Lanier maintains, for example, that musical development has essentially stalled. He has a challenge: "[P]lay me some music that is characteristic of the late 2000s as opposed to the late 1990s." Lanier claims that listeners can't distinguish between recent musical eras because music is "retro, retro, retro."

And nobody noticed? I just saw this:

The Slate review
Bookavore review

Yes, Lanier is a mega-dork and just as much of a con artist as anyone in the 2.0 world.
Still makes some good points. That comment about music cuts right to the quick.
He's right about that one--I think that rock-n-roll essentially stopped changing in the 1970s/80s.

It is increasingly disheartening to write about any topic in depth these days, because people will only read what the first link from a search engine directs them to, and that will typically be the collective expression of the Wikipedia. Or, if the issue is contentious, people will congregate into partisan online bubbles in which their views are reinforced. I don’t think a collective voice can be effective for many topics, such as history--and neither can a partisan mob. Collectives have a power to distort history in a way that damages minority viewpoints and calcifies the art of interpretation. Only the quirkiness of considered individual expression can cut through the nonsense of mob--and that is the reason intellectual activity is important.

A new book by Web 2.0 critic Jaron Lanier, who in the past has had unkind words for Wikipedia, will be released next week. There is an interview with him at Amazon.com and a review of the book in Slate.

From the Amazon interview:

...Mr. Lanier hangs out at John Brockman's www.edge.org, which is insufferably elitist. Brockman's site is much worse than Wikipedia.

I am not Jaron Lanier. Mr. Lanier hangs out at John Brockman's www.edge.org, which is insufferably elitist. Brockman's site is much worse than Wikipedia.

JOHN BROCKMAN is a cultural impresario whose career has encompassed the avant-garde art world, science, books, software, and the Internet. In the 1960s he coined the word "intermedia"...

The Edge