'Common Sense' is to be distinguished from ideas shared by most

Something you've already read, probably: digital maoism. Snip:

It's not hard to see why the fallacy of collectivism has become so popular in big organizations: If the principle is correct, then individuals should not be required to take on risks or responsibilities. We live in times of tremendous uncertainties coupled with infinite liability phobia, and we must function within institutions that are loyal to no executive, much less to any lower level member. Every individual who is afraid to say the wrong thing within his or her organization is safer when hiding behind a wiki or some other Meta aggregation ritual.

I've participated in a number of elite, well-paid wikis and Meta-surveys lately and have had a chance to observe the results. I have even been part of a wiki about wikis. What I've seen is a loss of insight and subtlety, a disregard for the nuances of considered opinions, and an increased tendency to enshrine the official or normative beliefs of an organization. Why isn't everyone screaming about the recent epidemic of inappropriate uses of the collective? It seems to me the reason is that bad old ideas look confusingly fresh when they are packaged as technology.

When I came across this essay when it was first written, I dismissed as yet another smear piece on Wikipedia, which seemed to be very fashionable. A second reading has revealed it to be a lot more thoughtful and nuanced than I thought.

I think it's important to distinguish between varying shades of aggregator: you've got on one hand experiments like fark and indymedia, that rise and fall with the strength of the personalities behind them. Even then, an unspoken consensus seems to emerge according to 'traditions' of humour or commentary. On the other hand, you have emergent forms of aggregators, based not on commentary but on constant evaluation. For example, Amazon, which begun offering only reviews of books. Then, it was necessary to review the reviews, and the reviewers themselves. Most 'aggregators' now conceal actual human words behind another link, leaving only an aggregate numerical evaluation. It's an important distinction, if only for aesthetic reasons: one form of aggregation celebrates the conflict that characterizes our shrivelled commons, while the other conceals it and integrates it into a sleek facade.

When you see the context in which something was written and you know who the author was beyond just a name, you learn so much more than when you find the same text placed in the anonymous, faux-authoritative, anti-contextual brew of the Wikipedia. The question isn't just one of authentication and accountability, though those are important, but something more subtle. A voice should be sensed as a whole. You have to have a chance to sense personality in order for language to have its full meaning. Personal Web pages do that, as do journals and books. Even Britannica has an editorial voice, which some people have criticized as being vaguely too "Dead White Men."

Really? The faux-authoritative voice of 'dead white men', proven to be just as (sometimes more) counter-factual on average than wikipedia, is somehow more infused with authorial voice, and thus meaning, and thus objectivity? I mean, it's been awhile since I picked up the Britannica, but... I do not recall there being much of an authorial voice. Or context.

Objectivity is a term that is noticeably absent from 'Digital Maoism', even though it lies at the crux of the argument: the author is arguing against the postmodernist idea of the Death of the Author, and arguing that a human voice is necessary to maintain a semblance of objectivity. In some ways, that is certainly a refreshing argument. But by necessity the argument must fall back onto reactionary ideas about the site of collectivism versus individualism, and the nature of authority.

Yes, there have been plenty of scandals in government, the academy and in 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 pre-Internet world is "yes," but only provided some signal processing is placed in the loop.

So we have started from a passionate criticism of 'collectivism in large organizations', to a wholesale defense of a 'pre-internet' order. Reread the first quote:

We live in times of tremendous uncertainties coupled with infinite liability phobia, and we must function within institutions that are loyal to no executive, much less to any lower level member... I've participated in a number of elite, well-paid wikis and Meta-surveys lately and have had a chance to observe the results. What I've seen is a loss of insight and subtlety, a disregard for the nuances of considered opinions, and an increased tendency to enshrine the official or normative beliefs of an organization.

Are these not the defining characteristics of the institutions themselves? In his rush to declaim the rise of a more efficient aggregation of 'common sense', the author has adopted rather quaint notions about the 'good old days' of the free market, and the objectivity and democracy industries. Thus demonstrating a comfortable awareness of 'common sense', but not truth.

The truth is that 'common sense' is neither an aggregation of the collective will, or the product of co-operation between hive-mind and individuals. 'Common sense' is a product, manufactured... the author's conception of the free market is a dangerous abstraction, a mirage of something that has never existed in any concrete form. When capitalism was being conceived, it was a time of great state involvement in trade, and... well, actually, most people call it genocide. Capitalism existed first as an alibi for theft. And it continued in that regard for five hundred years. And it continues today. Europe's development cannot be understood correctly without also simultaneously understanding colonialism. And not just in vague, handwringing, bleeding-heart terms; in bloody-fistful-of-dollar terms. We decry slavery but who knows the actual number of people killed? We know the number of Jews killed by Hitler, that is common sense. We do not know the numbers of Africans killed, or the amount of wealth taken from Africa and used to fuel Europe's 'development.' That is not common-sensical. It is not a useful number.

See, if I were to post this on a news-aggregator, I would come off as 'shrill.' This is an epithet for excess emotion, and an unwillingness to lapse into faux-objective euphemism. And so I do have sympathy for the author's skepticism towards internet collectivism. But this form of filtering is much, much older than the internet or wikipedia. People have long ago learned to imitate the 'authoritative voice' in order to 'be taken seriously' in discussion. Faux-authoritative voice is a mode of monologue that is anything but individual, whether it originates from 'wikitopians' or 'dead old men.' It is jargon that invites or excludes. It is mainstreamism.

Unfortunately, these filters of 'common sense' do not originate with the supremacy of mass media, and they are not abolished by the emergence of user-based or hive-mind media. Common sense is not defined by the masons or by overt conspiracy. But it is defined by what is and isn't politically expedient, and they incorrectly quantify perceptions or manage them to realms of pre-arranged possibility. And yet, at midnight somewhere in America two strangers will have a conversation where they both agree that leaders are monsters, that their lives are driven by outside forces, that 'things are going to hell', and that there's not much that either of them can do about it but take another hefty pull from the bottle in front of them. I know that occasionally the conversation between me and 'normal people'-- a court officer in one case-- makes me question whether or not my anarchist tendencies are truly considered 'inappropriate' to most... often my beliefs seem to be quite palpable to them.

These are concerns shared by a large number of people, but they cannot be 'common sense.' People manage their thoughts into 'opinions', as dictated by the forms of communication around them. People play into the 'mainstream' with a certain amount of awareness; they go through the motions but do not take it seriously. But institutions don't mind if you are singing passionately or just mouthing the words, as long as they define the public consensus.

So what to make of the fact that a third of Americans are so drastically outside the public consensus that they believe that 9/11 was an inside job? How can society continue to function if a third of Americans are believing things that should make widespread disobedience a moral imperative? Or, like, do they believe the conspiracies ironically or what? To answer that, maybe it's time to let somebody else do the do the telling...