Who Owns the Future?

by Jaron Lanier

unlikely underdogs worked hard and found great success—except the hard work part is no longer a given.

even when the original story is true, it is vanishingly unlikely that any particular individual will find similar success by pursuing similar strategies.

Horatio’s algebra offered horrible ratios. Theater can’t replace a functional economy. An economy can’t grow authentically if it is too much like a casino.

in the longer term, such people generally must seek to leverage Internet visibility in a gambit to find success in old media, which is being shrunk by the Internet at the same time.

On the one hand, in each case this is wonderful, and yet it’s ultimately a way for people to feel good while having achieved nothing, in statistical terms.

The Web itself went through a honeymoon phase around the turn of the century, which is now remembered as the “dot-com bubble.”

weird and wild successes

motivated a stampede of...

a young woman who drove up her credit card debt and then created a website asking for donations from strangers to pay off her debt, for n...

only because her timing was accident...

Her success was due to the fact that she had a rapt audience for that fleeting magic moment when a network is gaining its network effect but before all the hapless scammers of the world rush in to dilute the radiated benefit of it.

During the honeymoon phase of a newly successful Siren Server, a lucky few people will typically be gifted with astounding, deceptive success.

Their stories will be celebrated, creating a distorted popular perception of opportunities.

I would like to believe this type of success will become unremarkable, but as things stand, I won’t hold my breath. World, please prove me wrong!)

she might succumb to the illusion, for a moment, that she has achieved Siren Server status herself.

Needless to say, the Mechanical Turk effect came into play, and free labor presented itself.

Palmer relented and announced a plan to pay musicians. (Good for her, once again! But this doesn’t suggest a societal solution.)

because they caught a digital wave at just th...

If only there were enough of those moments generated by the regime of Siren Serve...

How do Siren Servers die? We don’t know as much as we will someday soon, since the phenomenon is still new.

simply because Amazon is even more computational than Wal-Mart.

Amazon, by using superior computation, might potentially piggyback on Wal-Mart’s legacy of supply chain optimization, and essentially aggrega...

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,

Competition becomes mostly about who can out-meta who, and only secondarily about specialization.

How would you break up Facebook? Into one for fake hot babes and another for political organizing? The idea is absurd.

Individual Siren Servers can die and yet the Siren Server pattern perseveres, and it is that pattern that is the real problem. The systematic decoupling of risk from reward in the rising information economy is the problem, not any particular server.

a grand future story in which the pattern of Siren Servers will be superseded by a more inclusive new pattern.

The endgames of contests between Siren Servers are not meaningless.

certain traits (narcissism, hyperamplified risk aversion, and extreme information asymmetry),

particular, more specialized p...

enough room for variation that contests between them can also be collision...

contextualized by who sent the thought rather than the content of the thought.

flashes of thought be inserted meaningfully into a shared semantic structure.

knowledge can be divorced from po...

Huffington Post, where opinion...

The designs of these sites are embodiments of philosophies about what a person is, where meaning comes from, the nature of freedom...

an early hint at how ideas might be lost along with them.

Google tried to get a new Siren Server going, to tremendous fanfare, called Wave.3 It proposed that conversations between people could be highly structured from the start, to make the content of the conversation more valuable later.

That would mean that meaning in natural language would be preserved even if everything said had to be fit initially into a par...

suggests a level of meaning in human conversation that is more orderly and tiered, more Chomskyan, than has ever bee...

It’s a major assertion about what meaning is, or might become. (I am skeptical that the idea is correct, ...

we can’t say that the idea suffered a Popperian* disqualification. Instead the idea was attached to a server that failed. With the death of a Siren Server, a distinct sensibility concerning human meaning and how we communicate wit...

described how science never achieves absolute, eternal truth, but instead gets closer and closer to truth by disqualifying false ideas. Mathematics, on the other hand, does include a concept of absolute, eternal truth, because of proofs.

A networked story is just as much a contest of ideas as was the Cold War,

Story lives, and the future is...

“Our CEO mastered social networking 2,000 years before Mark Zuckerberg was born.”1 There’s something to the comparison, and I find that worrisome.

Each network created a center of power that bypassed territorial and political boundaries, and existed on its own plane. Each became what might be called a “social monopoly,” engaging in social engineering on a grand scale.

in 2012 Facebook dipped a toe into the waters of social engineering by increasing the rolls of organ donors with a simple tweak of its user experience.

the problem with freestanding concentrations of power is that you never know who will inherit them. If social networking has the power to synchronize great crowds to dethrone a pharaoh, why might it not also coordinate lynchings or pogroms?

During the Middle Ages, which were characterized by weak states, the Church endured “bad popes.”