The Spy Who Came In From The Cold 2.0
How one digital pioneer turned against the very culture he helped create
By Ron Rosenbaum
Smithsonian Magazine, January 2013
I couldn't help thinking of John Le Carré’s spy novels as I awaited my rendezvous with Jaron Lanier in a corner of the lobby of the stylish W Hotel just off Union Square in Manhattan. Le Carré’s espionage tales, such as The Spy Who Came In From the Cold, are haunted by the spectre of the mole, the defector, the double agent, who, from a position deep inside, turns against the ideology he once professed fealty to.
And so it is with Jaron Lanier and the ideology he helped create, Web 2.0 futurism, digital utopianism, which he now calls “digital Maoism,” indicting “internet intellectuals,” accusing giants like Facebook and Google of being “spy agencies.” Lanier was one of the creators of our current digital reality and now he wants to subvert the “hive mind,” as the web world’s been called, before it engulfs us all, destroys political discourse, economic stability, the dignity of personhood and leads to “social catastrophe.” Jaron Lanier is the spy who came in from the cold 2.0. ...
But he saw anonymity as a poison seed. The way it didn't hide, but, in fact, brandished the ugliness of human nature beneath the anonymous screen-name masks. An enabling and foreshadowing of mob rule, not a growth of democracy, but an accretion of tribalism. ...
http://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/What-Turned-Jaron-Lanier-Against-the-Web-183832741.html#ixzz2OVBVyX7d
Not that all of Lanier’s points are without merit. What responsible person would defend the extreme ‘flaming’ on the Internet?
But two things need to be noted.
First, the Powers That Be, what I often call the Tolerance Police, who actually specialize in intolerance, are understandably upset that the Internet is becoming an ever growing un-PC forum that they have been unable to control.
http://www.amazon.com/Culture-Critique-Evolutionary-Twentieth-Century-Intellectual/dp/0759672229
Secondly, as Kevin MacDonald discusses at length, in his ‘The Culture of Critique,’ it has been characteristic of the Jewish community down through the ages to label any feelings of kinship among gentile whites as dangerous unhinged “tribalism,” while at the same time simply assuming out-of-hand that even stronger feelings of kinship within the Jewish community are not only natural and beneficial, but absolutely necessary for survival.
If you look at the consequences of this double standard, especially in the field of legal and illegal mass in-migration, plus offspring, it seems that the only way for white gentiles to prove they are not anti-Semitic is for them to politely go out of existence.
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