Who Owns the Future?

by Jaron Lanier

the dichotomy must now be understood in an even broader way than the ancient debate about the role of government.

even though the judgments they do solicit are no less intimate or consequential.

barriers between cases where we choose to give over some judgment to cloud software, as if we were predictable machines, and those where we elevate our judgments to pious, absolute standards.

where to place the barrier between ego...

Drawing the line between what we forfeit to calculation and what we reserve for the heroics of free w...

a little like the old joke about someone being famous for being famous.

Siren Servers gain dominance through rewarding network effects, but keep dominance through punishing network effects.

in the old days you knew you were wasting half of your advertising budget, but you didn’t know which half.

success breeds success.

it is part of the large phylum of Siren Servers in which the users are product,

punishing network effects. These are centered on a fear, risk, or cost that makes “captured” populations think twice if they want to stop engaging with a Siren Server.

if you give up a position on Google’s ad placement system, you know for certain that your next-nearest competitor in the auction will inherit your position.

Because that's the network that channels products to customers in a way that's more definite than billboards

An in-your-face loss must then be weighed against an inevitably more vague future alternative.

It’s very hard to leap into a crisp risk in pursuit of a fuzzy benefit. As a result, Google’s customers are effectively locked in,

get users to put data they value into your server in such a way that access to it will be lost—or at least expensive or labor-intensive to salvage—if they choose to leave.

This is precisely the opposite of a middle-class levee.

sometimes data can just be decontextualized enough to become less valuable.

Even if you capture every little thing you had uploaded, you can’t save it in the context of interactions with other people.

Would you ever be willing to take the risk to sever a part of your own life’s context in order to disengage from a Siren Server that ogles you?

whether a smartphone company or the wireless carrier is in charge of various services and revenue opportunities, and whether the principle of “net neutrality” will endure.

This demonstrates an interesting difference between Siren Servers and traditional monopolies. There is no reason that there can’t be a lot of Siren Servers.

They form ecologies instead of company towns. The reason to be concerned about them is how they distort and shrink the overall economy by demonetizing more and more value.

go all the way. The burden of that big leap creates a new kind of social immobility.

Siren Servers often pit these populations against each other.

it treats those who connect with it as data sources and as subjects for behavior modification.

this difference tracks the distinction between users and customers.

From a typical user’s perspective, Google is mostly carrot. But the other population—the true customers, the advertisers—is less free.

In the case of Wal-Mart, the captured population was the supply chain.

Retail customers gradually became a little captured in some locations where retail choice was eventually reduced,

Each particular scheme launched over a network, each purported golden goblet, tends to follow a well-worn course. Networked information, when it is about business instead of science (or, if you like, about human behavior instead of nature), follows a characteristic life cycle.*

it’s a mistake to perceive even an object,

I prefer to see the faces instead of the goblet,

following the ways in which servers obscure the real people who are the sources of value is also a good way of noticing how the struggle for power proceeds.

how a remarkably simple idea in network architecture, which was the motivation for the very first digital media designs, was lost, and how that loss created much of the chaos that search engines attempt to undo today.

data that is ordered either at the time of entry or later on, but in either case for free.

Those who sell through these schemes are mostly responsible for creating and tending their own presentations, unlike in traditional retail, where the retailer has to figure out how to present each product.

This is a key sign of a Siren Server. The lowly non-Sirens are as responsible as possible, while the Siren Server presides from an arm’s length.*

it does reduce markets for certain kinds of scholars in the long term in order to demonetize scholarship in the short term,

It creates the kinds of false efficiencies that thwart levees.

Heuristic that points towards the natural Ecology of an economy

a fascinating, idealistic Siren Server that is mildly for-profit.

Craig Newmark could probably have built his business into a giant along the lines of eBay or Amazon. Instead, he created a service that has greatly increased convenience for ordinary people, while causing a crisis in local journalism that once relied on paid classified ads.

Craigslist has a tragic quality, since it is as modest and ethical as it can be, eschewing available spying opportunities, and yet it still functions as a Siren Server despite that.

*There’s usually a ritual in place to make sure everything possible is done to avoid actual human involvement for as long as possible, even if it is inevitable.

This might be the first time real human eyes associated with the Siren Server have perceived your data.

exploring how to get non-elite service jobs out of the way of the Siren Servers of the future. The company offers a Web-based tool called Mechanical Turk.

The Amazon version is a way to easily outsource—to real humans—those cloud-based tasks that algorithms still can’t do, but in a framework that allows you to think of the people as software components.

friends sometimes suggest to me in all seriousness that writing books is hard work and I should turn to the Mechanical Turk to lower my workload.

Whenever there is a networked race to the bottom, there is a Siren Server that connects people and owns the master database about who they are. If they knew each other, comprehensively, they might organize a union or some other form of levee.

The most common means to survival is to route enough data fast enough so that by the time predators notice you at all, they won’t find it worthwhile to go after your niche.

governments and other entities yet to be discussed.