An Amazon Best Book of the Month, May 2013: Jaron Lanier's last
book, You Are Not a Gadget, was an influential criticism of Web
2.0's crowd-sourced back. In Who Owns the Future?, Lanier is
interested in how network technologies affect our culture,
economy, and collective soul. Lanier is talking about pretty
heady stuff--the monopolistic power of big tech companies (dubbed
"Siren Servers"), the flattening of the middle class, the
obscuring of humanity--but he has a gift for explaining
sophisticated concepts with clarity. In fact, what separates
Lanier from a lot of techno-futurists is his emphasis on the
maintaining humanism and accessibility in technology. In the most
ambitious part of the book, Lanier expresses what he believes to
be the ideal version of the networked future--one that is built
on two-way connections instead of one-way relationships, allowing
content, media, and other innovations to be more easily
attributed (including a system of micro-payments that lead back
to its creator). Is the two-way networked vision of the internet
proposed in Who Owns the Future quixotic? Even Lanier seems
unsure, but his goal here is to establish a foundation for which
we should strive. At one point, Lanier jokingly asks sci-fi
author William Gibson to write something that doesn't depict
technology as so menacing. Gibson replies, "Jaron, I tried. But
it's coming out dark." Lanier is able to conjure a future that's
much brighter, and hopefully in his imagination, we are moving
closer to that. --Kevin Nguyen
Q&A with Jaron Lanier
-------------------------
Jaron Lanier Q. Years ago, in the early days of networking, you
and your friends asserted that information should be free. What
made you change your tune?
A. In the big picture, a great new technology that makes the
world more efficient should result in waves of new rtunity.
That’s what happened with, say, electricity, telephones, cars,
plumbing, fertilizers, vaccinations, and many other examples. Why
on earth have the early years of the network revolution been
associated with recessions, austerity, jobless recoveries, and
loss of social mobility? Something has clearly gone wrong.
The old ideas about information being free in the information
age ended up screwing over everybody except the owners of the
very biggest computers. The biggest computers turned into ing
and behavior modification operations, which concentrated wealth
and power.
Sharing information freely, without traditional rewards like
royalties or paychecks, was supposed to create rtunities for
brave, creative individuals. Instead, I have watched each
successive generation of young journalists, artists, musicians,
photographers, and writers face harsher and harsher odds. The
perverse effect of opening up information has been that the
status of a young person’s parents matters more and more, since
it’s so hard to make one’s way.
Q. Throughout history, technological revolutions have caused
unemployment but also brought about new types of jobs to replace
the old ones. What’s different today?
A. Cars can now drive themselves, and cloud services can
translate passages between languages well enough to be of
practical use. But the role of people in these technologies
turned out to be a surprise.
Back in the 1950s, the fantasy in the computer science world was
that smart scientists would achieve machine intelligence and
profound levels of automation, but that never worked. Instead,
vast as of “big data” gathered from real people is rehashed
to create automation. There are many, many real people behind the
curtain.
This should be great news for the future of employment!
Multitudes of people are needed in order for robots to speak,
drive cars, or perform operations. The only problem is that as
the information age is dawning, the ideology of bright young
people and newfangled plutocrats alike holds that information
should be free.
Q. Who does own the future? What’s up for grabs that will affect
our future livelihoods?
A. The answer is indeed up for grabs. If we keep on doing things
as we are, the answer is clear: The future will be narrowly owned
by the people who run the biggest, best connected computers,
which will usually be found in giant, remote cloud computing
farms.
The answer I am promoting instead is that the future should be
owned broadly by everyone who contributes data to the cloud, as
robots and other machines animated by cloud software start to
drive our vehicles, care for us when we’re , mine our natural
resources, create the physical objects we use, and so on, as the
21st century progresses.
Right now, most people are only gaining informal benefits from
advances in technology, like free internet services, while those
who own the biggest computers are concentrating formal benefits
to an unsustainable degree.
Q. What is a “Siren Server” and how does it function?
A. I needed a broad name for the gargantuan cloud computer
services that are concentrating wealth and influence in our era.
They go by so many names! There are national intelligence
agencies, the famous Silicon Valley companies with nursery school
names, the stealthy high finance schemes, and others.
All these schemes are quite similar. The biggest computers can
predictably calculate wealth and clout on a broad, statistical
level. For instance, an insurance company might use massive
as of data to only insure people who are unlikely to get
. The problem is that the risk and loss that can be avoided
by having the biggest computer still exist. Everyone else must
pay for the risk and loss that the Siren Server can avoid.
The interesting thing about the original Homeric Sirens was that
they didn’t actually attack sailors. The al peril was that
sailors volunteered to grant the sirens control of the
interaction. That’s what we’re all doing with the biggest
computing schemes.
Q. As a solution to the economic problems caused by digital
networks, you assert that each one of us should be paid for what
we do and share online. How would that work?
A. We’ve all contributed to the fortunes of big Silicon Valley
schemes, big finance schemes, and all manner of other schemes
which are driven by computation over a network. But our
contributions were deliberately forgotten. This is partly due to
the ideology of copying without a trace that my friends and I
mistakenly thought would lead to a fairer world, back in the day.
The error we made was simple: Not all computers are created
equal.
What is clear is that networks could remember where the value
actually came from, which is from a very broad range of people. I
sketch a way that universal micropayments might solve the
problem, though I am not attempting to present a utopian
solution. Instead I hope to deprogram people from the “open”
ideal to think about networks more broadly. I am certain that
once the conversation escapes the bounds of what has become an
orthodoxy, better ideas will come about.
Q. Who Owns the Future seems like two books in one. Does it seem
that way to you?
A. If all I wanted was sympathy and popularity, I am sure that a
critique by itself—without a proposal for a solution—would have
been more effective.
It’s true that the fixes put forward in Who Owns the Future are
ambitious, but they are presented within an explicitly modest
wrapping. I am hoping to make the world safer for diverse ideas
about the future. Our times are terribly conformist. For
instance, one is either “red” or “blue,” or is accepted by the
“open culture” crowd or not. I seek to bust open such orthodoxies
by showing that other ideas are possible. So I present an
intentionally rough sketch of an alternate future that doesn’t
match up with any of the present orthodoxies.
A reality-based, compassionate world is one in which criticism
is okay. I dish it out, but I also lay my tender neck out before
you.
Q. You’re a musician in addition to being a computer scientist.
What in has that given you?
A. In the 1990s I was signed to a big label, but as a minor
artist. I had to compete in an esoteric niche market, as an
experimental classical/jazz high prestige sort of artist. That
world was highly competitive and professional, and inspired an
intense level of effort from me.
I assumed that losing the moneyed side of the business
would not make all that much of a difference, but I was wrong. I
no longer bother to release music. The reason is that it now
feels like a vanity market. Self-promotion has become the primary
activity of many of my musician friends. Yuk.
When the music is heard, it’s often in the context of
automatically generated streams from some cloud service, so the
listener doesn’t even know it’s you. Successful music tends to be
quite conformist to some pre-existing category, because that way
it fits better into the automatic streaming schemes. I miss
competing in the intense NYC music scene. Who keeps you honest
when the world is drowning in insincere flattery?
So here I am writing books. Hello book critics!