Jimbo vs. Morozov

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Jimbo vs. Morozov

Unread post by thekohser » Tue Apr 02, 2013 3:11 am

A classic Twitter fight took place today between Jimmy Wales and Evgeny Morozov. It happening on April 1st, it's tough to say without a doubt that it's real, but Morozov insults Jimbo's taste in intellectuals, given that the Sole Flounder named one of his kids after an Ayn Rand character.

I'm never sure if I'm linking correctly to Twitter, but here goes.
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Re: Jimbo vs. Morozov

Unread post by EricBarbour » Tue Apr 02, 2013 3:59 am


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Re: Jimbo vs. Morozov

Unread post by Zoloft » Tue Apr 02, 2013 4:26 am

Think this a few days ago might have rankled Jimbo?
Evgeny Morozov on Twitter wrote: Evgeny Morozov ‏@evgenymorozov 29 Mar
Very important read: "Big Oil's Wikipedia cleanup: A brand management experiment out of control" http://www.zdnet.com/big-oils-wikipedia ... 000013160/
51 Retweets
40 Favorites
4:57 PM - 29 Mar 13 · Details

eva pascoe ‏@EvaPascoe 29 Mar
@evgenymorozov for even more laughs read Gazprom entry on Wiki, pure pr propaganda straight from pravda.ru, Not a word on Arctic rig issues

Vegar K. ‏@v36ar 30 Mar
@evgenymorozov Too many forget that big oil has a influence in modern history that is unsurpassed. That's also why the want to own history.
We might want to keep an eye on Evgeny Morozov (T-H-L). Is there an EvgenyMorozov (T-C-L)? I guess not.

Some interesting single-purpose accounts on that bio. :hmmm:

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Re: Jimbo vs. Morozov

Unread post by Cla68 » Tue Apr 02, 2013 4:40 am

I'm reading Morozov's latest book To Save Everything, Click Here right now. He is very critical of crowdsourcing, although he is soft on criticizing Wikipedia in the book. I suspect it's only because he doesn't know how nasty Wikipedia really is inside, probably because he hasn't found our site here yet.

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Re: Jimbo vs. Morozov

Unread post by DanMurphy » Tue Apr 02, 2013 6:13 am

Wales describing Evgeny as a pseudo-intellectual is deliciously ironic. This is the lede to the piece that Wales attacked him over:
While the brightest minds of Silicon Valley are “disrupting” whatever industry is too crippled to fend off their advances, something odd is happening to our language. Old, trusted words no longer mean what they used to mean; often, they don’t mean anything at all. Our language, much like everything these days, has been hacked. Fuzzy, contentious, and complex ideas have been stripped of their subversive connotations and replaced by cleaner, shinier, and emptier alternatives; long-running debates about politics, rights, and freedoms have been recast in the seemingly natural language of economics, innovation, and efficiency. Complexity, as it turns out, is not particularly viral.
He's writing about Wikipedia without even knowing it.

The article is mostly about some silicon valley charlatan I've never heard of: "The enduring emptiness of our technology debates has one main cause, and his name is Tim O’Reilly," Evgeny writes.

Presumably Wales is mates with O'Reilly, who appears to be a fellow Randroid (that is, a pseudo-intellectual at best).

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Re: Jimbo vs. Morozov

Unread post by Zoloft » Tue Apr 02, 2013 6:47 am

DanMurphy wrote:Wales describing Evgeny as a pseudo-intellectual is deliciously ironic. This is the lede to the piece that Wales attacked him over:
While the brightest minds of Silicon Valley are “disrupting” whatever industry is too crippled to fend off their advances, something odd is happening to our language. Old, trusted words no longer mean what they used to mean; often, they don’t mean anything at all. Our language, much like everything these days, has been hacked. Fuzzy, contentious, and complex ideas have been stripped of their subversive connotations and replaced by cleaner, shinier, and emptier alternatives; long-running debates about politics, rights, and freedoms have been recast in the seemingly natural language of economics, innovation, and efficiency. Complexity, as it turns out, is not particularly viral.
He's writing about Wikipedia without even knowing it.

The article is mostly about some silicon valley charlatan I've never heard of: "The enduring emptiness of our technology debates has one main cause, and his name is Tim O’Reilly," Evgeny writes.

Presumably Wales is mates with O'Reilly, who appears to be a fellow Randroid (that is, a pseudo-intellectual at best).
If I swivel my head to the right, there is a bookshelf groaning under the weight of books published by his company. He is the premier tech publisher for computer, software, networking, open source, UNIX, etc. Of course he's also a chief acolyte for open source software. Tim O'Reilly (T-H-L)

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Re: Jimbo vs. Morozov

Unread post by Cla68 » Tue Apr 02, 2013 8:06 am

DanMurphy wrote:Wales describing Evgeny as a pseudo-intellectual is deliciously ironic. This is the lede to the piece that Wales attacked him over:
While the brightest minds of Silicon Valley are “disrupting” whatever industry is too crippled to fend off their advances, something odd is happening to our language. Old, trusted words no longer mean what they used to mean; often, they don’t mean anything at all. Our language, much like everything these days, has been hacked. Fuzzy, contentious, and complex ideas have been stripped of their subversive connotations and replaced by cleaner, shinier, and emptier alternatives; long-running debates about politics, rights, and freedoms have been recast in the seemingly natural language of economics, innovation, and efficiency. Complexity, as it turns out, is not particularly viral.
He's writing about Wikipedia without even knowing it.

The article is mostly about some silicon valley charlatan I've never heard of: "The enduring emptiness of our technology debates has one main cause, and his name is Tim O’Reilly," Evgeny writes.

Presumably Wales is mates with O'Reilly, who appears to be a fellow Randroid (that is, a pseudo-intellectual at best).
I wonder if Wales could, if he wanted to, write an essay so thoroughly researched and reasoned as that one by Morozov? Has Jimbo ever done so? His reaction is to tweet off an insult, thereby definitely conceding the high ground to Mr. Morozov, which I assume is why Mr. Morozov so gleefully retweeted it.

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Re: Jimbo vs. Morozov

Unread post by Midsize Jake » Tue Apr 02, 2013 8:15 am

Zoloft wrote:If I swivel my head to the right, there is a bookshelf groaning under the weight of books published by his company.
Try swiveling your head more to the left, Z...? :hmmm:

I actually think Morozov is being a bit harsh in his assessment of Tim O'Reilly, and perhaps of the tech-PR world in general. The problem isn't "buzzwordism," it's actually something I would call "bandwagoneering" (perhaps this could also be a buzzword?). This is what happens when people see something successful or "cool" and want to piggyback on it despite their own product or service being largely unrelated.

In particular, the "free/open-source software movement," or FOSS, is just fine when it comes to actual computer software, since most of what's available under that rubric is meant to be free and/or unlicensed. (There's also a real difference between "free" and "open source" that Morozov doesn't seem to appreciate.) But what happens is, entities like Wikipedia, Wikileaks, The Pirate Bay, and so on - who have little or nothing to do with actual computer software - endlessly try to hijack the FOSS "ethos" to provide themselves with a cover for their efforts to cheapen and degrade culture. When challenged, such entities will often point to the (admittedly shameful) over-extension of copyright terms, as well as a handful of cases where free digital distribution is either intentional or justifiable... and meanwhile, everybody else just has to lump it.

Basically, Tim O'Reilly makes money when standards are loose or non-existent, because that means there are more platforms and languages to write manuals for. That's why he's a FOSS advocate; FOSS takes away the profit motive to standardize, resulting in looser and fewer standards. It's not some diabolical plan to eliminate the meaning of words, or some-such thing as that. (I could always be wrong, though.)

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Re: Jimbo vs. Morozov

Unread post by lilburne » Tue Apr 02, 2013 9:25 am

Zoloft wrote: If I swivel my head to the right, there is a bookshelf groaning under the weight of books published by his company. He is the premier tech publisher for computer, software, networking, open source, UNIX, etc. Of course he's also a chief acolyte for open source software. Tim O'Reilly (T-H-L)
Strange, I have a whole bookcase of computer books, but not one is O'Reilly. I'm not sure why that is as if one scans the shelves in any bookshop its row upon row of O'Reilly this and that. At work we have shelves of Wiley publications and two O'Reilly books, one on perl and a slight thing on unix. I don't recall any O'Reilly books amongst the personal books that people keep on their desks either. But as said above I'm really not sure why that is, I know I've spent time scanning through them in the Norrington Room at Blackwell's, but in the end always chosen something else to buy.
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Re: Jimbo vs. Morozov

Unread post by thekohser » Tue Apr 02, 2013 12:22 pm

Cla68 wrote:I wonder if Wales could, if he wanted to, write an essay so thoroughly researched and reasoned as that one by Morozov? Has Jimbo ever done so?
Here are some samples of his lengthier collections of slop thoughts.

Advertising and Wikipedia

Browsing Beyond English

Richard O'Dwyer and the new internet war

Free knowledge requires...
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Re: Jimbo vs. Morozov

Unread post by Vigilant » Tue Apr 02, 2013 4:19 pm

Never mind
Hello, John. John, hello. You're the one soul I would come up here to collect myself.

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Re: Jimbo vs. Morozov

Unread post by Cla68 » Tue Apr 02, 2013 11:00 pm

thekohser wrote:
Cla68 wrote:I wonder if Wales could, if he wanted to, write an essay so thoroughly researched and reasoned as that one by Morozov? Has Jimbo ever done so?
Here are some samples of his lengthier collections of slop thoughts.

Advertising and Wikipedia

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I've asked Jimbo about it on his talk page on Commons since I can't currently edit the English Wikipedia. If someone is motivated enough about it, I guess they could link to my question on his English Wikipedia talk page.

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Re: Jimbo vs. Morozov

Unread post by Vigilant » Tue Apr 02, 2013 11:18 pm

Cla68 wrote:
thekohser wrote:
Cla68 wrote:I wonder if Wales could, if he wanted to, write an essay so thoroughly researched and reasoned as that one by Morozov? Has Jimbo ever done so?
Here are some samples of his lengthier collections of slop thoughts.

Advertising and Wikipedia

Browsing Beyond English

Richard O'Dwyer and the new internet war

Free knowledge requires...
I've asked Jimbo about it on his talk page on Commons since I can't currently edit the English Wikipedia. If someone is motivated enough about it, I guess they could link to my question on his English Wikipedia talk page.
Or better yet, if we could get one organized, would you be willing to have a public debate with him in person?
I would pay to watch that.
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Re: Jimbo vs. Morozov

Unread post by Peter Damian » Wed Apr 03, 2013 5:56 pm

Midsize Jake wrote:I actually think Morozov is being a bit harsh in his assessment of Tim O'Reilly, and perhaps of the tech-PR world in general.
This http://radar.oreilly.com/2009/06/benefi ... ation.html told me as much as I need to know about O'Reilly.
This skill has helped me to reframe big ideas in the computer industry, including creating the first advertising on the world wide web, bringing the group together that gave open source software its name, and framing the idea that “Web 2.0″ or the “internet as platform” is really about building systems that harness collective intelligence, and get better the more people use them. Socrates is my constant companions [sic] (along with others, from Lao Tzu to Alfred Korzybski to George Simon, who taught me how to listen to my inner daimon.)
Another huckster.
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Re: Jimbo vs. Morozov

Unread post by Peter Damian » Wed Apr 03, 2013 6:14 pm

Take the example of online education, for which excitement is rapidly building in California. Morozov notes in the book that it might very well produce more graduates per dollar spent, but it also might miss the very point of education.

He quotes Pamela Hieronymi, a professor of philosophy at UCLA: "Education is not the transmission of information or ideas. Education is the training needed to make use of information and ideas. As information breaks loose from bookstores and libraries and floods onto computers and mobile devices, that training becomes more important, not less."

This is more than a theoretical concern. We live in an increasingly polarized society where people on the extremes perpetually recycle information long since debunked, apparently incapable of - or uninterested in - evaluating the validity of information. It's why we still hear about the "hoax" of climate change, President Obama's foreign birth and autism-causing vaccinations.

Read more: http://www.sfchronicle.com/technology/d ... z2PQQmXBdv
+1
EvgenyMorozov is to tech writers as stoats are to kiwis. They didn’t have any natural predators before he arrived.
https://twitter.com/evgenymorozov
@annamasera having O'Reilly lecture me on truth is like having Exxon celebrate ecology.

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Re: Jimbo vs. Morozov

Unread post by thekohser » Wed Apr 03, 2013 6:39 pm

Peter Damian wrote:
Midsize Jake wrote:I actually think Morozov is being a bit harsh in his assessment of Tim O'Reilly, and perhaps of the tech-PR world in general.
This http://radar.oreilly.com/2009/06/benefi ... ation.html told me as much as I need to know about O'Reilly.
This skill has helped me to reframe big ideas in the computer industry, including creating the first advertising on the world wide web, bringing the group together that gave open source software its name, and framing the idea that “Web 2.0″ or the “internet as platform” is really about building systems that harness collective intelligence, and get better the more people use them. Socrates is my constant companions [sic] (along with others, from Lao Tzu to Alfred Korzybski to George Simon, who taught me how to listen to my inner daimon.)
Another huckster.
Well, his company did in fact (it seems) invent banner advertising on the web, so for that alone, I'd say he's noteworthy. (Not to say that he couldn't still be a complete huckster.)
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Re: Jimbo vs. Morozov

Unread post by EricBarbour » Wed Apr 03, 2013 11:09 pm

In case you missed it:

Slate column in which Farhad Manjoo bitched Morozov out for a long list of "sins" (and just makes himself look petty).

Morozov has a talent for provoking "digerati". We need to make an alliance with him.

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Re: Jimbo vs. Morozov

Unread post by Cla68 » Wed Apr 03, 2013 11:22 pm

EricBarbour wrote:In case you missed it:

Slate column in which Farhad Manjoo bitched Morozov out for a long list of "sins" (and just makes himself look petty).

Morozov has a talent for provoking "digerati". We need to make an alliance with him.
Actually, as I was reading Morozov's book recently, I came to basically the same conclusion as Manjoo that Morozov is using a strawman argument to some degree. Still, I think that the core of Morozov's reasoning is compelling- that advocates of the universal, saving grace of the open Internet are blowing a lot of sunshine up the public's patootie.

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Re: Jimbo vs. Morozov

Unread post by Sweet Revenge » Wed Apr 03, 2013 11:38 pm

Morozov's first book, The Net Delusion, is excellent. It turns out that (go figure) Twitter didn't really free the Arab world after all. The stoat/kiwi analogy is dead on, by the way.

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Re: Jimbo vs. Morozov

Unread post by DanMurphy » Thu Apr 04, 2013 12:05 am

Sweet Revenge wrote:Morozov's first book, The Net Delusion, is excellent. It turns out that (go figure) Twitter didn't really free the Arab world after all. The stoat/kiwi analogy is dead on, by the way.
The efforts to suggest the uprisings were down to Facebook, or Twitter, or Wikileaks or etc. etc. have been signs of naive, ignorant, smug minds from the very beginning. Drives me batty.

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Re: Jimbo vs. Morozov

Unread post by Sweet Revenge » Thu Apr 04, 2013 12:19 am

DanMurphy wrote:
Sweet Revenge wrote:Morozov's first book, The Net Delusion, is excellent. It turns out that (go figure) Twitter didn't really free the Arab world after all. The stoat/kiwi analogy is dead on, by the way.
The efforts to suggest the uprisings were down to Facebook, or Twitter, or Wikileaks or etc. etc. have been signs of naive, ignorant, smug minds from the very beginning. Drives me batty.
That's another nice piece of work, Dan. I like the way you point out that it's impossible to tell now why Bouazizi's suicide set things off when it did. That feeling for the ambiguity of historical causality melts like a snowflake in the oven of wikipedia.

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Re: Jimbo vs. Morozov

Unread post by Ghost In The Machine » Fri Apr 05, 2013 7:10 pm

DanMurphy wrote:Wales describing Evgeny as a pseudo-intellectual is deliciously ironic. This is the lede to the piece that Wales attacked him over:
While the brightest minds of Silicon Valley are “disrupting” whatever industry is too crippled to fend off their advances, something odd is happening to our language. Old, trusted words no longer mean what they used to mean; often, they don’t mean anything at all. Our language, much like everything these days, has been hacked. Fuzzy, contentious, and complex ideas have been stripped of their subversive connotations and replaced by cleaner, shinier, and emptier alternatives; long-running debates about politics, rights, and freedoms have been recast in the seemingly natural language of economics, innovation, and efficiency. Complexity, as it turns out, is not particularly viral.
He's writing about Wikipedia without even knowing it.
And not for the first, or only time either.
here, although he is describing gamification, it applies just as well to the game that is Wikipedia-
"Soviet planners were also gamification enthusiasts, even if they never used the term." Their preferred label was 'socialist competition', and the 'games' they arranged involved unending, repetitive labour rewarded by empty titles - not entirely dissimilar to using some online services today."
Have a Barnstar Evgeny!
:D

I've enjoyed his writings and lectures, to a lesser extent, for sometime now.

here he throws a MOROZOV COCKTAIL at the kingdum of Wales.
No fan of Silicone Snake Oil or the purveyors thereof is he.

Wish we could get him to join our discussions here at the 'Ocracy.

The article is mostly about some silicon valley charlatan I've never heard of: "The enduring emptiness of our technology debates has one main cause, and his name is Tim O’Reilly," Evgeny writes.

Presumably Wales is mates with O'Reilly, who appears to be a fellow Randroid (that is, a pseudo-intellectual at best).
Indeed.
Turds of a feather float together.
I lost one of my LJ friends, who was an employee of his, a while back because I made a post in my blog critical of Timmy and his ulterior motives.
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Re: Jimbo vs. Morozov

Unread post by Catfitz » Mon Apr 08, 2013 1:59 am

eva pascoe ‏@EvaPascoe 29 Mar
@evgenymorozov for even more laughs read Gazprom entry on Wiki, pure pr propaganda straight from pravda.ru, Not a word on Arctic rig issues
The Gazprom entry is thin and out of date in places. It's not true that Gazprom gets 75% of Turkmenistan's natural gas output, for example; since the explosion on the central line in 2009 (each country blames the other for it), deliveries fell to 10 bcm, and now China buys most of TM's gas.

The TNK-BP entry is also very, very light on its business disputes that in fact led to court cases, not just visa disputes. If there were world enough and time, I'd find people to work at fixing these. But...perhaps they value their lives. No one wants to mess with these oligarchs.

As for Morozov, I'm a long-time critic of him. I appreciate what he does and his own body of criticism, but it can be very misleading because ultimately, his own vision of an Internet society is a kind of Soviet bureaucratic centralism. I don't think that he's unaware of Wikipedia's tendentiousness, I just think it suits him. The collectivist and knowledge-fetish concept of Wikipedia seems to men to be an old one admired by the Soviet intelligentsia -- I think Maxim Gorky and HG Wells were the first to cook up this idea of gathering all the world's knowledge together in easily-accessible popular editions of a giant encyclopedia to be distributed freely everywhere.

The favourite thing of "progressives" to do in the US is to accuse someone of admiring Ayn Rand. This is a sport. Even if you loathe Ayn Rand (as I do), you will be called a Randian if you criticize "progressivism" in any form, the open source movement, etc. So Morozov is just "fitting in with the crowd" there, something he does a lot of.

Some have pointed out that Morozov's M.O. is to pick out big tech names and attack them to get their attention. I don't think he does this as some kind of gambit, I think he really has a coherent critique of his own and wants to articulate it. But it's interesting who he says he admires repeatedly (Angela Davis) and whom he barely ever criticizes (Beth Noveck).

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Re: Jimbo vs. Morozov

Unread post by EricBarbour » Mon Apr 08, 2013 2:17 am

Catfitz wrote:The Gazprom entry is thin and out of date in places. It's not true that Gazprom gets 75% of Turkmenistan's natural gas output, for example; since the explosion on the central line in 2009 (each country blames the other for it), deliveries fell to 10 bcm, and now China buys most of TM's gas.

The TNK-BP entry is also very, very light on its business disputes that in fact led to court cases, not just visa disputes. If there were world enough and time, I'd find people to work at fixing these. But...perhaps they value their lives. No one wants to mess with these oligarchs.
That would make a nice entry for the Wikipediocracy blog--how the coverage of Russian subjects is being biased.
As for Morozov, I'm a long-time critic of him. I appreciate what he does and his own body of criticism, but it can be very misleading because ultimately, his own vision of an Internet society is a kind of Soviet bureaucratic centralism.
I gathered that, but one shouldn't dismiss someone like him just because you don't agree with his "vision" of the Internet. Fighting Wikipedia's massive headstart in public relations "happy feelings" requires as many allies as possible.

This is the mistake too many Wikipedia victims make--that the Wiki-nerds can be "reasoned" with.
This is impossible, the only way to fight them is with their own methods. You need allies, and support.

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Re: Jimbo vs. Morozov

Unread post by Catfitz » Mon Apr 08, 2013 4:07 am

You need allies, and support.
Well, this is an interesting proposition, whether the problem is "just" Wikipedia and whether you can get Morozov more intellectually interested in Wikipedia, or whether Wikipedia is a function of the larger Silicon Valley cult problem that Morozov is good at attacking, and whether you can enlist him in that larger project.

I think Morozov isn't much of a builder of coalitions or ally-maker. He's alienated a lot of people (Tim O'Reilly) and he selectively praises some people if he thinks they are following him or praising him themselves (Audrey Waters). That said, his critique is a systematic and important one. It's much more intellectually wide-ranging and robust than AJ Keen's, important as Keen is. Keen calls himself the "anti-Christ of Silicon Valley," but good God, he works full-time for TechCrunch as one of their main interviewers of the gadget-makers. His "Cult of the Amateur" rightfully scores the copyleftism of the Internet and of course the mash-up of amateurism, but he doesn't go a lot further into all the other ideologies and political grandfathers they had (like O'Reilly's weird Polish mentor).

Here are some of my recent critiques of Morozov:

http://3dblogger.typepad.com/wired_stat ... ledge.html
http://3dblogger.typepad.com/wired_stat ... right.html

As someone who has been criticizing the Silicon Valley cults myself for ten years, I've thought through these critiques, and am not as thrilled as others that this critic has come along, as I've also been following him through many permutations, including as a Soros fellow when I also worked at the Soros Foundations, and I think he's an opportunist and has an agenda I haven't quite figured out, and ultimately who is supporting it (he never criticizes Putin or Lukashenka; he's from Belarus and still visits there frequently).

In any event, take what's useful, ignore what isn't, do what you're going to do.

There are all the ideological discussions to be had about the Silicon Valley cults -- whether the problem is technocommunism, as I call it, or digital Maoism, as Jared Lanier calls it, or whether its Randianism or extreme libertarianism as Morozov finds it to be at times. For me, the problem with O'Reilly is his collectivism, open source software cultism, and Code for America which is undemocratically invading many American cities. For Morozov, its his Randian entrepreneurism/hucksterism, his solutionism, his invasion of government with "nonpolitics" (and here, I think Morozov is at his best, uncovering the political agenda of the "new nonpolitical technological" approach of wiki-ism, etc.

But there's also the human dynamics that I think happens with all these SV start-ups:

o claim of openness and open source, but appearance of "benevolent dictator" who isn't so benevolent, and his fanboyz
o VC infusions and first and second rounds
o alpha and beta test love fests where testers selected by the devs in a closed system become the shapers of the app/platform/site/world/game/ whatever
o second tier of "early adapters" who are at odds with snuggly beta-test love testers who suck up to the devs
o founder's syndrome and forcible removal of founder (this will inevitably happen to Wales, these companies are not like Wendy's, keeping Dave around even after he died).
o hockey-stick growth, Gartner hype cycle, loads more users, and gulf between incrowd and early adapters and average customer
o different sets of privileges, early announcements of features, influence on feature sets, influence on rule-making etc by insiders and devs' friends
o list of recommended followers or automatic friends, made up of devs' friends (Twitter)
o abject failure, or VC pass around to each other, with new infusions and more failures and no business model
o sometimes IPO -- usually failure
o lather, rinse, repeat for each new thing, and they're all connected...

Wikipedia isn't immune to these cycles and features for being "nonprofit". All things in Silicon Valley are nonprofit -- Facebook doesn't really have income and its stock is falling.

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Re: Jimbo vs. Morozov

Unread post by EricBarbour » Mon Apr 08, 2013 8:17 am

Catfitz wrote:But there's also the human dynamics that I think happens with all these SV start-ups:

o claim of openness and open source, but appearance of "benevolent dictator" who isn't so benevolent, and his fanboyz
o VC infusions and first and second rounds
o alpha and beta test love fests where testers selected by the devs in a closed system become the shapers of the app/platform/site/world/game/ whatever
o second tier of "early adapters" who are at odds with snuggly beta-test love testers who suck up to the devs
o founder's syndrome and forcible removal of founder (this will inevitably happen to Wales, these companies are not like Wendy's, keeping Dave around even after he died).
o hockey-stick growth, Gartner hype cycle, loads more users, and gulf between incrowd and early adapters and average customer
o different sets of privileges, early announcements of features, influence on feature sets, influence on rule-making etc by insiders and devs' friends
o list of recommended followers or automatic friends, made up of devs' friends (Twitter)
o abject failure, or VC pass around to each other, with new infusions and more failures and no business model
o sometimes IPO -- usually failure
o lather, rinse, repeat for each new thing, and they're all connected...
Don't have to tell me---I was working in an office building in Portola Valley in the late 1990s. On the other side of the building was CMGi, one of the major Web 1.0 venture capitalists. I had plenty of time to talk to those fine gentlemen. They were amazingly like frat nerds, and cheerfully admitted they were "out to steal someone else's great ideas". I saw them take one outside idea after another, from ancestry.com to Lycos to GeoCities. Flew really high, everyone sitting in Aeron chairs and driving Porsches. Then the 2001 dotcom collapse came, and they were instant roadkill -- disappeared literally overnight. I later heard one of the senior partners killed himself.

Everything you put in that list was their standard MO--run it like a dictatorship, lie to everyone, ramp up growth, force out the original creator, usually followed by massive collapse. Enough of them succeeded to pay for the rest -- until 2001. It was stupid, but it worked, thanks to asshole "evangelists" like Kevin Kelly, George Gilder, Bill Gross, and Henry Blodget.
Wikipedia isn't immune to these cycles and features for being "nonprofit". All things in Silicon Valley are nonprofit -- Facebook doesn't really have income and its stock is falling.
Heh heh. People don't realize that Facebook is going to soon overtake Google as the world's most popular web property. But it's not a USEFUL web property, it's a combination of a shell game and a stiff dose of heroin.

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Re: Jimbo vs. Morozov

Unread post by Hex » Tue Apr 09, 2013 4:04 pm

"Soviet planners were also gamification enthusiasts, even if they never used the term." Their preferred label was 'socialist competition', and the 'games' they arranged involved unending, repetitive labour rewarded by empty titles - not entirely dissimilar to using some online services today."
And these days, there's talk of Chinese prison guards forcing their inmates to grind in World of Warcraft to earn them virtual gold, which they exchange for money. How the world has moved on!
My question, to this esteemed Wiki community, is this: Do you think that a Wiki could successfully generate a useful encyclopedia? -- JimboWales
Yes, but in the end it wouldn't be an encyclopedia. It would be a wiki. -- WardCunningham (Jan 2001)

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Re: Jimbo vs. Morozov

Unread post by EricBarbour » Mon Apr 15, 2013 2:30 am

Cory Doctorow weights in about Morozov's book, via a negative Washington Post review of it.
And predictably, shrieks how much he hates the book.

http://boingboing.net/2013/04/14/blowin ... o-sav.html

I honestly do not understand how he arrives at the following:
1. He never offers a credible vision of what technology should be like in order to promote freedom and justice. Morozov gives the strong impression that activists should just give up on using or attempting to improve the Internet, a counsel of despair that would result in an unchecked march to total surveillance, control and censorship for just about everyone, with no hope of change. In his first book, Morozov asserts that the mass demonstrations following the Iranian elections would have taken place without the net, just through word of mouth -- as someone who spent about a decade helping with phone-trees, mass-mailouts and wheatpasted poster campaigns for demonstrations, I was dubious on this score.

2. He is fundamentally pandering to censors, surveillors, and repressors. All of the former are cheerful about their attempts to lock down and spy upon the net, because, they assert, nothing of much importance happens there (I wrote about this at length earlier). Morozov's biggest boosters are the copyright thugs, the spyware vendors, and the data retention snoops who argue that ripping up the Internet's fabric does no particular harm because the Internet isn't even a thing. "There is no such thing as the Internet" is the 21st century version of Maggie Thatcher's "There is no such thing as society" -- a dangerous, reductionist self-fulfilling prophecy.
I keep saying that Mr. Doctorow is a delusional egotist. Now he sounds like Bush -- "you're either with us, or you're with the terrorists".

(By the way, have I pointed out that Boing Boing's overall traffic has plummeted more than 50% in the last 2 years?)

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Re: Jimbo vs. Morozov

Unread post by lilburne » Mon Apr 15, 2013 9:52 am

EricBarbour wrote: I keep saying that Mr. Doctorow is a delusional egotist. Now he sounds like Bush -- "you're either with us, or you're with the terrorists".
The biggest surveillors and repressors happen to be Google and the other tech companies the virtues of whom Doctorow extols every week. And how did these tech companies obtain the wealth that allows them to be scofflaws as regards privacy? They got that by accumulating money by selling advertising against pirated content. I'm reminded here of the medieval priest, with grease running down his chin, sitting in the lords hall on feast day and exhorting him to give a few pennies to charity, whilst preaching up the duty of peasants to give all they have to the lord on every other day of the year.
They have been inserting little memes in everybody's mind
So Google's shills can shriek there whenever they're inclined

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Re: Jimbo vs. Morozov

Unread post by gauss » Sun May 19, 2013 8:13 pm

thekohser wrote:A classic Twitter fight took place today between Jimmy Wales and Evgeny Morozov.
Except the fight was started by Wales who popped out of nowhere insulting ("gadfly", "You arrogance is breathtaking.") and starting dictating ("you should apologise"). Didn't know this Wales before but the way he behaves scares me-is this bully :angry: type of guy running that supposedly "noble" idea-Wikipedia?

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Re: Jimbo vs. Morozov

Unread post by TungstenCarbide » Sun May 19, 2013 8:23 pm

gauss wrote:... Didn't know this Wales before but the way he behaves scares me-is this bully :angry: type of guy running that supposedly "noble" idea-Wikipedia?
He used to run it, back when his porn site Bomis (T-H-L) owned the servers. Once the WMF was up and running Jimbo started fading.
Gone hiking. also, beware of women with crazy head gear and a dagger.

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