Unabridged Audiobook
The (co?)founder of Wikipedia talks about Wikipedia, and trust. He makes the case that there are some valuable insights to be gained from how Wikipedia works that apply broadly to democracy at scale, and we’re in danger if we don’t fix some recent trust problems. The rather bland and unsurprising observations here aren’t very controversial, and might even be considered rather common sense. What Jimmy avoids discussing at all is what to do about extremism. To paraphrase a famous observation, a tolerant society has to be intolerant of intolerance. Jimmy’s solution is to always assume good faith. That’s a great starting point for beginning interactions with someone you’ve never met, but he conveniently leaves out any suggestion about what to do about inveterate trolls and bad-faith actors, which is the real problem. There is no mention whatsoever of the bots that undo spam and vandalism on Wikipedia, and hardly any mention (except one small anecdote) about how they handle vandalism. Sure, on that platform you can ban IPs and usernames (which doesn’t prevent them from really coming back, if you know anything about networking). Jimmy has no view on what to do with these folks in brick-and-mortar, meatspace society. Fine— we don’t need to hear his opinion because this book is about harnessing the power of the public and having open, good-faith debates. Wonderful! But Jimmy doesn’t address the verifiable fact that open, non-partisan venues for news and discussion are also disappearing. Conglomerates like Sinclair are buying up all the media outlets, so the public gets one sanitized and pre-digested view decided by a minority elite. There is no suggestion about where or how to hold such society-wide debates, other than to mention the pitfalls of social media without a common purpose. Overall, a fine listen but rather bland.
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