Who Owns the Future?

by Jaron Lanier

consciousness is the one thing that isn’t reduced if it’s an illusion.)

the whole universe would disappear because it needed consciousness.

John Archibald W...

He once seemed to believe that consciousness plays a role in keeping things afloat by taking the role of the quantum observer in...

similar but not identical, because people would get a little duller.

suggesting that consciousness plays a specific, but limited practical function in the brain.

If consciousness were not present, the trajectories of all the particles ...

However, there would be no “gross,” or ev...

Neither would there be words or thoughts, though the electrons and chemical bonds that would otherwise comprise them in the brain ...

There would only be the particles that make up things, in exactly the same positions they would otherwi...

In other words, consciousness provides ontolog...

If there were no consciousness, the universe would be adequately described as being nothing but particles. Or, if you prefer a computational framework, only the bits would be left, but not the data structures. It w...

one might identify dynamics at a gross level that could not be described by particle interactions.

the grosser a process is, the more it becomes subject to differing interpretations by observers.

while there can be arguments over interpretation, there can be less argume...

one goes round and round trying to get rid of an experiencing observer in an attempt to describe the universe we experience,

and it is inherently impossible to verify that projects of that kind have been completed.

That is why I don’t think reason can definitively resolve disputes about wheth...

These kinds of arguments recall Kantian attempts to use reason to prove or dispro...

Whether the argument is about people or God, the moves are roughly the same. So I can’t prove that people are special, and no one...

I can argue that it’s a better bet to presume we are special, for little might be lost and much ...

Broadly speaking, that narrative counterpoises the inclusiveness, quickness, and sophistication of online social processes against the sluggish, exclusive club of old-fashioned government or corporate power.

That particular idea of revolution misses the point about how power in human affairs really works.

It cedes the future of economics and places the entire burden on politics.

we might depose an old sort of dysfunctional center of power only to erect a new one that...

The reason is that online opposition to traditional power tends to promote new Siren Servers that in the long ru...

it’s silly to think that only a particular sort of activist will bene...

It’s not as though traditional power structures have been sealed in stasis while digital networking has risen. Instead, old forms of power have been gradually melded...

same sorts of cheery recent PhDs from top schools cavort in an airy and playful environment with lots of glass and excellent coffee.

Nations increasingly recast themselves as Siren Servers in other ways as well.

all other nations wish to be the ultimate masters of digital information flow.

It’s easy to motivate a coalition in opposition to control freakery in digital statesmanship, because democracy advocates and network entrepreneurs hate it equally.

I suspect that the role of digital networking in the Arab Spring was a novelty effect.*

(It appears that governments are getting better at getting ahead of citizen cyber-movements than commercial schemes, which consistently outwit regulators.)

I am sick of hearing us pat ourselves on the back by describing someone else’s revolution as the “Twitter Revolution” or the “Facebook Revolution,” as if the whole world were about us.

Burma’s population achieved similar results at about the same time without the Internet.

hope to support democracy will backfire the most just when they seem to be succeeding.

Opposing a particular type of Siren Server, even when the target is the latest cyber-concept of a nation-state, doesn’t really help when your actions only serve to promote yet other Siren Servers.

It’s impossible to divorce politics from economic reality.

the gift I thanked Wal-Mart for earlier.

the ideal of “free” information could erode economic interdependencies between nations.

A warehouse should not be perceived as being in a separate economic category than a website. China is as economically dependent on an American website’s security as it is on the truck that delivers goods made in China. But that dependency doesn’t show up adequately in international accounting.

Siren Servers are narcissists; blind to where value comes from, including the web of global interdependence that is at the core of their own value.

Only genuinely empowered masses of people, with real wealth, clout, and economic dignity, can balance state power.

The cyber-activist community, which leans in a knotted lefty/libertarian fashion, fancies itself able to organize the vote, but actually it turns out that “big money” is even more able to do so.1

Democrats might vote to raise their own taxes, while Republicans might vote often enough to reduce their own safety nets and earned benefits.

what “big money” means is turning election campaigns into Siren Servers.

The interesting thing about elections is that law dictates multiple competing players. This makes elections unusual in the era of big data, since the “exclusion principle” doesn’t hold.

the failure mode of politics in which a “party machine” emerges.

The terminology is instructive. The process becomes deterministic, as if it were a machine. Democracy relies on laws that impose diversity on a market-like dynamic that might otherwise evolve toward monopoly.