I don't know if Jaron is right or not about the web, information freedom, and its effects on musicians, translators, and other content creators. It will take a few more years to find out what happens to a society with true freedom of information once the dust has settled, assuming we actually manage to build one.
One thing from the article that did really hit me is the quote, “This is the thing that continues to scare me. You see in history the capacity of people to congeal—like social lasers of cruelty. That capacity is
constant.”
I see it on a small scale all the time. The tendency that lets middle-schoolers pick on ugly kids and the Westboro Baptists to spread hate about gays is the same flaw in group psychology that gives us witch hunts and holocausts and suicide bombers. "Kill the outsider! Shun the nonbeliever! Purify the tribe! Root our the Communists!"
To the people involved it feels so perfect and righteous and true. We never realize until it's too late what a horrible thing they've started. This pattern, this tendency toward purges and mass hysterias, has probably been with us as long as we've had tribes and it's not going anywhere unless we do something very serious about it. Human nature is old and big and it doesn't go down without a fight. This particular quirk of human nature scares the shit out of me. I don't think I'm exaggerating when I say it threatens the very survival of our species.
Again I don't know much about this Jaron character but I get the feeling we're on the same side. "Social lasers of cruelty" is a perfect name for something I've been trying to pin down and name for a while now.