Tag: andrew leonard

Information Collapse

Naturally, I check the stats on this blog and am always curious to see referring sites and related comments. But this week, I’m reminded what an information clusterfuck the Internet can be with the discovery that a post I wrote about malicious editing on Wikipedia is now a cited footnote on a page at its backwoods, idiot cousin known as Conservapedia.  The page itself was about liberal bias on Wikipedia, and I couldn’t imagine anything I’d written that would support this kind of criticism; but there it was — footnote number 18 right below the heading blaming Wikipedia for, of all things, Anti-Christianity.  And the fact that they’re citing the words of a confirmed atheist is the lesser irony in this case.

Apparently, the rogue Wiki editor, Robert Clark Young, outed by Andrew Leonard at Salon.com and referenced in my post, included among his furtive revisions the “cleaning up” of articles which contained any positive reflections of paganism.  As such, Conservapedia’s beef is not that Young was a mischievous butcher of articles in general, but that Wikipedia ultimately banned him at least in part for doing his christian duty by scouring pro-pagan language. Neither my article nor Leonard’s makes mention of this particular angle related to Young’s antics; and if the pagan story is true, it’s the first I’ve heard of it.  Granted, the Conservapedia article doesn’t reference anything pertaining to the thesis of my post, only that it substantiates Young’s having been banned; although this is a paradoxical citation in support of an otherwise mundane fact.

Entitled Montag’s Grin, my piece (should any wayward christian zealot wander over here) contemplates the potential we have to digitally “burn” the books through round-the-clock, unchecked, amateur revisionism rather than with fire. So, the real irony in this case is that Conservapedia is probably one of the best examples of exactly what I meant when I wrote the post — that the tools and collectivist ideals behind the founding of Wikipedia do not necessarily have to produce better information and a smarter world. It was inevitable that an ultra-conservative, funhouse mirror version of Wikipedia would come to be, just as FOX News was inevitable the moment Ted Turner set out to prove that 24hr news could be a business.  And the Internet has only exploded and accelerated the folly 24hr news set in motion such that news is now even further segmented according to bias, has to provoke or entertain just to attract fleeting attention, and demands a rate of production that can only degrade the practice of investigative journalism.

On a related subject, I was interested to see that Popular Science recently removed comment threads from its website after concluding a study that indicated comments are actually bad for the advancement of science. This makes sense. Because we have elevated and monetized even the most base forms of discourse, we have consequently fostered an environment in which, under the guise of fairness, we continue debating on a national scale even settled sciences like Darwinian evolution. Quote that Conservapedia!

But with regard to any form of criticism of Web 2.0, those of us doing the criticizing are often accused of being anti-technology or anti-future, of trying to stuff the innovation genie back in his proverbial bottle. This isn’t a rhetorical tactic employed solely by common trolls, but also by the corporate leaders of the technological empire.  In any given debate about the application of digital technologies, the vested interests tend to sow a kind of fear by setting up the false choice of tech vs. no tech. If we’re paying attention, this is functionally the same as, If we don’t play by their rules, they’ll take their ball and go home. And we keep falling for it.  To quote Andy Borowitz in response to yesterday’s government shutdown, “If the Internet had been shut down, there would be rioting in the streets.”

Instead of this artificially binary, repetitive, and generalized defense of technology, we might all agree that the tools of innovation are also tools of exploitation; that connecting can include stalking and bullying; that the companion of crowd-sourced is mob-ruled; then maybe we can have an adult dialogue about how, when, and why we use these tools — and quite possibly assert the right to have some say as to how they evolve. Because, if the web is living up to its 20-year-old promise to make us a better informed hive, I have to wonder what this liberal’s words are doing linked to anything on Conservapedia.

Tech utopians herald the technological singularity as a messianic event — a time when man and machine will coexist in a world just beyond our imagination, where super-intelligence is the norm and immortality will be achieved.  It is possible, however, that these very same tools could actually cause the volume of  bullshit out there to keep expanding, acquire tremendous mass, and then collapse into a singularity as it is often defined in space-time — a point of infinite density from which not even light can escape.

Montag’s Grin: A Look at Wikipedia

“It was a special pleasure to see things eaten, to see things blackened and changed.”  

— Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

Internet culture seems to want to promote two values that, when combined, cannot help but produce some mischief.  How much mischief remains to be seen, but the values to which I refer are anonymity and the wisdom of crowds (a term coined by James Surowiecki).  Both of these principles are central to the design and maintenance of that populist repository of all knowledge known as Wikipedia, which is the sixth most-visited site on the web.  It is rare to conjure a search term that does not produce a Wikipedia link among the top few results; and the site is presumably a first source for most of us and the ultimate source for a lot of us despite the fact that, for instance, biographical information is frequently disputed by many a horse’s mouth.

Wikipedia is egalitarian, not-for-profit, and all-volunteer. Anyone can be an editor (usually under a pseudonym), but it isn’t meant to be a free-for-all.  There are rules and guidelines that are supposed to be maintained by self-governance within the collective, fulfilling the theory that the crowd will, on the whole, produce better work than an elite minority. Nevertheless, the potential for individual actors, shrouded in anonymity, to wreak havoc should not be underestimated, as will become clear if you read this excellent piece of investigative reporting by Andrew Leonard for Salon.com.  In the article, Leonard describes motives and methods behind the antics of a vengeful author named Robert Clark Young, who as Wikipedia editor “Qworty” set about maliciously revising the biographies of literary figures with whom he had a beef while tending to the stewardship and embellishment of Robert Clark Young’s own curriculum wiki.

All in, Qworty claimed to be responsible for some 13,000 edits to the online encyclopedia, and as Leonard rightly points out, he was just one of thousands of editors who work on the site every day.  Although the Wikipedia community seems finally to have put an end to Young/Qworty’s shenanigans, it must be very difficult to mitigate this kind of behavior in an environment comprising anonymous editors with no required credentials.  Certainly the mission of the group Wikipediocracy “to shine the light of scrutiny into the dark crevices of Wikipedia . . .” suggests that Qworty may not be an anomaly so much as representative of some systemic problems within the Encyclopedia Publica.

I’ll be honest. I generally don’t get the anonymity thing when it comes to free expression in the digital age. I think of anonymity as a tactic for dissident poets in dangerously oppressive countries and total wusses, bullies, trolls, and hackers in free societies.  In fact, I’ll argue that the overvaluation of anonymity in the digital age moves us free societies a step closer toward the not-so-free ones, a sentiment echoed in this weekend’s OpEd by Julian Assange when he refers to the degradation of privacy as a segue to authoritarianism. Presumably, it is the abandonment of privacy that spawns the need, or perceived need, for individuals to assume alternate identities in cyberspace, but it’s easy to see how anonymity through avatar can catalyze an authoritarian society which needs mob rule like fire needs oxygen. Anonymity on the web has fostered the ugliest of mob (i.e. unwise crowd) behaviors where death threats and misogyny seem to flow all too easily from the keyboards of self-righteous young men.  Even the generally well-meaning society of Redditors managed to form a virtual posse that harassed the family of an innocent and troubled young man immediately after the Boston Marathon bombing.

Why anonymity would be necessary for the composition or editing of encyclopedic work is a mystery, but I suspect it has little to do with practicality and everything to do with ideology.  After all to add the imprimatur of a name would only lead to the conclusion that some editors might be perceived as more valuable than others because they are associated with specific expertise or experience in a given area, and this only results in the kind of elitism of experts Wikipedia is disposed to reject as substandard. In theory, all voices are equal, and if we let the process run its course, balance, truth, and fairness will prevail over the occasional malicious actor like a Qworty.  In theory.

But if we look at Wikipedia as a social experiment that represents the larger promise of the Information Age, it’s entirely possible that we may never know if it succeeds or fails. After all, there must be a tipping point when too much mischief by individual, corporate, or state actors can corrupt enough data that it becomes the new reality upon which subsequent generations then build.  It is, of course, possible that in practical terms it may not look all that different from the pre-digital era.  “History,” as Mr. Churchill teaches us, “is written by the victors,” and thus what we think we know is never exactly what is or was. Ask most Americans about our colonial origins, and they’re likely to say something about the English (victors) and very little about the Dutch (losers), despite the fact that much of our culture begins in the heart of Amsterdam. Still the potential for round-the-clock, revisionist history is food for thought.

On the one hand, Wikipedia projects the hopeful conclusion of Fahrenheit 451, in which man subordinates a bit of his identity to become knowledge itself in order to preserve and pass down that knowledge. But at the same time, Wikipedia’s subordination of the individual to the crowd also allows the victorious author of history to be any anonymous hack and his army of sock puppets, teaching us that there is more than one way to burn a few books.