You Are Not A Gadget

by Jaron Lanier

As Chris explains, “despite the bluster about track records and taste … it’s all a crapshoot. Better to play the big-n statistical game of User Generated Content, as YouTube has, than place big bets on a few horses like network TV.”

“Big-n” refers to “n,” a typical symbol for a mathematical variable. If you have a giant social network, like Facebook, perhaps some variable called n gains a big value. As n gets larger, statistics become more reliable.

However, it must be pointed out that in practice, even if you believe in the big n as a substitute for judgment, n is almost never big enough to mean anything on the internet. As vast as the internet has become, it usually isn’t vast enough to generate valid statistics.

The crowd works for free, and statistical algorithms supposedly take the risk out of making bets if you are a lord of the cloud. Without risk, there is no need for skill.

human creativity and understanding, especially one’s own creativity and understanding, are treated as worthless. Instead, one trusts in the crowd, in the big n, in the algorithms that remove the risks of creativity in ways too sophisticated for any mere person to understand.

A natural question to ask at this point is, Are there any alternatives, any options, that exist apart from the opposing poles of old media and open culture?

Nelson’s ambitions for the economics of linking were more profound than those in vogue today. He proposed that instead of copying digital media, we should effectively keep only one copy of each cultural expression—as with a book or a song—and pay the author of that expression a small, affordable amount whenever it is accessed.

As a result, anyone might be able to get rich from creative work. The people who make a momentarily popular prank video clip might earn a lot of money in a single day, but an obscure scholar might eventually earn as much over many years as her work is repeatedly referenced. But note that this is a very different idea from the long tail, because it rewards individuals instead of cloud owners.

It was once a common concern that most people would not want to be creative or expressive, ensuring that only a few artists would get rich and that everyone else would starve.

If we idealists had only been able to convince those skeptics, we might have entered into a different, and better, world once it became clear that the majority of people are indeed interested in and capable of being expressive in the digital realm.

The scarcity of money, as we know it today, is artificial, but everything about information is artificial. Without a degree of imposed scarcity, money would be valueless.

It is a common assertion that if you copy a digital music file, you haven’t destroyed the original, so nothing was stolen. The same thing could be said if you hacked into a bank and just added money to your online account.

The problem in each case is not that you stole from a specific person but that you undermined the artificial scarcities that allow the economy to function. In the same way, creative expression on the internet will benefit from a social contract that imposes a modest degree of artificial scarcity on information.

In the open culture future, your creativity and expression would also be unpaid, since you would be a volunteer in the army of the long tail. That would leave nothing for you.

there are some cautions that I hope any new generations of digital socialists will take to heart. A sudden advent of socialism, just after everyone has slid down Maslow’s pyramid into the mud, is likely to be dangerous. The wrong people often take over when a revolution happens suddenly.

A prominent strain of enthusiasm for wikis, long tails, hive minds, and so on incorporates the presumption that one profession after another will be demonetized. Digitally connected mobs will perform more and more services on a collective volunteer basis, from medicine to solving crimes, until all jobs are done that way.

Digital socialists must avoid the trap of believing that a technological makeover has solved all the problems of socialism just because it can solve some of them. Getting people to cooperate is not enough.

Perceptions of fairness and social norms can support or undermine any economic idea.

if all of us are to earn a living when the machines get good, we will have to agree that it is worth paying for one another’s elevated cultural and creative expressions.

Even the most extreme libertarian must admit that fluid commerce has to flow through channels that amount to government.

What if it costs you a penny to manage a one-penny transaction? Any vendor who takes on the expense is put at a disadvantage. In such a case, the extra cost should be borne by the whole polis, as a government function. That extra penny isn’t wasted—it’s the cost of maintaining a social contract. We routinely spend more money incarcerating a thief than the thief stole in the first place.

We never record the true cost of the existence of money because most of us put in volunteer time to maintain the social contract that gives money its value.

In the same way, the maintenance of the liberties of capitalism in a digital future will require a general acceptance of a social contract. We will pay a tax to have the ability to earn money from our creativity, expression, and perspective. It will be a good deal.

it is often claimed by open culture types that if you can’t make a perfect copy-protection technology, then copy prohibitions are pointless.

But that’s an unrealistically pessimistic way of thinking about people. We have already demonstrated that we’re better than that.

We are bathed in what can be called love. And yet that love shows itself best through the constraints of civilization, because those constraints compensate for the flaws of human nature. We must see ourselves honestly, and engage ourselves realistically, in order to become better.

the return of live performance—in a new technological context—might be the starting point for new kinds of successful business plans.

the idea of “teleperformance for hire” remains speculative at this time, but the technology appears to be moving in a direction that will make it possible.

A songle is a dongle for a song. A dongle is a little piece of hardware that you plug into a computer to run a piece of commercial software. It’s like a physical key you have to buy in order to make the software work. It creates artificial scarcity for the software.

If each cultural expression is a brand-new tiny program, then they are all aligned on the same starting line. Each one is created using the same resources as every other one. This is what I call a “flat” global structure. It suggests a happy world to software technologists, because every little program in a flat global structure is born fresh, offering a renewing whiff of the freedom of tiny code.

That’s one reason the web 2.0 designs strongly favor flatness in cultural expression. But I believe that flatness, as applied to human affairs, leads to blandness and meaninglessness.

There’s a rule of thumb you can count on in each succeeding version of the web 2.0 movement: the more radical an online social experiment is claimed to be, the more conservative, nostalgic, and familiar the result will actually be.

The distinction between first-order expression and derivative expression is lost on true believers in the hive. First-order expression is when someone presents a whole, a work that integrates its own worldview and aesthetic. It is something genuinely new in the world.

I don’t claim I can build a meter to detect precisely where the boundary between first- and second-order expression lies. I am claiming, however, that the web 2.0 designs spin out gobs of the latter and choke off the former.

The more original material that does exist on the open net is all too often like the lowest-production-cost material from the besieged, old-fashioned, copy-written world. It’s an endless parade of “News of the Weird,” “Stupid Pet Tricks,” and America’s Funniest Home Videos.

I am not being a snob about this material. I like it myself once in a while. Only people can make schlock, after all.

So we can take existential pride in schlock. All I am saying is that we already had, in the predigital world, all the kinds of schlock you now find on the net.

The cumulative result is that online culture is fixated on the world as it was before the web was born.

The appeal of deliberate obscurity is an interesting anthropological question. There are a number of explanations for it that I find to have merit. One is a desire to see the internet come alive as a metaorganism: many engineers hope for this eventuality, and mystifying the workings of the net makes it easier to imagine it is happening.

the result is that we must now measure the internet as if it were a part of nature, instead of from the inside, as if we were examining the books of a financial enterprise. We must explore it as if it were unknown territory, even though we laid it out.

Why are so many of the more sophisticated examples of code in the online world—like the page-rank algorithms in the top search engines or like Adobe’s Flash—the results of proprietary development?

An honest empiricist must conclude that while the open approach has been able to create lovely, polished copies, it hasn’t been so good at creating notable originals. Even though the open-source movement has a stinging countercultural rhetoric, it has in practice been a conservative force.

Open wisdom-of-crowds software movements have become influential, but they haven’t promoted the kind of radical creativity I love most in computer science. If anything, they’ve been hindrances.

I’m not anti–open source. I frequently argue for it in various specific projects. But the politically correct dogma that holds that open source is automatically the best path to creativity and innovation is not borne out by the facts.

It’s easy to forget the role technology has played in producing the most powerful waves of musical culture.

Changing economic environments have also stimulated new music in the past. With capitalism came a new kind of musician.

So it seemed entirely reasonable to have the highest expectations for music on the internet.

Even if it was not yet clear what business models would take hold, the outcome would surely be more flexible, more open, more hopeful than what had come before in the hobbled economy of physicality.

A common rationalization in the fledgling world of digital culture back then was that we were entering a transitional lull before a creative storm—or were already in the eye of one.

We had instead entered a persistent somnolence, and I have come to believe that we will only escape it when we kill the hive.