Reddit mentions of You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto

I recommend You Are Not A Gadget by Jaron Lanier. Not because I agree with his ideas - for the most part, I vehemently disagree with them (Lanier, in my opinion, spends far too much time worrying about the evils of language without even touching on the impact of what it is used to say). Read it because it raises a bunch of issues that aren't really mainstream yet.

Something you need to consider when you do this is that you are probing and prodding the boundaries of a system that has absolutely no resilience in it whatsoever. Internet communities, particularly those with novel architecture, are incredibly unstable - consider just how fast Digg self-destructed. Something else you need to consider is that when you pop up and "bullet" a random user in, say, /r/WTF you are taking a place that has four hundred thousand faceless names and turning it into a place that has four hundred thousand faceless names staring at one person who has suddenly, against their will, become entirely human.

Look at it this way. You're at a football stadium. Suddenly, a face appears on the Jumbotron. That face is happy and excited - we all love recognition, we all love that little flit of fame. That's every girlfriend/cat/rage pic you've ever seen. But what if instead of just showing that face, it showed a name, an address, property tax records, political affiliation, political donation history and DMV records?

How excited would that face be?

All this information is publicly available, of course. It wouldn't even be that tough - if you knew who owned what season tickets, you could have all that ready to throw up at a moment's notice. And I guarantee you - there's a whole bunch of people in that stadium who will think that's awesome.

...until the camera is pointed at them.

We all have the camera. All of us. As I've mentioned, been there, done that. And people are usually at least a little creeped out when an individual learns more than you expect.

When a collective learns?

This is a fragile ecosystem you're experimenting with. Just keep it in mind.

You may be interested in checking out Jaron Lanier's work. He wrote You are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto. Here's a video of him speaking about "Alan Turing and the Tech World's New Religion."