fake on lanier
Caterina Fake responds to Jaron Lanier’s piece in the Wall Street Journal. First, for context, the salient bit from Lanier’s piece:
It turns out that millions of people are ready to contribute instead of sitting passively on the couch watching television. [But] we made a huge mistake in making those contributions unpaid, and often anonymous, because those bad decisions robbed people of dignity.
And with that, here’s Fake:
Systems such as Wikipedia, Flickr, Delicious, Facebook, Twitter, Hunch and various parts of the open source movement are based around small contributory systems, bodies of work in which there are incremental improvements by multiple contributors, or exposing small actions that would be insignificant in isolation, but are meaningful in the aggregate. These types of software and platforms are specifically designed for conversation and contribution. That is the point.
Emphasis mine.