Wikileaks Exposes Internet’s Dissent Tax, not Nerd Supremacy

“Jaron Lanier’s recent lengthy essay about Wikileaks is not
really about Wikileaks; thus, it is unsurprising that he misses the
central lesson of this affair. From the beginning, he makes the
fundamental conceptual mistake of conflating individual human
beings and powerful institutions, like governments and
corporations; he then takes off on a dystopic vision of a world
dominated by an imagined “nerd supremacist” ethic of complete
transparency, collapse of private life, and unrestricted
information flow, in which humanity is the slave of the
machine.

“Horrifying as this vision is, it simply distracts from the main
lessons of the Wikileaks affair: the increasing control of
(relatively) unaccountable corporations and states over the key
components of the Internet, and their increased willingness to use
this control in politicized ways to impose a “dissent tax” on
content they find objectionable. Ability to disseminate one’s ideas
on the Internet is now a sine qua non of inclusion in the global
public sphere. However, the Internet is not a true public sphere;
it is a public sphere erected on private property, what I have
dubbed a “quasi-public sphere,” where the property owners can
sideline and constrain dissent.”

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