You are not a Gadget: A Manifesto by Jaron Lanier Page A

reasonably free of manipulation or runaway internal resonances. But when a collective designs a product, you get design by committee, which is a derogatory expression for a reason.
    Collectives can be just as stupid as any individual—and, in important cases, stupider. The interesting question is whether it’s possible to map out where the one is smarter than the many.
    There is a substantial history to this topic, and varied disciplines have accumulated instructive results. Every authentic example of collective intelligence that I am aware of also shows how that collective was guided or inspired by well-meaning individuals. These people focused the collective and in some cases also corrected for some of the common hive mind failure modes. The balancing of influence between people and collectives is the heart of the design of democracies, scientific communities, and many other long-standing success stories.
    The preinternet world provides some great examples of how individual human-driven quality control can improve collective intelligence. Forexample, an independent press provides tasty news about politicians by journalists with strong voices and reputations, like the Watergate reporting of Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein. Without an independent press, composed of heroic voices, the collective becomes stupid and unreliable, as has been demonstrated in many historical instances—most recently, as many have suggested, during the administration of George W Bush.
    Scientific communities likewise achieve quality through a cooperative process that includes checks and balances, and ultimately rests on a foundation of goodwill and “blind” elitism (blind in the sense that ideally anyone can gain entry, but only on the basis of a meritocracy). The tenure system and many other aspects of the academy are designed to support the idea that individual scholars matter, not just the process or the collective.
    Yes, there have been plenty of scandals in government, the academy, and the press. No mechanism is perfect. But still here we are, having benefited from all of these institutions. There certainly have been plenty of bad reporters, self-deluded academic scientists, incompetent bureaucrats, and so on. Can the hive mind help keep them in check? The answer provided by experiments in the preinternet world is yes—but only if some signal processing has been placed in the loop.
    Signal processing is a bag of tricks engineers use to tweak flows of information. A common example is the way you can set the treble and bass on an audio signal. If you turn down the treble, you are reducing the amount of energy going into higher frequencies, which are composed of tighter, smaller sound waves. Similarly, if you turn up the bass, you are heightening the biggest, broadest waves of sound.
    Some of the regulating mechanisms for collectives that have been most successful in the preinternet world can be understood as being like treble and bass controls. For instance, what if a collective moves too readily and quickly, jittering instead of settling down to provide a stable answer? This happens on the most active Wikipedia entries, for example, and has also been seen in some speculation frenzies in open markets.
    One service performed by representative democracy is low-pass filtering, which is like turning up the bass and turning down the treble. Imagine the jittery shifts that would take place if a wiki were put in charge ofwriting laws. It’s a terrifying thing to consider. Superenergized people would be struggling to shift the wording of the tax code on a frantic, never-ending basis. The internet would be swamped.
    Such chaos can be avoided in the same way it already is, albeit imperfectly: by the slower processes of elections and court proceedings. These are like bass waves. The calming effect of orderly democracy achieves more than just the smoothing out of peripatetic struggles for consensus. It also reduces the potential for the collective to