It seems to me that if Wikipedia disappeared, similar information would still be available for the most part, but in more contextualized forms, with more visibility for the authors, and with a greater sense of style and presence.

But isn't this a fact of Wikipedia's namesake—the encyclopedia—as well? There's a reason that once you reach high school you are no longer permitted to quote from the encyclopedia: it's an inferior resource. It would be dangerous to forget that.

Whether they are cordial or not, Wikipedians always act out the ideal that the collective is closer to the truth and the individual voice is dispensable.

Elsewhere, Lanier calls this the "one book" philosophy: the idea that all the world's knowledge could be collected into one true book. Which naturally leads to there being no books—and no truths—at all.

The centrality of advertising to the new digital hive economy is absurd, and it is even more absurd that this isn't more generally recognized. The most tiresome claim of the reigning official digital philosophy is that crowds working for free do a better job at some things than paid antediluvian experts. Wikipedia is often given as an example. If that is so—and as I explained, if the conditions are right it sometimes can be—why doesn't the principle dissolve the persistence of advertising as a business?

A functioning, honest crowd-wisdom system ought to trump paid persuasion. If the crowd is so wise, it should be directing each person optimally in choices related to home finance, the whitening of yellow teeth, and the search for a lover. All that paid persuasion ought to be mooted. Every penny Google earns suggests a failure of the crowd—and Google is earning a lot of pennies.

One response: part of the purpose of advertising (perhaps the most significant purpose) is to persuade you to purchase things for which you have no need whatsoever. Perhaps the crowd does not guide you towards the best tooth whitener, not because it is unable, but because it rightly sees no need for that.

What computerized analysis of all the country's school tests has done to education is exactly what Facebook has done to friendships. In both cases, life is turned into a database. Both degradations are based on the same philosophical mistake, which is the belief that computers can presently represent human thought or human relationships. These are things computers currently cannot do.

I'll take this a step further: these are things computers should not do. Technology is supposed to improve our lives, not replace them.

The approach to digital culture I abhor would indeed turn all the world's books into one book.…Google and other companies are scanning library books into the cloud in a massive Manhattan project of cultural digitization. What happens next is important. If the books in the cloud are accessed via user interfaces that encourage mashups of fragments that obscure the context and authorship of each fragment, there will only be one book. This is what happens today with a lot of content; often, you don't know where a quoted fragment from a news story came from, who wrote the comment, or who shot a video. A continuation of the present trend will make us like the various medieval empires, or like North Korea, a society with a single book.

Indeed, an author and her publisher have recently defended such mashups as what the kids are doing today, seemingly oblivious to how that statement makes all authors and publishers obsolete.

The ethereal, digital replacement technology for the printing press happens to have come of age in a time when the unfortunate ideology I'm criticizing dominates technological culture. Authorship—very idea of the individual point of view—is not a priority of the new technology.

It's that individual point of view that matters; Wikipedia imposes a single voice on all topics, as if there could be a single, agreed-upon, crowd-sourced view of everything. The problem being that once you attain the god's eye view, you lose your ability to interrogate it; you lose your sense of self.

We have certain work to do for our bread, and that is to be done strenuously; other work to do for our delight, and that is to be done heartily: neither is to be done in halves and shifts, but with a will; and what is not worth this effort is not to be done at all. Perhaps all that we have to do is meant for nothing more than an exercise of the heart and of the will, and is useless in itself; but, at all events, the little use it has may well be spared if it is not worth putting our hands and our strength to. It does not become our immortality to take an ease inconsistent with its authority, nor to suffer any instruments with which it can dispense, to come between it and the things it rules: and he who would form the creations of his own mind by any other instrument than his own hand, would also, if he might, give grinding organs to Heaven's angels, to make their music easier. There is dreaming enough, and earthiness enough, and sensuality enough in human existence, without our turning the few glowing moments of it into mechanism; and since our life must at the best be but a vapour that appears for a little time and then vanishes away, let it at least appear as a cloud in the height of Heaven, not as the thick darkness that broods over the blast of the Furnace, and the rolling of the wheel.

Such are his resources that he does not lend us his words; he gives them to us and he does not take them back.

Which, of course, is what every great writer does; his words are a gift to every reader, and all the readers yet to come.

For the man of genius can only give birth to works which will not die by creating in them the image not of the mortal being that he is, but of the exemplum of mankind he bears within him. His thoughts are in some sense lent to him for his lifetime, of which they are the companions. On his death they return to mankind and instruct it.

I love this: that the words are themselves immortal creatures, coupling with us for a time, until we expire and they leave to teach the world what they've learned. That the words have more agency than we do is reason enough to covet their attention.

The room of balaclavas is a sign that indigenous people are engaging in democracy without its most infection symptom—elections. Rather than sitting in individual air-conditioned offices in front of large portraits of themselves, these democratic officials serve their communities anonymously, with their faces hidden by the masks of the office they have assumed. The ski masks also serve another purpose. They are a reminder that when you visit the Junta, you aren't there to see a particular person—you came to see the people. The masks reveal that the most important face in the room is yours.

Forced to assume the visage of the people, the politicians are unable to forge their own, separate brands. In the heat of Chiapas, the ski masks must also represent the burden that the people place on them.