Who Owns the Future?

by Jaron Lanier

there has to be some way for a particular Siren Server to gain enough initial momentum to become the beneficiary of network effects.

Therefore, the primary enemy of a fresh server is not competing wannabe servers, but rather “friction.” Friction is what it feels like to ...

Even the slightest expense or risk might slow the initial growth spurt, so every possible effort is made to pretend there are no costs, ...

This can never really be true. Yet it feels true as you sign up for a social network or an ap...

Obviously you have to get someone else to do something on your server.

eBay started out as a trading site for people who collected Pez candy dispensers.

If you’re getting a lot of traffic through someone else’s server, then you’re not...

noticing some other pretender to a throne that isn’t growing as fast as it could and overtaking it once it has identified a viable Siren Server niche to be won.

form an offering out of whole cloth at just the right time and place.

Some part of me still wishes that serious technical innovation were more essential to hatching Siren Servers.

initially based on genuine algorithmi...

mostly related to getting big fast without a rel...

People now use it because others do.

There’s a well-supported analytic class—statisticians and MBAs employed by venture capitalists, big companies, and private capital firms—that attempts to model the qualities of hopeful startup sites, in order to predict which ones will take off.

This is like asking why some silly Internet memes rise and others fall. There are many factors, mostly uncounted.

A butterfly might have flapped its wings on the other side of the world, as the saying goes. Of course, the proprietors of a site that takes off are always certain it was because they did exactly the right thing.

when users put effort, money, or important data into a particular service, like a social network, then network effects tend to create a single Sirenic presence, a monopoly for that particular kind of data or pattern of use.

something like a Pauli exclusion principle,

more a mediator than an accumulator of primary data sources,

because they don’t own the primary reservation-related data that they mediate.

There can be multiple Sirenic financial services because none of ...

because, as an accumulator of advertiser relationships, Google does enjoy a monopoly-like network effect.

coexist as booksellers, because they don’t own the books, but if they also become major publishers, then one would probably have to kill the other.

blocked because of a structural or legal blockade that limits reach.

Even when there is only one Siren Server to a niche, there can be a lot of niches, however.

What’s the threshold for rewarding network effects to kick in? For consumer-facing sites, it is

the point at which enough people are using a site to support each other’s expectations of dynamism.

a critical number of people have to stick together long enough so that the site becomes a habit for them....

catch a wave and bec...

tweaking the design of human experience at large.

the honeymoon phase, or free rise (the opposite of free fall).

free rise to continue until your Siren Server becomes a monster,

During free rise, you can see patterns in data no one else can see, as if you were an oracle. You will suddenly know more about some slice of human life than anyone else. Maybe you’ll see something about eating habits, sex, shopping, or driving patterns.

A few of the folks you have aggregated will inevitably get an insane lift from being hitched to you,

only a tiny token number of people, though. It is really you, the proprietor of the Siren Server, who will benefit above all others.

all you’ll have is rewarding network effect. That means that people will benefit from using your server because other people are using it.

a world-class, persistent Siren Server. In addition, you have to inject some sort of punishing network effect.

Make Others Pay for Entropy

make sure that risk is being radiated out to other people and institutions, and not accruing to your server.

places all responsibility for copyright violations or anything else squarely on the user.

If people are paying money to use your server, don’t accept any of it directly if you can possibly avoid that. You should be a broker between buyers and sellers to the degree that’s possible. You can then earn commissions, placement fees, visibility fees, or any number of other fees yet to be conceiv...

These click-through agreements are the grandiosely verbose descendants of the Zen koan about a tree falling in a forest that no one hears.

Since they are unread, they basically do not exist, except for setting the basic rule everyone understands, which is that the server takes no risks, only the users of the server.

The ideal is for click-through agreements to remain unread until your server becomes so huge that it’s scary.

The ideal Siren Server is one for which you make no specific decisions.

You should do everything possible to not do anything consequential. Don’t play favorites; don’t have taste. You are to be the neutral facilitator, the connector, the hub, but never an agent who could be blamed for a decision. Reduce the number of decisions that can be pinned on you to an absolute minimum.

What you can do, however, is pattern how other people make decisions.

Notice how this is almost synonymous with governance , and also the maxim that the government that governs best is the government that governs least

never get into the middle of any specific event within the pattern template you’ve created for other people to use.

It isn’t polite or cool to think about monetization very early in the game.

Information always turns to money, somehow, sooner or later.