heaven lean down promotion. Culture is to
for a closer look, and the smoke drifts upward, and we are the smoke, we are become precisely nothing
only the smoke, inside of which my neighbor walks, with his ducks, and sings, but advertising.
and they follow, and my hive lazes, drowses as if they or it were dreaming At the time the Web
us, as if they or us were touchable, simple as a story, an explanation, was born, in the early
any fiction, as if they thought of us, or were praying, or were dancing, 1990s, a popular trope was
or were lonely, as if they could be, or would be touched. that a new generation of
teenagers, reared in the
conservative Reagan years,
had turned out to be ex-
ceptionally bland. The
members of “Generation
Google. The centrality of advertising to the X” were characterized as blank and inert. The
new digital hive economy is absurd, and it is anthropologist Steve Barnett saw in them the
even more absurd that this isn’t more widely phenomenon of pattern exhaustion, in which
recognized. The most tiresome claim of the a culture runs out of variations of traditional
reigning digital philosophy is that crowds designs in their pottery and becomes less cre-
working for free do a better job at some things ative. A common rationalization in the fledg-
than antediluvian paid experts. Wikipedia is ling world of digital culture back then was
often given as an example. If that is so, why that we were entering a transitional lull before
doesn’t the principle dissolve the persistence a creative storm—or were already in the eye
of advertising as a business? of one. But we were not passing through a
A functioning, honest crowd-wisdom system momentary calm. We had, rather, entered a
ought to trump paid persuasion. If the crowd is persistent somnolence, and I have come to
so wise, it should be directing each person opti- believe that we will escape it only when we
mally in choices related to home finance, the kill the hive.

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