Who Owns the Future?

by Jaron Lanier

the immediate protagonists.

grow wealth as a side effect of living our lives creatively and intelligently,

a no-way transaction,

value traded will be off the books,

in the informal value systems of...

benefit that is unreliable and perishable.

turn your life activities into the greatest fortunes in history.

When we make our world more efficient through the use of digital networks, that should make our economy grow, not shrink.

as digital networking hollows out every industry,

its value comes from the millions of users who contribute to the network without being paid for it.

the net effect of centralizing wealth and limiting overall economic growth.

moving the value created by the many off the books.

power and money becoming concentrated around the people who operate the most central computers in a network, undervaluing everyone else.

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.

all the preexisting terms have baggage or common uses that are just enough askew from what I need to say

the price we pay for the illusion of “free” is only workable so long as most of the overall economy isn’t about information.

information as the intangible enabler

most productivity probably will become software-mediated.

the final industrial revolution.

the shape of the future is coalescing on the software if the present

it’s the connection that’s out of whack.

On the level of economics,

fawning over digital superhuman phenomena that don’t necessarily exist.

Speculative advocacy

It wouldn’t exist without you, after all.

People are largely a changeable in this regard, however. The ethic must be that someone must be paid, rather than "if you don't take this chance to do it for free then someone else will "

information wouldn’t need to be free if no one were impoverished.

the lion’s share of wealth now flows to those who aggregate and route those offerings, rather than those who provide the “raw materials.”

break out of the “free information” idea and into a universal micropayment system.

This is a book about futuristic economics,

it’s really about how we can remain human beings as our machines become so sophisticated

nonnarrative science...

speculative a...

guiding principle, like all ten commandments wrapped into one.

the way that a pile of rocks gets higher when you add more rocks.

Mooore's Law makes people seem expensive

Is it a human-driven, self-fulfilling prophecy or an intrinsic, inevitable quality

the exhilaration of accelerating change leads to a religious emotion in some of the most influential tech circles. It provides a meaning and context.

When machines get incredibly cheap to run, people seem correspondingly expensive. It used to be that printing presses were expensive, so paying newspaper reporters seemed like a natural expense to fill the pages. When the news became free, that anyone would want to be paid at all started to seem unreasonable. Moore’s Law can make salaries—and social safety nets—seem like unjustifiable luxuries.

driven by statistics,

could be treated as genuine, but it is not.

the blindness of our standards of accounting to all that value is gradually breaking capitalism.

There used to be a substantial middle-class population supported by the recording industry, but no more.

surgery would then be reconceived as an information service.

should pretend to be indefinitely immune to this pattern.

We will float from joy to joy, even the poorest among us living like a sybaritic magician.

picture this

more often these visions come up in ordinary conversations.

and from there your interlocutor extrapolates that supernatural-seeming possibilities will reliably open up later in this century.

thought schema of a thousand inspirational talks,

any scenario in which humans imagine living without constraints feels like that.