In Infotopia, Cass R. Sunstein argues that because deliberative groups are prone to groupthink, with people copying each other’s biases and worrying about status, they should compensate for those flaws by encouraging individual thinking and contrariness.

That’s well and good, but Sunstein gets there by way of prediction markets, which he holds up as a sort of ideal form of decision making, where people independently make bets that reflect the best of their knowledge. Prediction markets, he believes, are “uncannily” accurate.  We should be using them a lot.

Prediction markets are interesting (and fun!), but I’m skeptical about how useful they are.  They’re clearly good at gathering hidden information, but many of the areas Sunstein believes prediction markets would be good for, (such as the number of deaths from a new disease, or the likelihood of a “feared event” in the Middle East), are characterized by what Nassim Taleb calls wild randomness, the fourth quadrant.  Essentially, they’re unpredictable.

Sunstein doesn’t pretend that prediction markets always work, but he oversells them, treating them a bit like a magic eightball.  You can ask it almost anything – never mind why on earth it would know the answer.

His analogy with Hayek’s price theory is also flawed.  Market prices reflect something everyone’s an expert on: How much is this worth for me?  That’s not the case with wild randomness.   Perhaps prediction markets make better predictions than the alternatives, but that’s missing the point: If your plans for the future depend on our ability to predict it, you’re doing it wrong.

Where Jaron Lanier is a tech skeptic, who warns against the implicit digital maoism of Web 2.0, Clay Shirky is a tech evangelist, who praises social media for enabling entirely new forms of cooperation.  For some reason I like both.

That’s because their worldviews aren’t actually in conflict, they just deal with technology at different levels.  At least that’s how I read them.  Shirky looks at the amazing possibilities social media opens up here and now.  Lanier looks at the drawbacks, – and at the amazing possibilites we don’t have here and now, and haven’t even thought of yet.

Shirky’s argument is that social media lowers the transaction costs of group efforts, allowing people to find like-minded people and cooperate with them.  Traditionally, group effort required central coordination and formal hierarchies.  Organized effort required organizations.  Now it can be done with social media.

That’s mostly for the good, but the factors that reduce transaction costs for the opposition in Belarus and Iran, also reduce it for terrorists, conspiracy theorists and anorectics.  You get the bad with the good.  But Shirky mostly focuses on the good.

You can choose to see a conflict with skeptics like Lanier here, but we’re well past the “Internet – for or against?!!” debates of the 2000′s.  It’s not like we can turn the clock back.  This is the world we live in, and it’s not all black or all white.

When it comes to technology, I listen to both optimists and skeptics.  I agree more with the optimists, (how can you not be a technology optimist?), but I don’t like their religious fervor.  The best of the skeptics are not luddites, they’re people who, precisely because they know and love technology, don’t just blindly accept whatever some tech company throws their way.  They know that technology is accidental, not inevitable.  They know we have a choice in how we use it.

In You Are Not a Gadget, Jaron Lanier warns that Web 2.0 pushes people into behavioral patterns that reduce their individuality.  Technology is not neutral, and it never lets us express more than a fragment of our selves.  It is easy to reduce our idea of who we are, in order to conform to the demands and limitations of some technology.

Lanier also believes that the search for the highest possible meta, the aggregator of aggregators, becomes a form of collectivism.  There’s a strain of mysticism here, a dream of merging with the hive mind, seen as a higher level of being.  But crowds are not wise.  The best human qualities are reserved for individuals.

This sounds obvious, but this is not a book of platitudes.  What I find inspiring is how Lanier reminds us of the possibilities in technology, and how some of the technologies that impress us most today actually represent a lack of ambition.  We’re walking one path, but there are thousands other. Take a step side-ways.

It’s early in the twenty-first century, and that means that these words will mostly be read by nonpersons – automatons or numb mobs composed of people who are no longer acting as individuals. The words will be minced into atomized search-engine keywords within industrial cloud computing facilities located in remote, often secret locations around the world. They will be copied millions of times by algorithms designed to send an advertisement to some person somewhere who happens to resonate with some fragment of what I say. They will be scanned, rehashed and misrepresented by crowds of quick and sloppy readers into wikis and automatically aggregated wireless text message streams.

Reactions will repeatedly degenerate into mindless chains of anonymous insults and inarticulate controversies. Algorithms will find correlations between those who read my words and their purchases, their romantic adventures, their debts, and, soon, their genes. Ultimately these words will contribute to the fortunes of those few who have been able to position themselves as lords of the computing clouds.

The vast fanning out of the fates of these words will take place almost entirely in the lifeless world of pure information. Real human eyes will read these words in only a tiny minority of the cases.

And yet it is you, the person, the rarity among my readers, I hope to reach.

The words in this book are written for people, not computers.

I want to say: You have to be somebody before you can share yourself.

The preface to Jaron Lanier’s You Are Not a Gadget.