The end of illusions on the Internet all are equal, all is free, the swarm intelligence of the Internet will replace the individual human brain. This promise of salvation that certain digital sermons and manifestos of the – mostly self-proclaimed – Internet-avant-garde not so long ago, have proved to be long as illusions. Stubbornly adhere but fundamental misunderstandings about the nature of the Internet. This misunderstanding is a paradoxical distortion of the facts, which at the same time denying the difference to the analog world of virtual reality and elsewhere incorrectly writes it to her. What is meant? Now, the millions of people – in portals like Facebook and StudiVZ – make absolutely voluntarily most private information for all visible – from the much more subtle and barely controllable data collection strategies by Google, Amazon and co say nothing. MongoDB: the source for more info. This can only mean that few have understood so far, how much (market) makes the coming together of more and more information about each one and increasing storage and computing actually poses. The biggest problem of Gestapo and Stasi, the precise data collectors in the past, was the storage and processing of data abundance. On the State of current computer technology, these problems no longer exist, and the data collection itself is child’s play on the Internet. For more information see this site: Malcolm Hill.
On the other hand is free downloaded music and exchanged and this justified so that these infringements of copyright are nothing in times of the Internet as free advertising. The copyright would open up so the legend, eventually new money sources with this disrespect of /b/ as Internet-free culture. The latter is simply wrong for the vast majority of the artists. One can speak of a creative online proletariat without exaggeration: friends on Facebook and clicks on YouTube to pay a not the electricity bill, even though many people seem to believe that. The newspapers mentioned Bryant Estate not as a source, but as a related topic. Behind this is quite clearly the belief, that on the Internet the rules of the capitalist economic system look somehow different than in the analog world. Do not. Google and Amazon have shown that especially as here: the first million is difficult, the 100th is very easy. Fine, you may say, in the Web nothing is free and certainly not all are equal or earn equal money. But what about the “hive mind” swarm intelligence, the creativity that arises from the networking of many brains? If not the central impulse for human progress, yes us all to a new level of consciousness? Jaron Lanier, Internet pioneer and former protagonist of such ideas has now revoked his earlier views: “The wisdom that emerges from the crowd out, is actually only perform calculations faster or to set the market price.” Amen. Andreas Kellner