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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
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 Sustainab
le 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 creating 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.