Who Owns the Future? Read online

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  Contents

  Prelude

  Hello, Hero

  Terms

  PART ONE

  First Round

  1. Motivation

  The Problem in Brief

  Put Up or Shut Up

  Moore’s Law Changes the Way People Are Valued

  Essential but Worthless

  The Beach at the Edge of Moore’s Law

  The Price of Heaven

  The Problem Is Not the Technology, but the Way We Think About the Technology

  Saving the Winners from Themselves

  Progress Is Compulsory

  Progress Is Never Free of Politics

  Back to the Beach

  2. A Simple Idea

  Just Blurt the Idea Out

  A Simple Example

  Big Talk, I Know . . .

  FIRST INTERLUDE: ANCIENT ANTICIPATION OF THE SINGULARITY

  Aristotle Frets

  Do People Deserve to Be Paid if They Aren’t Miserable?

  The Plot

  PART TWO

  The Cybernetic Tempest

  3. Money as Seen Through One Computer Scientist’s Eyes

  Money, God, and the Old Technology of Forgetting

  The Information Technology of Optimism

  4. The Ad Hoc Construction of Mass Dignity

  Are Middle Classes Natural?

  Two Familiar Distributions

  Tweaks to Network Design Can Change Distributions of Outcomes

  Letting Bell Curves Be Bell Curves

  Star Systems Starve Themselves; Bell Curves Renew Themselves

  An Artificial Bell Curve Made of Levees

  The Senseless Ideal of a Perfectly Pure Market

  Income Is Different from Wealth

  The Taste of Politics

  Drove My Chevy to the Levee but the Levee Was Dry

  How Is Music like a Mortgage?

  5. “Siren Servers”

  There Can’t Be Complexity Without Ambiguity

  A First Pass at a Definition

  Where Sirens Beckon

  6. The Specter of the Perfect Investment

  Our Free Lunch

  Candy

  Radiant Risk

  You Can’t See as Much of the Server as It Can See of You

  Waiting for Robin Hood

  From Autocollate to Autocollude

  Rupture

  7. Some Pioneering Siren Servers

  My Little Window

  Wal-Mart Considered as Software

  From the Supply Chain’s Point of View

  From the Customer’s Point of View

  Financial Siren Servers

  SECOND INTERLUDE (A PARODY): IF LIFE GIVES YOU EULAS, MAKE LEMONADE

  PART THREE

  How This Century Might Unfold, from Two Points of View

  8. From Below: Mass Unemployment Events

  Will There Be Manufacturing Jobs?

  Napsterizing the Teamsters

  Flattening the City on a Hill

  Factoring the City on a Hill

  Education in the Abstract Is Not Enough

  The Robotic Bedpan

  A Pharma Fable That Might Unfold Later in This Century

  9. From Above: Misusing Big Data to Become Ridiculous

  Three Nerds Walk into a Bar . . .

  Your Lack of Privacy Is Someone Else’s Wealth

  Big Data in Science

  A Method in Waiting

  Wise or Feared?

  The Nature of Big Data Defies Intuition

  The Problem with Magic

  Game On

  The Kicker

  The Nature of Our Confusion

  The Most Elite Naïveté

  THIRD INTERLUDE: MODERNITY CONCEIVES THE FUTURE

  Mapping Out Where the Conversation Can Go

  Nine Dismal Humors of Futurism, and a Hopeful One

  Meaning as Nostalgia

  Can We Handle Our Own Power?

  The First High-Tech Writer

  Meaning in Struggle

  Practical Optimism

  PART FOUR

  Markets, Energy Landscapes, and Narcissism

  10. Markets and Energy Landscapes

  The Technology of Ambient Cheating

  Imaginary Landscapes in the Clouds

  Markets as Landscapes

  Experimentalism and Popular Perception

  Keynes Considered as a Big Data Pioneer

  11. Narcissism

  The Insanity of the Local/Global Flip

  Siren Servers Think the World Is All About Them

  FOURTH INTERLUDE: LIMITS ARE FOR MUGGLES

  The Endless Conversation About the Heart Cartel

  The Deadly Risk of Not Being a Shapeshifter

  The First Musical “Any”

  Climb Any “Any”

  PART FIVE

  The Contest to Be Most Meta

  12. Story Lost

  Not All Is Chaos

  The Conservation of Free Will

  13. Coercion on Autopilot: Specialized Network Effects

  Rewarding and Punishing Network Effects

  For Every Carrot a Stick

  Denial of Service

  Arm’s-Length Blackmail

  Who’s the Customer and Who Are All Those Other People?

  14. Obscuring the Human Element

  Noticing the New Order

  Who Orders the Data?

  The Human Shell Game

  15. Story Found

  The First Act Is Autocatalytic

  Since You Asked

  Why the Networked World Seems Chaotic

  When Are Siren Servers Monopolies?

  Free Rise

  Make Others Pay for Entropy

  Bills Are Boring

  Coattails

  The Closing Act

  Stories Are Nothing Without Ideas

  FIFTH INTERLUDE: THE WISE OLD MAN IN THE CLOUDS

  The Limits of Emergence as an Explanation

  The Global Triumph of Turing’s Humor

  Digital and Pre-digital Theocracy

  What Is Experience?

  PART SIX

  Democracy

  16. Complaint Is Not Enough

  Governments Are Learning the Tricks of Siren Servers

  Alienating the Global Village

  Electoral Siren Servers

  Maybe the Way We Complain Is Part of the Problem

  17. Clout Must Underlie Rights, if Rights Are to Persist

  Melodramas Are Tenacious

  Emphasizing the Middle Class Is in the Interests of Everyone

  A Better Peak Waiting to Be Discovered

  SIXTH INTERLUDE: THE POCKET PROTECTOR IN THE SAFFRON ROBE

  The Most Ancient Marketing

  Monks and Nerds (or, Chip Monks)

  It’s All About I

  “Abundance” Evolves

  Childhood and Apocalypse

  PART SEVEN

  Ted Nelson

  18. First Thought, Best Thought

  First Thought

  Best Thought

  The Right to Mash-up Is Not the Same as the Right to Copy

  Two-Way Links

  Why Isn’t Ted Better Known?

  PART EIGHT

  The Dirty Pictures (or, Nuts and Bolts: What a Humanistic Alternative Might Be Like)

  19. The Project

  You Can’t Tweet This

  A Less Ambitious Approach to Be Discouraged

>   A Sustainable Information Economy

  A Better Beach

  20. We Need to Do Better than Ad Hoc Levees

  Keep It Smooth

  Not Enough Money Grows on Trees

  21. Some First Principles

  Provenance

  Commercial Symmetry

  Only First-Class Citizens

  Eschewing Zombie Siren Servers

  Only First-Class Identity

  22. Who Will Do What?

  Biological Realism

  The Psychology of Deserving

  But Will There Be Enough Value from People?

  A Question That Really Isn’t That Hard to Answer

  Nothing More to Offer?

  To the Dead Their Due

  23. Big Business

  What Will Big Companies Do?

  The Role of Advertising

  24. How Will We Earn and Spend?

  When Will Decisions Be Made?

  Dynamic Value

  Earning a Little Money by Living Well or Interestingly

  25. Risk

  The Cost of Risk

  Risk Never Really Goes Away

  Puddle, Lake, or Ocean?

  26. Financial Identity

  Economic Avatars

  Economic Avatars as an Improvement on the Forgetfulness of Cash

  Interpersonal Economic Symmetry Through Theatrics

  Economic Network Neutrality

  Symmetry as a Disincentive to Game the System

  Faith and Credit

  Tax

  27. Inclusion

  The Lower Half of the Curve

  The Lowly Tail of the Curve

  Wealth and Civility

  28. The Interface to Reality

  How Great Are Our Powers?

  Waiting for Technology Waiting for Politics

  What Can We Do About Big Data and the Reality Problem?

  Carbon Copies Ruin Carbon Credits

  How Fighting “Fraud” Might Also Fight “Scams”

  Feeding the Frenetic Mind of the Networked Person

  It’s All in the Timing

  The Treachery of Toys

  29. Creepy

  Three Pervasive Creepy Conundrums

  A Hacker’s Paradise

  Creepiness Thrives on the Quest for Utopia

  Once Upon a Time I Hoped to Wish Paranoia Away

  The ’Net Is Watching

  Some Good Reasons to Be Tracked by the Cloud

  The Creepiness Is Not in the Tech, but in the Power We Grant to Siren Servers

  Maslow’s Pyramid of Blackmail

  The Weird Logic of Extreme Creepiness

  30. A Stab at Mitigating Creepiness

  Commercial Rights Scale Online Where Civil Rights Don’t

  Commercial Rights Are Actionable

  The Ideal Price of Information Equals the Minimization of Creepiness

  Individual Players Will Also Be Motivated to Set Prices to Minimize Creepiness

  SEVENTH INTERLUDE: LIMITS ARE FOR MORTALS

  From Social Network to Immortality

  Supernatural Temptations in Tech Culture

  Just for the Record, Why I Make Fun of the University

  Will the Control of Death Be a Conversation or a Conflagration?

  The Two Tiers of Immortality Planned for This Century

  PART NINE

  Transition

  31. The Transition

  Can There Be a Digital Golden Rule?

  The Miracle’s Gauntlet

  Avatars and Credit

  The Price of Antenimbosia

  32. Leadership

  Audition for the Lead

  A Thousand Geeks

  Startups

  Traditional Governments, Central Banks, etc.

  Multiplicities of Siren Servers

  Facebook or Similar

  Confederacies of Just a Few Giant Siren Servers

  EIGHTH INTERLUDE: THE FATE OF BOOKS

  Books Inspire Maniacal Scheming

  An Author’s Experience of a Book

  It’s Not About Paper Versus eBooks

  The Book as Silicon Valley Would Have It

  What Is It About a Book That Is Worth Saving?

  Conclusion: What Is to Be Remembered?

  All This, Just for the Whiff of Possibility

  The Economics of the Future Is User Interface Design

  The Tease of the Tease

  Know Your Poison

  Is There a Test for Whether an Information Economy Is Humanistic?

  Back to the Beach

  Appendix: First Appearances of Key Terms

  Acknowledgments

  About Jaron Lanier

  Notes

  Index

  To everyone my daughter will know as she grows up.

  I hope she will be able to invent her place in a world in which it’s normal to find success and fulfillment.

  Prelude

  Hello, Hero

  An odd thing about this book is that you, the reader, and I, the author, are the immediate protagonists. The very action of reading makes you the hero of the story I am telling. Maybe you bought, or stole, a physical copy, paid to read this on your tablet, or pirated a digital copy off a share site. Whatever the prequel, here you are, living precisely the circumstances described in this book.

  If you paid to read this, thank you! This book is a result of living my life as I do, which I hope provides value to you. The hope of this book is that someday we’ll all have more ways to grow wealth as a side effect of living our lives creatively and intelligently, with an eye to doing things of use to others.

  If you paid to read, then there has been a one-way transaction in which you transferred money to someone else.

  If you got it for free, there has been a no-way transaction, and any value traded will be off the books, recorded not in any ledger but rather in the informal value systems of reputation, karma, or other wispy forms of barter. That doesn’t mean nothing has happened. Maybe you’ll get some positive strokes over a social network because of what you say about the book. That sort of activity might benefit us both. But it’s a kind of benefit that is unreliable and perishable.

  The clamor for online attention only turns into money for a token minority of ordinary people, but there is another new, tiny class of people who always benefit. Those who keep the new ledgers, the giant computing services that model you, spy on you, and predict your actions, turn your life activities into the greatest fortunes in history. Those are concrete fortunes made of money.

  This book promotes a third alternative, which is that digital networking ought to promote a two-way transaction, in which you benefit, concretely, with real money, as I do. I want digital networking to cause more value from people to be on the books, rather than less. When we make our world more efficient through the use of digital networks, that should make our economy grow, not shrink.

  Here’s a current example of the challenge we face. At the height of its power, the photography company Kodak employed more than 140,000 people and was worth $28 billion. They even invented the first digital camera. But today Kodak is bankrupt, and the new face of digital photography has become Instagram. When Instagram was sold to Facebook for a billion dollars in 2012, it employed only thirteen people.

  Where did all those jobs disappear to? And what happened to the wealth that those middle-class jobs created? This book is built to answer questions like these, which will only become more common as digital networking hollows out every industry, from media to medicine to manufacturing.

  Instagram isn’t worth a billion dollars just because those thirteen employees are extraordinary. Instead, its value comes from the millions of users who contribute to the network without being paid for it. Networks need a great number of people to participate in them to generate significant value. But when they have them, only a small number of people get paid. That has the net effect of centralizing wealth and limiting overall economic growth.

  Instead of enlarging our overall economy by creatin
g more value that is on the books, the rise of digital networking is enriching a relative few while moving the value created by the many off the books.

  By “digital networking” I mean not only the Internet and the Web, but also other networks operated by outfits like financial institutions and intelligence agencies. In all these cases, we see the phenomenon of power and money becoming concentrated around the people who operate the most central computers in a network, undervaluing everyone else. That is the pattern we have come to expect, but it is not the only way things can go.

  The alternative introduced in this book is not a utopian idea; it won’t be hard to foresee its annoyances and messiness. However, I will argue that monetizing more of what’s valuable from ordinary people, who turn out to be the uncompensated sources of the data that make networks valuable in the first place, will lead to a better future.

  That will make power and clout more honestly distributed, and might even lead to a persistent middle class in an information economy, which would otherwise be an impossible goal.

  Terms

  It would be impossible to only use preexisting terminology to communicate the ideas in this book. The problem is not that there are no relevant, familiar terms, but that all the preexisting terms have baggage or common uses that are just enough askew from what I need to say that they bring more confusion than clarity. So unfamiliar terms and expressions will appear. An appendix contains a list of some of these terms, along with the pages on which they first appear. Think of it as the high-priority index.

  PART ONE

  First Round

  CHAPTER 1

  Motivation

  The Problem in Brief

  We’re used to treating information as “free,”* but the price we pay for the illusion of “free” is only workable so long as most of the overall economy isn’t about information. Today, we can still think of information as the intangible enabler of communications, media, and software. But as technology advances in this century, our present intuition about the nature of information will be remembered as narrow and shortsighted. We can think of information narrowly only because sectors like manufacturing, energy, health care, and transportation aren’t yet particularly automated or ’net-centric.

  *As exemplified by free consumer Internet services, or the way financial services firms can often gather and use data without having to pay for it.

  But eventually most productivity probably will become software-mediated. Software could be the final industrial revolution. It might subsume all the revolutions to come. This could start to happen, for instance, once cars and trucks are driven by software instead of human drivers, 3D printers magically turn out what had once been manufactured goods, automated heavy equipment finds and mines natural resources, and robot nurses handle the material aspects of caring for the elderly. (These and other examples will be explored in detail later on.) Maybe digital technology won’t advance enough in this century to dominate the economy, but it probably will.