Who Owns the Future? Quotes

“Here’s a current example of the challenge we face. At the height of its power, the photography company Kodak employed more than 140,000 people and was worth $28 billion. They even invented the first digital camera. But today Kodak is bankrupt, and the new face of digital photography has become Instagram. When Instagram was sold to Facebook for a billion dollars in 2012, it employed only thirteen people. Where did all those jobs disappear to? And what happened to the wealth that those middle-class jobs created? This book is built to answer questions like these, which will only become more common as digital networking hollows out every industry, from media to medicine to manufacturing.”
― Jaron Lanier, Who Owns the Future?

“It is exactly when others insist that it’s a sign of being free, fresh, and radical to do what everybody’s doing that you might want to take notice and think for yourself. Don’t be surprised if this is really hard to do.”
― Jaron Lanier, Who Owns the Future?

“Wouldn’t it be easier just to treat the information space as a public resource and tax or charge companies somehow for the benefit of using it?”
― Jaron Lanier, Who Owns the Future?

“We must learn to see the full picture, and not just the treats before our eyes. Our trendy gadgets, such as smartphones and tablets, have given us new access to the world. We regularly communicate with people we would never even have been aware of before the networked age. We can find information about almost anything at any time. But we have learned how much our gadgets and out idealistically motivated digital networks are being used to spy on us by ultrapowerful, remote organizations. We are being dissected more than we dissect.”
― Jaron Lanier, Who Owns the Future?

“With an eBook, however, you are not a first-class commercial citizen. Instead, you have only purchased tenuous rights within someone else’s company store. You cannot resell, nor can you do anything else to treat your purchase as an investment.”
― Jaron Lanier, Who Owns the Future?

“Distributions can only be based on measurements, but as in the case of measuring intelligence, the nature of measurement is often complicated and troubled by ambiguities. Consider the problem of noise, or what is known as luck in human affairs. Since the rise of the new digital economy, around the turn of the century, there has been a distinct heightening of obsessions with contests like American Idol, or other rituals in which an anointed individual will suddenly become rich and famous. When it comes to winner-take-all contests, onlookers are inevitably fascinated by the role of luck. Yes, the winner of a singing contest is good enough to be the winner, but even the slightest flickering of fate might have changed circumstances to make someone else the winner. Maybe a different shade of makeup would have turned the tables. And yet the rewards of winning and losing are vastly different. While some critics might have aesthetic or ethical objections to winner-take-all outcomes, a mathematical problem with them is that noise is amplified. Therefore, if a societal system depends too much on winner-take-all contests, then the acuity of that system will suffer. It will become less reality-based.”
― Jaron Lanier, Who Owns the Future?

“When people don't care enough to look, then privacy will be restored.”
― Jaron Lanier, Who Owns the Future?

“When you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail.”
― Jaron Lanier, Who Owns the Future?

“Moral hazard has never met a more efficient amplifier than a digital network.”
― Jaron Lanier, Who Owns the Future?

“The reason [James Clerk] Maxwell's Demon cannot exist is that it does take resources to perform an act of discrimination. We imagine computation is free, but it never is. The very act of choosing which particle is cold or hot itself becomes an energy drain and a source of waste heat. The principle is also known as "no free lunch."
We do our best to implement Maxwell's Demon whenever we manipulate reality with our technologies, but we can never do so perfectly; we certainly can't get ahead of the game, which is known as entropy. All the air conditioners in a city emit heat that makes the city hotter overall. While you can implement what seems to be a Maxwell's Demon if you don't look too far or too closely, in the big picture you always lose more than you gain.
Every bit in a computer is a wannabe Maxwell's Demon, separating the state of "one" from the state of "zero" for a while, at a cost. A computer on a network can also act like a wannabe demon if it tries to sort data from networked people into one or the other side of some imaginary door, while pretending there is no cost or risk involved.”
― Jaron Lanier, Who Owns the Future?

“Here is yet another statement of the core idea of this book, that data concerning people is best thought of as people in disguise, and they’re usually up to something.”
― Jaron Lanier, Who Owns the Future?

“The foundational idea of humanistic computing is that provenance is valuable. Information is people in disguise, and people ought to be paid for value they contribute that can be sent or stored on a digital network.”
― Jaron Lanier, Who Owns the Future?

“As the familiar quote usually attributed to Supreme Court justice Louis D. Brandeis goes, “We can have democracy in this country, or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can’t have both.”
― Jaron Lanier, Who Owns the Future?

“Every power-seeking entity in the world, whether it’s a government, a business, or an informal group, has gotten wise to the idea that if you can assemble information about other people, that information makes you powerful.”
― Jaron Lanier, Who Owns the Future?

“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.”
― Jaron Lanier, Who Owns the Future?

“Letting your children get lazy now because of the work of the earlier generations could bring the cumulative achievement of many generations of people down to rubble in a single generation.”
― Jaron Lanier, Who Owns the Future?

“What's killing millions of people is that we're so squeamish about letting rich people be rich.”
― Jaron Lanier, Who Owns the Future?

“You are the reverse image of inconceiveable epochs of heartbreak and cruelty. [...] The genetic, natural part of you is the sum of the leftovers of bilions of years of extreme violence and poverty.”
― Jaron Lanier, Who Owns the Future?

“This is one of the great illusions of our times: that you can game without being gamed.”
― Jaron Lanier, Who Owns the Future?

“It's easier to stay rich than to get rich.”
― Jaron Lanier, Who Owns the Future?

“We are becoming alienated from our authentic selves, and the most valuable parts of becoming human are being bargained away to feed the digital hunger for data to monetize.”
― Jaron Lanier, Who Owns the Future?

“Can you drop out of social media for six months, just to feel the world differently, and test yourself, in a new way? Can you disengage from a Siren Server for a while and handle the punishing network effects? If you feel you can't, you haven't really engaged fully with the possibilities of who you might be, and what you might make of your life in the world.”
― Jaron Lanier, Who Owns the Future?

“The intrinsic challenge of computation-and of economics in the information age-is finding a way to not be overly drawn into dazzlingly designed forms of cognitive waste”
― Jaron Lanier, Who Owns the Future?

“And then about the criteria for success: "If market pricing is the only legitimate test of quality, why are we still bothering with proving theorems? Why don't we just have a vote on whether a theorem is true? To make it better we'll have everyone vote on it, especially the hundreds of millions of people who don't understand the math. Would that satisfy you?”
― Jaron Lanier, Who Owns the Future?

“When only certain privileged players can own capital, while everyone else can only buy services, the market will eventually consume itself and evolve into a nonmarket.”
― Jaron Lanier, Who Owns the Future?

“Governments lately seem timid, beleaguered, and incompetent to keep up with the times.”
― Jaron Lanier, Who Owns the Future?

“If the middle classes are weak, then chaos will unfold. People usually protest in a reasonably orderly fashion against austerity. If they come to see that their families must die before those of a weird insular upper class, there will be no restraint. As much as we like to romanticize revolutions, they are a form of terror in practice. It would be wise to institute a universal system to strengthen the middle classes before the destined moment arrives.”
― Jaron Lanier, Who Owns the Future?

“That people age and die is what makes room for new people to find their places, so that aspiration is possible. If individuals were no longer temporary, then the species would enter into a worse-than-medieval stasis of eternal, absolutely boring winners. Plutocracy would suffocate creativity definitively.”
― Jaron Lanier, Who Owns the Future?

“Corruption, senility, and brutality emerge in democratically elected governments, of course, but the whole point of a viably designed democracy is to provide a persistent baseline for society. You can vote in new politicians without killing a democratic government, while a free market is a fake if companies aren't allowed to die due to competition. When giant remote companies own everyone's digital identities, they become "too big to fail," which is a state of affairs that degrades both markets and governments.”
― Jaron Lanier, Who Owns the Future?

“The death of Facebook must be an option if it is to be a company at all. Therefore your online identity should not be fundamentally grounded in Facebook or something similar.”
― Jaron Lanier, Who Owns the Future?