Annual Wikimania conference, held in Haifa, Israel in 2011. No one knows who most of the editors are, but they are generally found to be white males. Photo by Sebastian Wallroth.
So here's one of those PandoDaily posts that help sell the gadgets better. So Nathaniel Mott is using that "iconoclastic" trick of bloggers purporting to go against the status quo (the hatred of fanboyz of something stupid tech companies are doing) to in fact support the establishment.
I can't help thinking of that deliciously awful put-down by Nick Danton, the Valleywag entrepreneur:
Oh @sarahcuda, you matter. As scraping courtier to the tech princes, flatterer-in-chief at Pander Daily, you are a gift of a subject.
— Nick Denton (@nicknotned) January 29, 2013
Somebody aptly calls the overpriced $1300 new Google-manufactured Chromebook a glorified browser with a keyboard attached to it, that oh, yeah, you can swipe on, and Mott turns it into an epiphany about Luddites Who Stop Progress.
I remember it was one of the pioneers in virtual reality in Second Life at Stanford who bragged on Facebook that his little two-year-old daughter automatically tried to swipe the TV set because she was used to swiping the i-pad, and found that it was "b'oken" because it didn't behave as she, an obviously evolved creature, expected it to.
I remember my father, an engineer, coming home from work at Xerox Corporation one day some 45 years ago and telling me that "the boys in the string ties" as he used to call the people in California making up different wild gadgets were making them try screens with "light pens" as he called them. In other words, if you held this "light pen," a pen made to be able to interact with the pixels on a TV screen, you could make the screen "do things". It was among those early tests with interactive screens -- the pen would make the screen "do stuff". But this was an annoyance because you'd have to take your hands off the keyboard, then pick up that pen, which would get lost, so they had it corded to the computer like a phone. This was before the mouse.
In any event, here we all are, and we're supposed to swipe stuff. All well and good, soon everything -- bathroom mirrors, kitchen tables, bedside stands, etc. will have screens or be screen-enabled and be swipable.
But here's the problem with ubiqituous computing or the semantic web or the Internet of Things or whatever they will call it, and it's not that awkward gap between keyboard and hand-swipe: the knowledge base.
You're supposed to be able to touch anything or call to anything and get answers from those "smart" things -- smart phones, smart tablets, even smart bathroom mirrors or tables in the future.
And where will this smartness come from?
Well, it will only come from Wikipedia, which is highly flawed and written by a bunch of anonymous and unaccountable geeks nearly impervious to the rest of the Internet because there really aren't valid votes on their work or even the ability to share the pages for discussion (and recently I was told by a well-informed Wiki-geek that this was due to fears of privacy concerns, that they'd have to hook their pages up to Facebook's servers to process the "likes". Sigh.)
To be sure, there are a few competitors, like the drama-ridden and sectarian-hobbled Quora, which I don't play, because nobody pays me to write smart essays on my areas of expertise there -- they don't even pay me in Quorabux to enable me to buy a t-shirt or a free Coke or something. There's also Qwiki, that was an attempt to make an encyclopedia pulling in your social web and Wikipedia both, with sometimes hilarious results, which is now morphing into yet another "innovation" of the tired three elements of social/video/pictures only this time as video/pictures/social.
So that does leave Wikipedia far out ahead.
As you know, I have at least 21 theses against Wikipedia -- and more. I could add "and this awfulness is used as the tainted basis now for the 'smartness' of all smart-phones etc."
Imagine I'm at a party and everyone whispers into their Apple Watch or their Google Glass, "Who is Catherine A. Fitzpatrick?" And they get my vandalized and ridiculous Wikipedia entry partly taken from Enclopedia Dramatica. So while they are all whispering to each other that my entire career seems to have been obsessed with taking down a Soviet-themed commuter college digital arts department named Woodbury in suburban California, or fattening up my children adopted in Soviet Russia in order to eat them, or that I am "the biggest asshole of the Internet" (if the vandalism happens to not yet have been removed at that particular hour), what am I to do?
Well, fortunately by that time, someone will have created the Right of Reply ap or some other kind of Propaganda Layar (which is how it will be seen) to counteract that, um, "voice of the people," Wikipedia. So Wicked Impediment would have harmed yet another social transaction, but who cares? The nerd in New Jersey who lives to spite middle-aged WikiLeaks critics he loathes lives to fight another day in anonymity.
That's just a tiny thing -- what if the Olympics managers asks the smartthing for the national anthem of Kazakhstan, and gets not the real national anthem, but Borat's Song? (That actually happened in real life).
Or what if the President of the United States summons on his aging Blackberry or Google Glass, if he wears one, the facts about some country he is about to order invaded, and the Wikipedia entry is skewed with over-hype from that country's defense ministry about its defense capacity that in fact is wildly exaggerated?
And so on.
I used to think the only solution to fix the awfulness of Wikipedia that would actually happen (because disbanding it or making all the editors unmask themselves and be accountable) would be having Google buy it out. They might fix up some of its obvious stupidities and make it work better. After all, it's Wikipedia that provides the fig leaf to Google, the Ad Agency, by turning up search results with actually non-commercial "knowledge" or the appearance of same, on every search, before you see the SEO-skewed results or the paid ads. Google Glass needs Wikipedia even more voraciously than regular online search sitting at your computer or i-phone.
Will the new scrutiny and burden on Wikipedia finally make this open-source cult bastion crack and crumble like the old Soviet Union and finally be forced to reform? Will that reform perpetuate it and/or make it worse?
That same well-informed geek told me that no one in Wikipedia would ever countenance the idea that Google would buy out Wikipedia because a) it's not for sale and is nonprofit and b) they knew that Google had failed at this task only a few years ago with its Knoll thing. Nolls. Whatever they were called. "Units of knowledge". Yes, it failed and closed. So what? Google is better, maybe, at buying out start-ups that already had some user testing.
And yes, there's a price that likely Jimmy Wales could be bought at. Well, as I said to the Wiki-geek, get rid of that creepy leader of yours with the creepy eyes and then maybe they'll talk.
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