Caterina, I totally agree with this post. BTW, I can't see the cute dog picture because you must have it set to private :)

Personally, I think Jaron wrote that as a sensationalist 'look at me' work...but I digress.

To add to your amazing summary of why we actually do this stuff is:

1. The Origin of Virtue by Matt Ridley (who I named my adorable dog after) discussed the main impetus behind people doing stuff for free, for one another, just 'cause...because our survival depends on generosity and our nature is programmed to 'get' that! Ridley discusses many historical and cultural studies where the richest of society is actually he or she who gives away the most. And the mechanism that ties it all together? Reciprocity. I contribute and I understand (trust) that you will also contribute and when we ALL pitch in, we all reap the rewards...

which brings me to:

2. As much as collectivism has been kicked to sh*t in American political discourse, we DO have more power in numbers than we have as individuals. Even the wealthiest, most powerful individuals will fall to an uprising of us peasants. Wikipedia, Hunch, Flickr, Twitter, etc. are amazing displays of the power of our collective. The only issue to date is that we haven't (yet) used this to fix the real ills in the world. But we will. We are getting there.

So, I'm with you on fighting for participatory media, the amateur, the collective, the volunteer, the generosity, the everything I love and live for because participating in this culture with people like yourself reminds me that there is so much good in the world still worth fighting for.

Believe me, I know how corny that sounds. But I believe it from the bottom of my heart.

Sam, I fixed it.

Tara, I'll have to check out Ridley, sounds great. And I think there's some weird idea floating in and around this stuff that the group and the individual are somehow incommensurates. Never understood that. Sometimes we are alone, sometimes with others.

I wonder if part of his bone-to-pick is that fewer people want to pay for software, like say a closed VR environment....

Being an artist that works in modes being radically changed by the Net (music especially), Lanier might feel justified in brazenly claiming that online participatory media provides no credit or compensation.

But as a writer who receives his primary compensation from Web work and a passionate Wikipedian, the idea I don't get something back for my work in both arenas is bunk. Both Jimmy Wales and any old Wikipedian will tell you, we do it because it's fun, not purely out of some collective altruism. One need only see the barnstars festooned across Wikipedia user pages to see the kind of social affirmation we get by becoming a part of that community, not to mention the intrinsic motivators in contributing to a charity.

Caterina, I totally admire your cute dog.

Also, you have very accurately summed up my own experience in participatory media: meet people! correct grammar! have fun arguments over text and context! share oddities and laugh! And, on occasion, jointly create greatness.

My work as a futurist and facilitator is essentially a face-to-face participatory medium, and I receive credit and pay for that. On the internetz I'm happy to be an amateur at play in the fields of the blooming bits, in the company of other people motivated by the love of..... almost everything.

So, well done, you: Jaron Lanier is fun to read, but in this case, it seems, too bound by his own experiences.

Collectivism can also be a pretty solid platform for gaining recognition for your talents. Lanier's warning against having "our young people aggregated" seems to assume that all collective work is anonymized and purely altruistic. To the contrary, many participatory sites enable individual recognition in a way that would have been impossible ten years ago.

Some of these platforms are powered by individual motivations. Take stack overflow, techguy.org (and the numerous similar sites), where individuals troubleshoot others while simultaneously signaling their expertise to future employers. Kudos can have material value. Take open source work by Guido van Rossum (python) or Joe Hewitt (mozilla) who also joined for-profit enterprises like Google and Facebook. The two go hand in hand and individuals who understand this will go back and forth again and again.

This really isn't analogous to living in "collective households" and "food co-ops." It's always been really, really hard to signal your talents. A long time ago, before these platforms, you either had to strike out on your own enterprise or work up a single corporate ladder. Now the cost of signalling is reduced while the audience benefiting from these efforts has greatly increased.

These platforms are the minority of collective media, and I believe some of the most meaningful contributions are entirely altruistic and anonymous. But the overall message is about facilitating the contribution of the individual, not about robbing individual dignity.

Also I don't understand why all of this isn't inevitable.

Great counterpoint to Lanier's book, fortified by your actually putting your time and effort where your mouth is with the very interesting Hunch.com.

I sincerely hope the ultimate consequence of this debate is not just another issue that gets highly polarized, but a real awareness of the need to create a knowledge sharing website where those participating for a great variety of reasons, whether sharing for fun, profit, esteem, ego, altruism, etc., feel comfortable participating in a process that makes a very positive contribution to all of us as individuals, communities and as a planet.

After following the link to admire Dos Pesos on flickr, I came across your photo of labels that you were sewing together to make a dress (http://www.flickr.com/photos/caterina/25370/). How appropriate to discover your creative project that was made possibly by crowdsourcing; it's a beautiful concrete example and additional defense for participatory media.

I'd love to know how the piece turned out; are there any photos of the finished piece buried in your photostream?

Someday, we will be the ones writing the editorial bemoaning whatever comes after participatory media. We will complain that something has supplanted opt-in community-driven content. We will miss the days when small actions combine to build something bigger than our individual selves, and we will also seem to miss the point. WE WILL BE WEARING THOSE STUPID DREADLOCKS SOMEDAY.

It seems to me that these platforms are also enabling a new kind of human economy in which contribution and collaboration are used as currency. Even in environments that are largely 'fun' or 'meaningless' (in an economic sense of the word) you have talents and significant contributions recognized in ways that are valuable; being a real member of a community because of tangible actions (as opposed to marketing or how many academic degrees you have) is something of worth. It may not pay your bills, but it surrounds you with a legion of supporters and listeners and credibility.

We have tools popping up around the net that place more value on social contribution than anything else...some are even trying to recognize that value so that it's useful at a later point in time (the way money is). This is exciting, and only possible in environments like the one's you described.

There just isn't a scenario in which moving from a profit-motivated collaboration model to a model that involves ego-less, give=win participation (you get involved for no reason other than you can or want to) is a bad thing in the long run.

Great ending: "Of course the word 'Amateur' comes from the French word 'to love'. Good enough reason for me to participate. And you?"

I'll throw another word in the ring, a word that I'm trying to redeem: dilettante. It's defined as a dabbler. But it's etymology is related to delight.

As much as I agree broadly with Caterina's comments I do find some merit in Lanier's arguments.

There are two aspects to the role of the collective - creation and selection. While internet has accelerated the ease of collective creative endeavors they are not limited to the internet. And to argue that any such endeavors in any way impede or limit the freedom for personal expression is naive at best.

However, the more significant emergent internet phenomenon is selection through crowd-sourcing. This need not be a bad thing, and may actually be better, if the conditions of diversity and adequate incentives are met. Often huge numbers of internet are argued as diverse and "kudos" argued as incentives. However, I would say not always.

A situation, which Lanier claims is at hand, where all cultural productions need to be selected by the collective does not promote innovation. One because the collective may not be diverse enough, hence the "pack of dogs" metaphor. Second to get selected one has to play by the rules of the collective game, of which "free" appears today to an integral part.

Personally, I do not agree with Lanier's evaluation that we have reached the described critical situation. If anything, the cultural selection powers even today are far too centralized in the hands of a few players. But we also do not, possibly want a world where world fits Lanier's description.

Wow, you weren't kidding. Your dog *is* cute!

Jaron Lanier seems to have reached the conclusion that the internet has somehow formed a "collective" by fostering participatory websites. I would suggest, as you have, that just the opposite is true: That person sitting in front of his computer is as privately individual as is possible in our civilization. It is true that his or her thought may be added to that of others, and form some sort of "collective" amalgam, but this in no way diminishes the thoughts of the individual, whose social instincts have probably been in some measure satisfied by his participation. He has been creative, and that is a good thing. I would guess that in most cases, those who put their two cents into such internet participation are not doing it for a living. They needn't be paid, or protected by intellectual property laws, because they are doing it in their spare time, as you do on your very thoughtful blog. And yet through these websites something very powerful has been created. I've always thought that your "culture of generosity" quote was one of your best, and right on target. It seems to me that Jaron Lanier is being rather negative and unduly pessimistic.

Nice, reasoned refutation of the excerpt from Lanier's manifesto, Caterina.

I was supposed to review the book for work, got halfway through, couldn't read another sentence: I was so opposed to much of what the man was stating, what he was erroneously (I believe) positing in the face of like-DUH evidence to the contrary, that I slammed the book down and harangued my (long-suffering) teenage daughter about the thing.

She (long-suffering, but no ass-kisser) agreed with my points, which were pretty much the ones (or variations of the ones) you more considerately supplied above. And Lanier's perspective, she suggested, seemed to often come from a fear of "If nobody cares about unique weirdness, they're not gonna pay attention (or money) to *me* anymore!"

Oy. Cue Chrissie Hynde singing "Brass in Pocket" and fade ...