'Who Owns The Future?' Jaron Lanier thinks Google and the government should pay for your data

2013-05-23T17:00:07Z

In Who Owns the Future?, Jaron Lanier, the computer scientist and musician who became the face of virtual reality in the 1990s, pins the devolution and ultimate destruction of the Western middle class on accelerating technological change, and on the internet in particular. He then suggests a way to re-engineer our networked world to recreate a middle class. His critique of the conditions that led to America’s economic crisis, while flawed, is mostly a sharp and enjoyable read. The last 150 pages (nearly half of the book) dedicated to the solution, however, get bogged down in the contingencies of something that will never occur.

Lanier would have done better with a blast of pure pessimism or by embracing far simpler and more probable fixes. But some surprisingly knee-jerk reactionary political prejudices lead him away from the more likely solutions. The result is an often brilliant book that is subverted, in the end, by an obscure intellectual exercise.

Lanier’s fundamental point is that power and wealth have drifted upward in the digital economy and toward what he calls “Siren Servers.” These giant information-gathering “services” — ranging from Facebook and Google to giant financial players and the government surveillance industry — take data that we all provide freely (and, often, enthusiastically) and use their advantages in data collection to build enormous economic fiefdoms.

Publishing, TV, and a whole series of industries are being squeezed dry by the people’s demand for free digitized stuff

In Lanier’s view, it’s unfair that we receive no income from being the informational source of this “Big Data” economy. But the bigger problem is that the “free culture” we create, which is, more or less, curated by the Siren Servers, eliminates industries, and with it, jobs. Musicians — and the music industry that (in Lanier’s estimation) supported them — were the canaries in the coal mine. Slowly but surely, book publishing, television, and a whole series of media industries are being squeezed dry by the people’s demand for free digitized stuff. Large cloud-based companies hold a singular advantage, too, floating above the complexities of making content and amassing ridiculous fortunes simply by providing a nexus through which content is found and / or distributed. This large-scale disintermediation puts a lot of people out or work and shrinks the middle-class economy. But the trouble doesn’t end there. With the rapid evolution of robotics and other forms of automation (like 3D printing), pretty much everybody else will become economically superfluous and marginalized. A middle class already in a tailspin will disappear almost entirely.

Portrait of the author, Jaron Lanier

There’s a lot that’s right with Lanier’s analyses, and it’s accomplished with a concision and wit that occasionally spills over into genuine hilarity, as in Lanier’s satire of the power relations between the Siren Servers and the average participant in the digital economy. In this funny segment, he imagines a real world functioning similarly to our current or near-future digital world. In the imagined scenario, the parents of some children setting up a lemonade stand receive notice that they must apply to the fictional über-Facebook, StreetBook, for a jointly operated “Lemonade Stand” app. An accompanying contract blatantly advantages StreetBook over the Lemonade Stand partners at every turn. Finally, at the end, in all caps, the contract reveals the totality of StreetBook’s domination: “STREETBOOK MAY CHANGE OR AMEND ANY AND ALL ASPECTS OF THIS AGREEMENT ENTERED INTO BY YOU AT ANY TIME. STREETBOOK ACCEPTS NO LIABILITY OF ANY KIND.”

This cracked me up, having read contracts not dissimilar to this on a few occasions. But then I realized that the contracts I was remembering were from conventional, pre-digital media corporations. And therein lies one of the biggest flaws in Lanier’s tome. His view of pre-digital capitalism — and the middle-class lifestyle it granted to a fairly substantial number of (white) people — is more than a little bit gauzy.

In fact, once you get past the critical part of the book and begin to gather glimpses of its advocacy, there’s a strong undercurrent of nostalgia for a very specific set of economic and social conditions that defined Western democratic capitalism during the second half of the 20th century. To wit: according to Lanier’s late-20th-century sensibility, in order to have a thriving middle class with economic dignity, we must recode our networked system in a way that causes the market to reward efforts with payments in currency. The trouble is — in the face of disintermediation and automation — said system has to contort itself in peculiar (and, most of all, unlikely) ways for this to occur. The market, left to its current devices, won’t have a reason to pay enough people enough money for what they do to support a booming middle class. Lanier’s solution for this is… well… very complicated.

Lanier’s solution is to cut us in on the action — to monetize our activities to our own financial advantage

Lanier reaches back to the ideas of computer visionary Ted Nelson. Nelson proposed something similar to our contemporary internet in the 1960s, but with the important distinction that links would be two-way and therefore always traceable back to the original source. Presuming to somehow fix this “error” in the way things actually occurred, Lanier seems to be proposing a quasi-egalitarian micro-commoditization of virtually all our moments in public space (now tractable thanks to the Nelsonian linking scheme) so that people somehow get paid every time they make a contribution to the datasphere. For example, he imagines a pedestrian whose stroll uncovers a pedestrian safety issue receiving a micro-payment from the government.

Leaving aside the complications in measuring an endless dataflow of such subjective value (well beyond what the market does on its own), the scheme seems mainly reactive. Since the complaint is that Facebook and Google (for example) are selling our spontaneous activities in virtual space to advertisers, Lanier’s solution is, essentially, to cut us in on the action — to monetize our activities to our own financial advantage. But the entire edifice on which our participation in the world of the Siren Servers is built depends on advertising, or the expectation of advertising. That foundation is so flimsy that a slight upturn in an already present mass skepticism could topple the whole thing. Anyway, pulling so much of our lives into the realm of accountancy and currency exchange hardly seems like a path to the more humanistic economy Lanier is hoping for.

Many of us believe that a healthier version of a radically automated culture would increasingly decommodify public and private information and activity. An excess of wealth generated by automated production would make it possible to live more dynamic economic lives. This would be done by combining guaranteed income with an amplification of participatory cultural tendencies and the continued fostering of market competition to inspire innovation. Weirdly, Lanier — who self-identifies as a liberal — cries socialism or even communism at such proposals. What it really suggests is an adaptation of his much-beloved late-20th-century Western democratic mixed-economy social welfare state to the realities of the 21st century.

R.U. Sirius

Ted Nelson

The reader may start to feel as if she is stuck in a room with a smart engineer on stimulants who is taking his late-night “If I ruled the world” fantasy too seriously

In contrast to a Nelsonian coding of the networked world, social welfare capitalism has the advantage of having actually occurred and — perhaps more to the point — of having been tacked on to other things that actually occurred. That’s the way shit actually happens. It’s tacked on to the shit that happened before.

And that’s why the section of Who Owns The Future? which proposes a solution starts to get tedious. It’s not gonna happen. And after a while, the reader may start to feel as if she is stuck in a room with a smart engineer on stimulants who is taking his late-night “If I ruled the world” fantasy too seriously, filling in way too much detail and working through an entire list of contingencies that the fantasy system would probably produce.

Jaron Lanier brings noble intentions to the book. He wants to gently derail the Siren Servers’ dominant plutocratic tendencies by recoding the fundamentals of digital exchange. He even claims that everybody — even the plutocrats — would ultimately benefit from his idea. But the sad truth is that his elegant Nelsonian concept is even now disappearing into the memory hole of a dissipative, inelegant, and chaotic present and future. Jaron Lanier is trying to fit a square peg into a black hole.

Steve Jobs manga portrays the man as a dreamy, drug-fueled genius that Japanese girls could love

2013-03-25T10:40:56Z

It doesn't star Ashton Kutcher, and it isn't written by Aaron Sorkin, but it might be more interesting than both: it's the Japanese manga adaptation of Steve Jobs' life. You could be forgiven for thinking that the juice has been squeezed out of this particular story, following 2011's official biography by Walter Isaacson and a brace of upcoming movies — but if ever there were a medium that could put a new spin on an old tale, a manga series would be it. Today's publication of Mari Yamazaki's Steve Jobs, then, is a somewhat notable event. The first volume is now available in the May 2013 issue of womens' comic anthology Kiss, oddly enough, and it's quite unlike anything I've read before.

Yamazaki has pulled off the artwork beautifully

The manga is actually an adaptation of Isaacson's biography, and credits it as the source material on the bottom of the first page. Told from Isaacson's perspective, it begins with Jobs repeatedly nagging the biographer to write his story — a conversation that persists over the first fifteen pages before a call from Jobs' wife Laurene Powell finally breaks Isaacson's resolve. The first thing you'll notice in these opening pages is that Yamazaki has pulled off the artwork beautifully; far from the spiky-haired caricatures that may come to mind when you think of manga, Jobs has been brought to life in a semi-realistic monochrome style that is never off-putting, but stays true to the Japanese manga tradition.

Once Isaacson has been persuaded to write the biography, the manga jumps back to Jobs' early years. It's here where we start to see Yamazaki play to her perceived audience — Jobs is rendered as a cute, doe-eyed kid who worries about whether his adoptive parents love him. From then we see Jobs grow into the man who founded Apple with the realization that he is "special," a developed interest in engineering, and school pranks that establish a slightly bad-boy persona.

Context is important, here: "Steve Jobs" is appearing in the pages of Kiss alongside regular tales of high school love and drama, and that's the lens through which readers will view it. Jobs is as much a household name in Japan as anywhere else, but the manga already pushes its luck by starting with a fifteen-page deliberation on the writing of its protagonist's biography — however, the story quickly turns into something more reader-friendly.

From candy to LSD in two pages

Once Jobs is of college age, Yamazaki swiftly transforms him into the type of character any teenage reader could fall in love with. In one memorable two-page spread, Jobs goes from accepting a bribe of $5 and candy from his influential teacher Imogene Hill, to replying "Sure!" when encouraged to try LSD by a long-haired peer in college corridors. Yamazaki plays on Jobs' rebellious side, including an incident where he accidentally leaves a gigantic bag of marijuana in his car at the age of 15. Jobs' father Paul discovers it, but the argument isn't resolved on page — in the next panel, we see Jobs laying down and smoking in a field, thinking to himself "I'm special, so I'm a free person." In a country where drug use is still genuinely counter-culture in most circles, it seems the archetype of the misunderstood genius works just as well.

The manga's final panel shows Jobs' first meeting with a shaggy-haired, bearded Steve Wozniak, with the Isaacson narration elaborating "And that was how the two Steves met;" no further explanation of the Apple co-founder's identity is given. And maybe that's okay — from this first volume, Steve Jobs sets out to tell the tale of the mercurial genius' life in broad, emotionally charged strokes. The unusual mix of theme and tone, mixed with some excellent art, is what'll make me pick up the next volume when it's released next month.

The Verge - Book Reviews

'Who Owns The Future?' Jaron Lanier thinks Google and the government should pay for your data

Steve Jobs manga portrays the man as a dreamy, drug-fueled genius that Japanese girls could love