Finally, The Internet As Intended.

In late May, The Edge.org published a fascinating dialogue among many of the web’s most respected pundits in response to Jaron Lanier’s essay Digital Maoism: The Hazards of the New Online Collectivism, in which he casts the desire of web software to harness collective intelligence as dangerous and potentially destructive to the individual.

Quite an A-list weighed in with responses: Douglas Rushkoff, Quentin Hardy, Yochai Benkler, Clay Shirky, Cory Doctorow, Kevin Kelly, Esther Dyson, Larry Sanger, Fernanda Viegas & Martin Wattenberg, Jimmy Wales, George Dyson, Dan Gillmor, and Howard Rheingold. I caught wind of the debate belatedly via JP Rangaswami’s post lamenting that he too had only belatedly discovered the conversation.

I’ll let you read the dialogue for yourself - and if you are interested in the future of social software, you should - but Kevin Kelly had the most insightful remark, for me. :

…Our technological systems are marked by the fact that we have introduced intelligent design into them. This is the top-down control we insert to speed and direct a system toward our goals. Every technological system, including Wikipedia, has design in it. What’s new is only this: never before have we been able to make systems with as much "hive" in it as we have recently made with the Web. Until this era, technology was primarily all control, all design. Now it can be design and hive. In fact, this Web 2.0 business is chiefly the first step in exploring all the ways in which we can combine design and the hive in innumerable permutations. We are tweaking the dial in hundreds of combos: dumb writers, smart filters; smart writers, dumb filters, ad infinitum.

- Kevin Kelly

It puts a finger on what Lanier did not recognize, that social software isn’t the hive mind - it is, for the most part, individualist design attempting to extract wisdom from it. It underscores a few things I’ve said before, that successful Web 2.0 companies and applications are baking the power of the network right into their offerings. And that excellent social software is bionic - it does not simply playback user participation, it amplifies it intelligently.