"The Current Negotiated Truth"
A month ago I read Digital Maoism, an article by Jaron Lanier which argued that because so many in the Silicon Valley (and elsewhere) have an unquestioning belief that technology is here to solve all our problems, that extreme views (including, as he argues, collectivism) have mainstream appeal among technologists. I had a hard time with his argument that anonymity and the neutral viewpoint on Wikipedia leads to either bad writing or persistent inaccuracies on the site, but listening to Open Source's episode with Lanier, James Surowiecki and David Weinberger I found myself agreeing with Weinberger the most (Surowiecki and Lanier mostly agreed with each other, disagreeing mostly on emphasis and to which cases the "wisdom of crowds" applies). Where Weinberger argues that “having an extended conversation in which they are trying to get past themselves so they can get to something they agree on and write it down”, Lanier can only disagree by pointing to the discussion pages, which can get pretty raucous. I believe Weinberger meant the pages themselves, which are, in a sense, “extended conversations” towards what Cory Doctorow calls "the current negotiated truth".
