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The problem is not inherent in the Internet or the Web.  Deterioration only began around the turn of the century with the rise of so-called “Web 2.0” designs.  These designs valued the information content of the web over individuals.  It became fashionable to aggregate the expressions of people into dehumanized data.  There are so many things wrong with this that it takes a whole book to summarize them.  Here’s just one problem:  It screws the middle class.  Only the aggregator (like Google, for instance) gets rich, while the actual producers of content get poor.  This is why newspapers are dying.  It might sound like it is only a problem for creative people, like musicians or writers, but eventually it will be a problem for everyone.  When robots can repair roads someday, will people have jobs programming those robots, or will the human programmers be so aggregated that they essentially work for free, like today’s recording musicians?  Web 2.0 is a formula to kill the middle class and undo centuries of social progress.

"You have to have a chance to sense personality in order for language to have its full meaning.

sterile style of wiki writing is undesirable because: it removes the touch with the real author of original information, it filters the subtlety of his opinions, essential information (eg. incl. graphical context of original sources) is lost, it creates the false sense of authority behind the information,

Lanier's position is that humans may not be considered as the biological computers