By Ryan Paul

In a recent article, renowned virtual reality guru Jaron Lanier criticizes the community-driven software development process of the open-source movement, asserting that the model isn’t conducive to radical innovation. Lanier believes that the scientific community should shun the open approach and not follow in the footsteps of Linux.

Lanier is a noted critic of Internet collectivism, and one can look at his previously stated positions in order to gain a better understanding of his opinions about open-source software. In a 2006 essay titled “Digital Maoism,” Lanier condemned Wikipedia as a “fetish site for foolish collectivism” and cautioned against what he perceived as descent into mob mentality. The basis for Lanier’s concerns about Internet collectivism, which he elucidated in an article for TIME magazine later that year, seem to extend from the observation that collectivization has a dehumanizing effect that erodes moral autonomy and reduces individuals to the lowest common denominator of the group.

Like most people who have had close encounters with idiocy on the ‘Net, I can certainly sympathize with many of his concerns. In the article, Lanier points out that anonymity tends to foster abusive attitudes and that a collective of anonymous people can easily become a brutish gang. The correlation between anonymity and abrasiveness, especially in the presence of an audience, is quite apparent on the Internet (we may even be treated to a demonstration in the discussion thread for this article). Lanier doesn’t directly address the issue of how collectives magnify the effect, but I think the reasons are pretty obvious: in a collective, participants mutually reinforce each others’ behaviors.

The open-source software community certainly exhibits some of the negative traits of collectivism. For instance, there is a very strong tendency to erect personality cults around strong leaders whose opinions are then given undue weight. There are also many cases where certain groups or factions of the open-source software community have resorted to nasty personal attacks and other inappropriate mob-like behavior in response to a perceived threat. I can also recall several notable instances where irrational group consensus led to adoption of poor practices and technologies to the detriment of innovation. One example of this is CORBA, which was adopted with way too much enthusiasm on the Linux platform despite serious deficiencies and has now been almost completely purged.

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