Who Owns the Future?

by Jaron Lanier

can’t be fully automatic and needs some “buttons,”

Wanting to tweak a technology shows a commitment to it, not a rejection of it.

if network technology can make capitalism better instead of worse.

levies at the top. rich dad poor dad

not mere income but wealth.

The rich have internalized a psychology of finance, as opposed to accounting.

The rich enjoy big levees in the flow.

Wealth for the most successful people becomes like the ocean th...

easier to stay rich than t...

In mathematics we often switch around top and bottom

We are constantly trying to find ways that our minds can make sense of abstractions,

middle-class-sustaining form of wealth, as opposed to mere income.

fluid enough to reward creativity,

tough enough to withstand inevitable giant hurricanes of capital flow, which will surely appear as new technologies unfold in this century.

not dependent on all-or-nothing life events,

strengthened, not weakened, as more and more pe...

What might seem to a worker like security can seem to an employer or an investor like a blockade on the corrective mechanisms of the market.

except no union member had ever dealt with shape-sensing optical fiber bundles or wiring for magnetic field generators that were needed to track parts of performers’ bodies.

Theirs wasn’t just an intellectual argument; the threat of physical enforcement hung in the air.

And yet,

came to be

have ...

Next to every levee is a bat...

at times approaching a fo...

for the purposes of this book I have to focus somewhat on certain failings.

Levees are more human than algorithmic,

the rich or the middle class, levees are inevitably a little conspiratorial, and conspiracy naturally attracts corruption.

Levees are a rejection of unbridled algorithm and an insertion of human will

antenimbosian levees worked well enough to preserve middle classes

of a world contoured by finance.

capitalism would probably have decayed into Marx’s “at...

The legitimizing of the levees of the middle classes reinforced the legitimacy of the levees of the rich.

cheap enough to network finance

the fluid of capital became a superfluid.

Unions were unable to stop manufacturing jobs from moving about the world as fast as the tides of capital would carry them.

All must be made fluid.

victims often cheered

so that taxpayers were no longer responsible for the retirements of strangers.

investment could be unendingly leveraged from above.

Isn’t it great that people are taking responsibility for the fact that life isn’t fair?

razor-thin tower and an emaciated long tail.

copying. moral position on software features? practical note

unfortunately designed digital network flattens levees

enabling data copying.

what would be in storage but copies? well. originals exist, in either universe. but, is there hardware.... The earth is turning into a spaceship. Will there be an environment for the human? What? It could be shaped as one seat, or it could be shaped akin to it is now. is there hardware we're presently using that the new digital stuff doesn't communicate with? there's only the weakest symbolic link, understood by mathematicians and computer scientists.. our bodies suffer when their out-puts are not read into our awareness. We treat others as other, all the way up to war. exploding people, like that solves anything. this organic hardware works silently in most people as they exchange prepressed ideas, moving aloentated through their lives. Proprioception at the helm.

When copying is easy, there is almost no intrinsic scarcity,

therefore market value collapses.

the very idea

copying over a network

technically ill-...

bizarre, tawdry events

I don’t really care to have a moral position on a software function.