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Who Owns The Future? (2013)

by Jaron Lanier(Favorite Author)

3.72 of 5 Votes: 4

ISBN

1451654967 (ISBN13: 9781451654967)

languge

English

genre

Nonfiction

publisher

Simon & Schuster

review 1: Interesting read and I find myself torn between which is better for society. With siren servers as the current buzz, will they die off creating a micro-payment society. Jaron predicts about the future where every wish, desire and need will be fully met. We as a society may be compensated only when we conserve. This means our current AI's will need to improve beyond what we can currently grasp. What will we turn into?Another of Jaron's points relating to 3D printers was also very interesting. Once everything open sourced and no patents are held, do we as a society generate everything we need at home without leaving our house. It's intriguing to image we would print something one day having it disassembled that night and reprinted the next day into something completel... morey new. Great book, great concepts.
review 2: Probably mostly preaching to the easy to convert, Lanier pleads for an egalitarian digital world. The introduction to the paperback alone is already pretty much an eye opener, although the mindset Lanier warns against, accepting a little inconvenience, like handing over personal data, in exchange for perceived benefits, like free social networking, is the mindset of the masses, who have now become accustomed to 'free' as an economic model, while not being too impressed by Snowden-like revelations.Lanier points out that if we demand free services now, we must also accept we will pay a price for them in the future. Obviously true, as, for one, on Facebook, you are the product, but also extendable into the offline world. (Rio recently saw the zero-fare movement, where a sizable swath of society was demanding free public transport for all. The busses don't run for free, so who in the end should pay for them?)The basic premise of Lanier's plan is for contributors of information to be compensated for that information to the extent that subsequent users make money through having access to that information. This makes information a 'good' to be bought and sold and would, in turn, result in the creation of a digital middle class.In the process of explaining his premise, Lanier points out issues with the currently dominating model. Information is wealth, that is, the fastest computers, which he calls 'siren serves', mean wealth. But only for a very small portion of society. And though there is plenty of anecdotal information of individuals striking it rich in the information economy (Instagram, say), the number of people actually benefiting, economically, is getting smaller and smaller.Lanier tries to build his argument on the need for an economic middle class, in a society that's not modeled after a winner-takes-all attitude. This makes sense, though his argument against a winner-takes-all system is that, apparently, this sees random, irrelevant, noise amplified, moving the resulting system away from 'reality'. This can be somewhat conceptualized by thinking of winner-takes-all systems like American Idol, where a stroke of luck can completely change the outcome of who will end up on the top of the heap. However, though this makes intuitive sense, without at least a general mathematical proof, I find this a somewhat tenuous statement.Lanier more often makes claims without properly underpinning them mathemtically, which takes away from his credibility. But he does seem to have a point.Another example is his claim that mortgages are like music files: the risk associated with repayment can be copied many times, from bank to bank, say, but the promise of repayment only is made once, by the home owner. Just like the musician can't be guaranteed wealth from relentless copying, being forced into a peasants dilemma, earning his living from gig to gig, the homeowner, as part of society, has to accept the risk of a host of derivative uncertainties, resulting in lower security of his future wealth, originally based on his own promise.Nevertheless, star systems, as Lanier calls winner-takes-all systems, specifically when they are the only paths to success, do starve themselves, as there is a constant push to the bottom of the curve representing wealth distribution, 'naturally' pushing the middle classes out of their somewhat more privileged economic position.The current digital age slowly moves society away from a bell-curve distribution of wealth to a winner takes all distribution. This is related to overshooting in quantile-driven ecosystems, such as finance, as well as other metric-driven environments have become.Lanier makes the claim that post-digital, that is, after the introduction of digital distribution, the music industry is now a quarter of its original size. Not specifically because less music is bought or sold, or there are losses due to file sharing, but simply because the industry need not sustain as many employees, the increased efficiency and prominence of siren servers resulting in many fewer jobs and many more artists making less money.Lanier's central claim is that any industry which becomes streamlined through the introduction of optimal efficiency through networks, digitizations and siren servers will go through the same destructive process.In another example, with the introduction of the Khan academy, Udacity, Coursera and whatnot, education is becoming a free for all, with the consequence that most universities will no longer be sustainable for the lack of money teaching brings in.Lanier makes a great observation, almost in passing: meaning comes from struggle with restraints. This is exactly why digital, automated, tools (such as many of the automated Google+ photography features) annihilate the value, or worth, of what they produce.Important in the perpetuation and appeal of building a siren server is the active separation of risk from reward. Siren servers, both the lesser known (financial) ones and the well known public facing ones like Facebook or Pinterest, or Google, make sure they reap the benefits while not taking on any risk. They mediate, putting all responsibility (copyright, investment, etc) with the user.For all these new digital systems being called 'democratic, democracy actually relies on laws that impose diversity on a market-like dynamic that might otherwise evolve toward monopoly. Except in countries where one party systems prevailed.Lanier's proposed system for assigning value to information effectively hinges on concepts pioneered in the 1960s by Ted Nelson and are effectively a two-way linked version of data (text, video, you name it). Every derivative work carries with it its sources and, as a result, every contributor can not only be attributed, but also compensated.Given the current economic model, there isn't enough shared economic interest to support long term democracy. Commercial symmetry, everyone becoming both consumer and producer, and being compensated for use of those products, changes that, specifically because in an information economy, this fosters the rise of a middle class.Related to this, the death of Facebook must be an option if it is to be a company at all. Facebook is not a public utility, and therefore needs to stand the risk to fail. Therefore, our online identities should not be fundamentally grounded in Facebook, or something similar.We need social safety nets (Lanier calls them levees), not because we are lazy, but because we are real. We can't predict when we fall sick, how much care will cost, or how extensive the cost of kids or education will be.When enough people lack economic dignity, there is no way for the economy to function well.Freedom within any system demands accepting the cost of risk. (Think about it, this is exactly why America is becoming less and less free.) Currently, with networked finance and schemes like YouTube, risk is externalised, while the benefit is skimmed off. As a result businesses become too big to fail, privatizing benefit while socializing risk.Lanier pleads for the concept of risk pools, where risk is carried by groups of people, larger than 1 and smaller than society (as otherwise they are meaningless as absorbers of risk).Risk pools are nothing new; film studios invest somewhat widely in the hope of striking big. Unknown authors get to write books. Unknown musicians are signed contracts. However, more and more, now, these risk pools are taking on the size of society, or, inverting this, of the individual. Youtube's risk is your risk: you might strike it big with your video, but you're on your own if you don't.However,although I find Lanier's basic concept of accountability for use of materials in a two-way linked system intuitive and even obvious, much more sensible, humanistic in Lanier's words, his suggested solution of using economic avatars that allow participants to be agnostic about the actual economic details of individual transactions seems quite complex.Lanier tries to explain this through the suggestion that the complex metrics that define the cost of doing business on Facebook or Google should also be used vice versa, that is, in establishing costing or prices between individuals or between businesses and customers.(On a sidenote, Lanier doesn't mention it, but the requirement to allow for nano payments serves a currency like bitcoin.)In passing, Lanier points out why societal models like anarchism don't work. My personal shorthand is that all participants in an anarchistic society need to play by the same rules for anarchism to work, while in a socialist or communist society, this needs to 'only' be the vast majority. At the same time, in a capitalist society, even an (economically strong) minority can 'spoil' it for the rest, that is, force the capitalist model down everyone's throats.Lanier's point is that if you are willing to consider an utopia without central authority or taxes, you will create a phony utopia where power is ultra-concentrated behind impregnable private gates. This will lead to decrepitude and poverty through the mechanism of titanic moral hazards.What is probably Lanier's most exotic, if also scariest argument for introducing a system of full economic accountability inside our ever growing information-based society is the potential, within this century, when left unchecked, for the creation of a near-immortal class of plutocrats, based on the profits made from the extremely skewed information imbalance baked into the models of society we currently subject ourselves to.The quest for immortality is real, both virtual and physical. If it comes this far that the common man realizes that his 'own' people will have to die for a financial elite to literally live forever, the revolutions we have seen over the last few years are likely to pale in comparison with what is to come.Lanier's rejection of the current eBook economy is excellent and the very reason I do not like it. However, it's also not unique to the eBook economy, but has been the direction all information-driven economies have moved towards. By only renting out books, or licensing them for individual use, readers become second class economic citizens. They no longer own what they buy, resulting in an overturning of a normal market economy.There would be some ways to overturn this model, which would benefit all participants as the counterpoint is that the market will become smaller and smaller instead of grow, but an obvious fix would be to allow for resales of the works (and an open system of trading them), or for vastly reduced cost of purchasing ebooks as opposed to paper books. I'm amazed, every time, when I find that a book I'm looking to buy is more expensive on a proprietary digital platform than it is on paper.But, perhaps simply the best sentiment is carelessly mentioned in a debate on the trappings of collectively generated content: human life is its own purpose. less

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