Who Owns the Future?

by Jaron Lanier

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 sensibility also implies that the more dominant information becomes in our economy, the less most of us will be worth.

However, in the long term, this way of using network technology is not even good for the richest and most powerful players, because their ultimate source of wealth can only be a growing economy.

Even the most successful players of the game are gradually undermining the core of their own wealth. Capitalism only works if there are enough successful people to be the customers. A market system can only be sustainable when the accounting is thorough enough to reflect where value comes from, which, I’ll demonstrate, is another way of saying that an information age middle class must come into being.

New technological syntheses that will solve the great challenges of the day are less likely to come from garages than from collaborations by many people over giant computer networks. It is the politics and economics of these networks that will determine how new capabilities translate into new benefits for ordinary people.

A starting point for an answer can be summarized: “Digital information is really just people in disguise.”

At this ancient date, a number of possibilities were at least slightly visible to Aristotle’s imagination. One was that the human condition was in part a function of what machines could not do. Another was that it was possible to imagine, at least hypothetically, that machines could do more. The synthesis was also conceived: Better machines could free and elevate people, even slaves.

It’s not as if everyone wanted to be closer to all of humanity when cities first formed. Athens was a necessity first, and a luxury second. No one wants to accommodate the diversity of strangers. People deal with each other politically because the material advantages are compelling. We find relative safety and sustenance in numbers. Agriculture and armies happened to work better as those enterprises got bigger, and cities built walls.

The greatest beneficiaries of civilization use all their power to create a temporary illusion of freedom from politics. The rich live behind gates, not just to protect themselves, but to pretend to not need anyone else, if only for a moment. In Aristotle’s quote, we find the earliest glimmer of the hope that technological advancement could replace territorial conquest as a way of implementing an insulating bubble around a person.

Anthropologist David Graeber, in his book Debt: The First 5,000 Years (Brooklyn, NY: Chelsea House, 2010), proposes that debt is as old as civilization. However, simple debts are still representations of past events, rather than anticipations of future growth in value; the latter is what we call “finance.”

An opaque, elite server that remembers everything money used to forget, placed at the center of human affairs, begins to resemble certain ideas about God.

Growth is merely honest if the goodwill of ordinary people is to be acknowledged instead of forgotten. That means a little inflation—not too much—is proper, as people get better at doing things in ways that are acknowledged to be good for one another.* This is such a basic idea that it can be hard to see.

In an expanding market, new value and new wealth are created. Not all new wealth is created from game-changing events like inventions or natural resource discoveries.† Some of it comes from the ability of ordinary people to keep promises.

Only people, not inanimate information, could make promises about what to do in the future. A dollar is a dollar whoever holds it, and securities can change hands. But a promise belongs to someone in particular or it is nothing. The recent breakdowns of finance can be understood as the symptoms of a fallacious hope that information technology can make promises on its own, without people.

Attempts to stem the flow and replace finance entirely with politics by means such as Marxist revolutions turned out to be vastly crueler than even the worst dysfunctions of capital. So the conundrum of poverty in a world driven by finance remains a challenge.

All the examples of long-term stable middle classes we know of relied on Keynesian interventions as well as persistent mechanisms like social safety nets to moderate market outcomes.

Unfortunately, the new digital economy, like older feudal or robber baron economies, is thus far generating outcomes that resemble a “star system” more often than a bell curve.

Is there anything wrong with winner-take-all outcomes? Don’t they just promote the best of everything for the benefit of everyone? There are many cases where winner-take-all contests are beneficial. Certainly it’s beneficial to the sciences to have special prizes like the Nobel Prize. But broader forms of reward like academic tenure and research grants are vastly more beneficial.

And yet the rewards of winning and losing are vastly different. While some critics might have aesthetic or ethical objections to winner-take-all outcomes, a mathematical problem with them is that noise is amplified. Therefore, if a societal system depends too much on winner-take-all contests, then the acuity of that system will suffer. It will become less reality-based.

The fatal conundrum of a hyperefficient market optimized to yield star-system results is that it will not create enough of a middle class to support a real market dynamic. A market economy cannot thrive absent the well-being of average people, even in a gilded age. Gilding cannot float. It must reside on a substrate. Factories must have multitudes of customers. Banks must have multitudes of reliable borrowers.

Broad economic expansion is more lucrative than the winner taking all.

The principal way a powerful, unfortunately designed digital network flattens levees is by enabling data copying.

The peasant’s dilemma is that there’s no buffer. A musician who is sick or old, or who has a sick kid, cannot perform and cannot earn. A few musicians, a very tiny number indeed, will do well, but even the most successful real-time-only careers can fall apart suddenly because of a spate of bad luck. Real life cannot avoid those spates, so eventually almost everyone living a real-time economic life falls on hard times.

Great fortunes are being made on shrinking the economy instead of growing it. It’s not a result of some evil scheme, but a side effect of an idiotic elevation of the fantasy that technology is getting smart and standing on its own, without people.

Ultimately, there was an old-fashioned old boys’ club obscured under the tangle of cables in the foundation of the newfangled digital network.

The key question isn’t “How much will be automated?” It’s how we’ll conceive of whatever can’t be automated at a given time.

Why are we still bothering with higher education in the network age? We have Wikipedia and a world of other tools. You can educate yourself without paying a university. All it takes is discipline. Tuition pays for making discipline a little more structured, getting some extended years of parental support in a place with a quad and beer, and certification. You also meet elite friends. There’s prestige in getting into a top school, whether you finish or not.

The data that drives “automation” has to ultimately come from people, in the form of “big data.”

To put it another way, the nontechnical ideas of scientists influence general trends, but the ideas of technologists create facts on the ground.

Today a guitar manufacturer might advertise through Google. But when guitars are someday spun out of 3D printers, there will be no one to buy an ad if guitar design files are “free.” Yet Google’s lifeblood is information put online for free. That is what Google’s servers organize. Thus Google’s current business model is a trap in the long term.

Sirenic entrepreneurs intuitively cast free will—so long as it is their own—as an ever more magical, elite, and “meta” quality of personhood. The entrepreneur hopes to “dent the universe”* or achieve some other heroic, Nietzschean validation. Ordinary people, however, who will be attached to the nodes of the network created by the hero, will become more effectively mechanical.

Making choices of where to place the barrier between ego and algorithm is unavoidable in the age of cloud software. Drawing the line between what we forfeit to calculation and what we reserve for the heroics of free will is the story of our time.

Maybe some other Siren Server related to self-driving vehicles will come along and be able to make itself meta to Amazon and then steal whatever advantage Amazon builds up, since Amazon depends on vehicles to deliver goods to consumers. Competition becomes mostly about who can out-meta who, and only secondarily about specialization.

The systematic decoupling of risk from reward in the rising information economy is the problem, not any particular server.

The process is described in an essay1 by Alan Watts on how to be a guru that was well-known around the time Apple was first taking off. The successful guru is neither universally nor arbitrarily scornful to followers, but there should be enough randomness to keep the followers guessing and off guard. When praise comes, it should be utterly piercing and luminous, so as to make the recipient feel as though they’ve never known love before that moment.

everyone will eventually have to both buy and sell, and become a full participant. If you never buy, you’ll never be able to sell, since it’s virtually never the case that something can be created online entirely out of whole cloth.

Singularity University is part of a grand tradition. Most techies are not great showmen, but whenever the combination appears, watch out.

The reason people won’t copy—or exploit information without paying for it—is that to copy would be to undermine the very source of their own wealth. This is what the golden rule looks like on a network.

Since no one else can keep up, highly effective technical people can still make up the future, unfettered to an amazing degree. The society of the brightest computer scientists and engineers is also amazingly small. A thousand top geeks working together could steer the future of the world economy.

Making complexity easier is the great craft of our era.

Wealth and dignity are different from a Klout score. They are states of being, not instant signals. It is the latitude granted by the hysteresis—the staying power—of wealth that translates into practical freedom.