Geek Freaks - Jaron Lanier rants against Web 2.0

hao3 writes: In his new book, You Are Not A Gadget, former Wired writer Jaron Lanier bemoans what the internet has become. "It's early in the twenty-first century, and that means that these words will mostly be read by nonpersons," it begins. The words will be "minced into anatomized search engine keywords," then "copied millions of times by some algorithm somewhere designed to send an advertisement," and then, in a final insult, "scanned, rehashed, and misrepresented by crowds of quick and sloppy readers." Lanier's conclusion: "Real human eyes will read these words in only a tiny minority of the cases." He goes on to criticise Google, Wikipedia, Facebook, Twitter, open-source software and what he calls the 'hive mind'. This will be nothing new to the 'crowds of quick and sloppy readers' on Slashdot, where no one RTFA, which nevertheless somehow becomes slashdotted. But has Web 2.0 made it worse or is Lanier's book nothing but a long, rambling 'now get off my lawn!!'?