Who Owns the Future?

by Jaron Lanier

If its product is to manage risk, it clearly did a terrible job.

expanded purely because of its top positions on networks.

ss defined

Moral hazard has never met a more efficient amplifier than...

The more influential digital networks become, the more potential moral hazard we’ll see, unless...

narcissism, hyperamplified risk aversion, and extreme information asymmetry.

winner of an all-or-nothing contest, and it inflicts smaller all-or-nothing contests on those who interact with it.

results of the analysis are kept secret, but are used to manipulate the rest of the world to advantage.

That plan will always eventually backfire,

the rest of the world cannot indefinitely absorb the increased risk, cost, and waste di...

yet was entirely complacent about Hephaestus’s gold...

in inorgani...

we are really most looking at ourselve...

It is not the siren who harms the sailor, but the sailor’s inabili...

fated by their nature to sow...

cousins to another seductive liter...

imaginary creature that, if it could only exist,

the tiny act of discriminating between hot and cold would produce infinite energy,

it does take resources to perform an act of discrimination.

The principle is also known as “no free lunch.”

whenever we manipulate reality with our technologies,

can’t get ahead of the game, which is kno...

in the big picture you always lose more than you gain.

while pretending there is no cost or risk involved.

might allow only those who would be cheap to insure through a doorway

the uninsured would not cease to exist; rather, they would instead add to the cost of the whole system,

A short-term illusion of risk reduction would actually lead to increased risk in the longer term.

lights in the tunnel / book. pay people for consuming wisely

the Siren Servers, channel much of the productivity of ordinary people into an informal economy of barter and reputation, while concentrating the extracted old-fashioned wealth for themselves.

subject to arbitrage,

I find that idea inadequately human-centric and overly dismal, but it is an interesting contrast to my proposal.

These are the skills that might win you a position close to a Siren Server.

good advice in the near term.

The Specter of the Perfect Investment

the specture of the perfect investment

Information and money are mutable cousins,

money might not even be the object, though even in that case,

It ideally doesn’t do or make anything. The plan is simply to channel the information of those who do act in the world. It is those actors who take risks, not the perfect investment.† †This goes beyond the traditional idea of cost externalization, to automated, unexamined risk externalization.

The responsibility for fixing problems enabled by the perfect investment lies with those sorry souls who are fated to act and take risks in the disadvantaged neighborhood that is reality.

quickly anneal into an impermeable and unchallengeable position, by nature a monopoly in its domain.

in the vernacular Silicon Valley sense.

taught students in his Stanford course on startups to find a way to create “monopolies.”)

an Ender's Game of Economy

the creation of ultrasecret mega-dossiers about what others are doing, and using this information to concentrate money and power.

the result is a wielding of digital technology against the future of the middle class.

Weird stealth blackmail

remarkably decent,

You couldn’t ask for a nicer elite. But that doesn’t really help.

Iconic online empires have been accepted ...

Individuals of high or low station are not reasonably able to avoid playing along in an immediately compelling system, even if that system is destroying itself in the big picture.

similar once you think about information systems in the terms of information, instead of imposing outdated categories on them.

someone is practically blackmailed by the distortions of playing the pawn in someone else’s network.

weird kind of stealth...

you don’t see all that should be in ...