Monday, April 6th, 2009 1:45 pm by
Anthony DiPierro 
 |
| The Blue Screen of Death at a subway station |
In my last post I wrote that the Internet is amazing. It is. Moreover, and before that, I would say that the personal computer is one of the great inventions of our time. However, those who know me well may recall that I’ve been known to make the comment that “I hate the Internet” or that “I hate computers”. There’s an implicit equivocation there – what I really hate is the shortfall between what the Internet and the PC could offer and what they have become. I hate the buggy, poorly designed software that is so prevalent on computers. I hate the multitude of websites with great potential that slide into mediocrity, or worse.
 |
| Evan Prodromou’s Crowdsourcing |
Mediocrity is the great disappointment on the Internet, and time and time again the mediocrity seems to be directly caused by compromise. Despite claims of the wisdom of the crowds, creative projects benefit from having small numbers of contributors. As Fred Brooks pointed out in The Mythical Man Month, adding manpower to a late software project only makes it later. In fact, the process of thinking, so far as we can tell, is a private one which can only be done by single individuals. “Crowdsourcing” can aggregate the results of these individuals together, or provide an average result through compromise, but neither aggregation nor averaging qualifies as any sort of “intelligence”.
 |
| Steve Wozniak |
Almost all if not all of the great software projects, even in the open source world, were created by very small numbers of individuals. In most cases only a single individual was in charge of the design, and in those cases where more than one was in charge I’d argue that the project failed to reach its full potential as a result. Dave Hyatt and Blake Ross created Firefox. Apache was created by Robert McCool. Michael Widenius wrote the majority of the first version of MySQL. Steve Wozniak built the Apple computer and wrote the operating system for it. In the Website world, Larry Page and Sergey Brin created Google. Jerry Yang and David Filo made Yahoo. Larry Sanger and Ben Kovitz invented Wikipedia. Meanwhile, Wikia Search, an idea of Jimmy Wales which he tried to convince the masses to build for him, died a miserable death less than a week ago.
The Internet has brought tremendous advances to the ability of humans to communicate, and therefore collaborate. But it hasn’t changed the nature of collaboration.
Image credits:
- BSOD Photo by flickr contributor thirdrail. Available under CC-BY-NC.
- Crowdsourcing by Evan Prodromou. Available under CC-BY-NC.
- Steve Wozniak by Al Luckow. Public domain.
Abraham Lincoln was credited with saying, “The hen is the wisest of all animals. She doesn’t cackle until [i]after[/i] she lays the egg.” Ben Kovitz, I believe, has proved wiser still. He not only failed to cackle, he allowed Larry Sanger and Jimbo Wales to claim all the credit for creating Wikipedia. The wise do not eagerly claim credit for a rotten egg.
And Tim Berners-Lee, who lives down the road from me, invented the World Wide Web.
I met Steve Wozniak at MIT when he participated in a panel discussion on the launch of a book celebrating invention and innovation.
After the panel session was over, and we had a few minutes to schmooze with the panelists, I went up to Steve Wozniak and remarked, “The smartest thing you ever did, when you designed the Apple Computer, is that you left out the Amygdala.”
He gave me a quizzical look.
“That’s the Fear Processor,” I explained. The Apple Computer has a Buddha Nature because you can’t intimidate it.
He brightened up as he absorbed the point of my remark. Wozniak had imbued his own invention with a key trait of fearless inventors like himself. He had given it a Buddha Nature.
There is no way to bully an Apple Computer, for it has no fear, carries no grudges, and has no motivation for revenge.
That’s what Wikipedia is, extremely well crafted mediocrity. That’s what the wisdom of crowds really is.
“Well crafted mediocrity”. Can I use that for the title of a future Akahele blog post?
Barry, I’m planning to borrow “Inventing Modern America” from the library next time I go.
Also check out The Pattern On the Stone by Danny Hillis. I guarantee you will enjoy that book.
[...] optimism of participants in commons-based models (Open Source and Wikipedia) ignores the fact that “Almost all if not all of the great software projects, even in the open source world, were cre… Students would rather tweet or update Facebook than pay attention in class, with the result being a [...]