Who Owns the Future?

by Jaron Lanier

An irrational number can’t be expressed as a fraction. But could it be rhythm? Would music in such a rhythm mean anything to people? Conlon provided the answers: yes and yes.

Conlon would be one of the first artists to conquer an “any.” He did it in the domain of rhythm and he used a crazy, brilliant tool to get there, the player piano. Conlon would sit at his desk, hand-punching player piano rolls, working for months to make each minute of music.

It has an incredible intensity, tougher and more of a knockout than just about anything else you can hear. The music has incredible textures, harmonies, and of course, rhythms. And fantasy,

it corresponds to a sensual and luscious but unfamiliar world that can’t be described or...

Sure, you can find sound files online. Information is not experience, however. The way to really hear the stuff was in Conlon’s bunker-like studio, where the pianos thundered and you felt it in your body.

They were done in too clinical a way, perhaps, or the tempo was wrong, or something.* *I suggest you seek out the old Columbia or 1750 Arch vinyl records, which are much better than the digital recordings made later by Wergo.

You mustn’t demand that someone be able to state exactly how information underrepresents reality. The burden can’t be on people to justify them...

perhaps a recording ought to provide a closer equivalent than a recording can provide of a concert.

Mexico was insane in neon shades,

I could barely speak. It amazes me still that Conlon and his wife, Yoko, were tolerant of this weird, non...

An elegant man from an era when it was expected for men to have well-developed egos, he conveyed a regal stature quietly, declinin...

It hadn’t occurred to me that he’d be anything other than messianic.

on another level, I still think to myself, “Come on! He was playing a game of understatement. He knew perfectly well what he was doing.”)

Here was an example of someone who had gained precise, unlimited control of a domain and indeed he did create entirely new meaning and sensation by leaping out of the snags the rest of us navigate, onto a new plateau of generality.

Who had done that before? Alan Turing, certainly. The great analytic mathematicians. Who else? Who had done it aesthetically?

What Conlon did for rhythm might be done for sensory impressions, for the human body, for the whole of human experience. That would be Virtual Reality.

Chasing after limitlessness had already become a central idea in Silicon Valley

Just as I talked up Virtual Reality as encompassing “any” external reality, or sensory motor experience, possible, a fellow named Eric Drexler was talking up nanotechnology as someday doing the same for physical reality.

Stephen LaBerge was experimenting with lucid dreaming at Stanford and offering “any” possible subjective experience to th...

a temple of yearning for “anyness” in those days,...

Tablets and smartphones have fluid uses, turning into “any” device that can be accommodated by the fixed physical attributes.

I have worked on robots inspired by the “morphing” varieties of octopi that can change shape in order to allow your hands to feel arbitrary surfaces in a virtual world.

The true star toward which we navigate is freedom from particularity.

A sanctioned malaise has been in effect for some decades now;

it is accepted in some circles that future history will not be coherent. From here on out the human story will no longer unfold in a sensible way. We are said to be entering into a fate that will resist interpretation. Narrative arcs will no longer apply.

“the future idea that everything is fragmented and the past idea that there is a beginning, middle, and end.”

“world’s oldest Bolshevik” in Tony Kushner’s play Perestroika,

a clear-enough dominant narrative. Everything is becoming more and more software-mediated, physicality is becoming more mutable by technology, and reality is being optimized.

The problem with it is that humans aren’t the heroes. People might merge with machines and become immortal, but that’s a sideshow. The dominant story is machine-centric.

My view is that people are still the actors. Technology is not really autonomous. People act in the network age either by struggling to get close to top Siren Servers in order to enjoy power and wealth, or by doing something other than that and falling into relativ...

I’ve found that they provide a simple story line that works awfully well as a principle for...

I might be overapplying the idea. As the saying goes, when you have a hammer, ever...

power struggles over digital networks will naturally be the typical...

these pockets of chaos are circumscribed by a simple logic.

A story must have actors, not automatons. Different people become more or less like automatons in our Sirenic era.

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.

or to put it more bluntly, the people being modeled must act at least somewhat predictably. Otherwise, the data wouldn’t be actionable at all.

To the degree people become predictable by a server, they won’t appear to have as much free will as “free range” individuals who aren’t tied to the server.

*The question of whether reality is deterministic overall

must be separated from the design of human society.

The two best-confirmed theories of physics, quantum field theory and general relativity, offer conflicting sensibilities of determinism.

impossible to reliably distinguish study from manipulation when you occupy the high perch of a Siren Server.

The difference isn’t really a difference, within the scope of business epistemology.

Ordinary people are influenced by the particular theory of optimization imbedded in a ...

and therefore become more predic...

Siren Servers conserve the tally of free will perceived...

Sirenic idealists browbeat those who are thought to be attempting to insert free will into human affairs in places where it doesn’t belong.

human will is only respected when it comes from an entrepreneur.

Free will is granted only a narrow legitimacy.

What is new in the network age is the extension of this kind of thinking into eve...