by Jaron Lanier
Robots are even more impressive in the lab. They perform combat missions and surgery and, ominously, fabricate products from raw materials. There are already affordable homemade hobbyist models of small fabricating robots that can create household items on demand right in your house, based on plans downloaded from the net.
The Devaluation of Everything
One of our essential hopes in the early days of the digital revolution was that a connected world would create more opportunities for personal advancement for everyone. Maybe it will eventually, but there has been more of an inverted effect so far, at least in the United States. During the past decade and a half, since the debut of the web, even during the best years of the economic boom times, the middle class in the United States declined. Wealth was ever more concentrated.
I’m not saying this is the fault of the net, but if we digital technologists are supposed to be providing a cure, we aren’t doing it fast enough. If we can’t reformulate digital ideals before our appointment with destiny, we will have failed to bring about a better world. Instead we will usher in a dark age in which everything human is devalued.
This kind of devaluation will go into high gear when information systems become able to act without constant human intervention in the physical world, through robots and other automatic gadgets. In a crowdsourced world, the peasants of the noosphere will ride a dismal boomerang between gradual impoverishment under robot-driven capitalism and a dangerously sudden, desperate socialism.
The Only Product That Will Maintain Its Value After the Revolution
There is, unfortunately, only one product that can maintain its value as everything else is devalued under the banner of the noosphere. At the end of the rainbow of open culture lies an eternal spring of advertisements. Advertising is elevated by open culture from its previous role as an accelerant and placed at the center of the human universe.
There was a discernible ambient disgust with advertising in an earlier, more hippie like phase of Silicon Valley, before the outlandish rise of Google. Advertising was often maligned back then as a core sin of the bad old-media world we were overthrowing. Ads were at the very heart of the worst of the devils we would destroy, commercial television.
Ironically, advertising is now singled out as the only form of expression meriting genuine commercial protection in the new world to come. Any other form of expression is to be remashed, anonymized, and decontextualized to the point of meaninglessness. Ads, however, are to be made ever more contextual, and the content of the ad is absolutely sacrosanct. No one—and I mean no one—dares to mash up ads served in the margins of their website by Google. When Google started to rise, a common conversation in Silicon Valley would go like this: “Wait, don’t we hate advertising?” “Well, we hate old advertising. The new kind of advertising is unobtrusive and useful.”
The centrality of advertising to the new digital hive economy is absurd, and it is even more absurd that this isn’t more generally recognized. The most tiresome claim of the reigning official digital philosophy is that crowds working for free do a better job at some things than paid antediluvian experts. Wikipedia is often given as an example. If that is so—and as I explained, if the conditions are right it sometimes can be—why doesn’t the principle dissolve the persistence of advertising as a business?
A functioning, honest crowd-wisdom system ought to trump paid persuasion. If the crowd is so wise, it should be directing each person optimally in choices related to home finance, the whitening of yellow teeth, and the search for a lover. All that paid persuasion ought to be mooted. Every penny Google earns suggests a failure of the crowd—and Google is earning a lot of pennies.
Accelerating a Vacuum
If you want to know what’s really going on in a society or ideology, follow the money. If money is flowing to advertising instead of musicians, journalists, and artists, then a society is more concerned with manipulation than truth or beauty. If content is worthless, then people will start to become empty-headed and contentless.
The combination of hive mind and advertising has resulted in a new kind of social contract. The basic idea of this contract is that authors, journalists, musicians, and artists are encouraged to treat the fruits of their intellects and imaginations as fragments to be given without pay to the hive mind. Reciprocity takes the form of self-promotion. Culture is to become precisely nothing but advertising.
It’s true that today the idea can work in some situations. There are a few widely celebrated, but exceptional, success stories that have taken on mythical qualities. These stories are only possible because we are in a transitional period, in which a few lucky people can benefit from the best of the old-and new-media worlds at the same time, and the fact of their unlikely origins can be spun into a still-novel marketing narrative.
Thus someone as unlikely as Diablo Cody, who worked as a stripper, can blog and receive enough attention to get a book contract, and then have the opportunity to have her script made into a movie—in this case, the widely acclaimed Juno. To think about technologies, however, you have to learn to think as if you’re already living in the future.
It is my hope that book publishing will continue remuneratively into the digital realm. But that will only happen if digital designs evolve to make it possible. As things stand, books will be vastly devalued as soon as large numbers of people start reading from an electronic device.
The same is true for movies. Right now, there are still plenty of people in the habit of buying movies on disk, and of going out to movie theaters. This is the way culture works these days. You have to deliver it through some kind of proprietary hardware, like a theater or a paper book, in order to charge for it.
This is not a sustainable solution. The younger you are, the more likely you are to grab a movie for free over the net instead of buying a disk. As for theaters, I wish them a long, healthy continued life, but imagine a world in which a superb fifty-dollar projector can be set up anywhere, in the woods or at the beach, and generate as good an experience. That is the world we will live in within a decade. Once file sharing shrinks Hollywood as it is now shrinking the music companies, the option of selling a script for enough money to make a living will be gone.
Blaming Our Victims
In the early days of so-called open culture, I was an early adopter of one of our talking points that has since become a cliché: All the dinosaurs of the old order have been given fair notice of the digital revolution to come. If they can’t adapt, it is due to their own stubbornness, rigidity, or stupidity. Blame them for their fate.
This is what we have said since about our initial victims, like the record companies and newspapers. But none of us was ever able to give the dinosaurs any constructive advice about how to survive. And we miss them now more than we have been willing to admit.
Actually, as long as we put the blame on them, it is okay to admit that we miss the declining “mainstream media.” A popular 2008 blog post by Jon Talton blamed newspapers for their own decline, in keeping with the established practices of the revolution. It ended with this stereotypical accusation, which I’ll quote at length:
The biggest problem … was the collapse of an unsustainable business model. Simply put, the model involved sending mini-skirted saleswomen out to sell ads at confiscatory rates to lecherous old car dealers and appliance-store owners …
Now the tailspin continues, and the damage to our democracy is hard to overstate. It’s no coincidence that the United States stumbled into Iraq and is paralyzed before serious challenges at home and abroad at precisely the moment when real journalism is besieged. It almost might make the conspiracy minded think there was a grand plan to keep us dumb.
Of course, I’ve selected just one little blog post out of millions. But it is highly representative of the tenor of online commentary. No one’s ever been able to offer good advice for the dying newspapers, but it is still considered appropriate to blame them for their own fate.
An important question ha
s been raised by this rant, and it would be taboo to ask it in online circles if it weren’t gift wrapped in blanket attacks on the dignity of our victims: Would the recent years of American history have been any different, any less disastrous, if the economic model of the newspaper had not been under assault? We had more bloggers, sure, but also fewer Woodwards and Bernsteins during a period in which ruinous economic and military decisions were made. The Bush years are almost universally perceived as having been catastrophic: the weapons of mass destruction illusion, the economic implosion. Instead of facing up to a tough press, the administration was made vaguely aware of mobs of noisily opposed bloggers nullifying one another. Sure, bloggers uncovered the occasional scandal, but so did opposing bloggers. The effect of the blogosphere overall was a wash, as is always the case for the type of flat open systems celebrated these days.
Peasants and Lords of the Clouds
If some free video of a silly stunt will draw as many eyeballs as the product of a professional filmmaker on a given day, then why pay the filmmaker? If an algorithm can use cloud-based data to unite those eyeballs with the video clip of the moment, why pay editors or impresarios? In the new scheme there is nothing but location, location, location. Rule the computing cloud that routes the thoughts of the hive mind, and you’ll be infinitely wealthy!
We already see the effect of an emerging winner-take-all social contract in students. The brightest computer science students are increasingly turning away from intellectually profound aspects of the field and instead hoping to land a spot in the new royalty at the center of the cloud, perhaps programming a hedge fund. Or the best students might be hatching plans to launch a social networking site for affluent golfers. One Ivy League engineering school unofficially banned that idea as a model business plan in a class on entrepreneurship because it had become so commonplace. Meanwhile, creative people—the new peasants—come to resemble animals converging on shrinking oases of old media in a depleted desert.
One effect of the so-called free way of thinking is that it could eventually force anyone who wants to survive on the basis of mental activity (other than cloud tending) to enter into some sort of legal or political fortress—or become a pet of a wealthy patron—in order to be protected from the rapacious hive mind. What free really means is that artists, musicians, writers, and filmmakers will have to cloak themselves within stodgy institutions.
We forget what a wonder, what a breath of fresh air it has been to have creative people make their way in the world of commerce instead of patronage. Patrons gave us Bach and Michelangelo, but it’s unlikely patrons would have given us Vladimir Nabokov, the Beatles, or Stanley Kubrick.
CHAPTER 5
The City Is Built to Music
THE FATES OF musicians in the emerging digital economy are examined.
How Long Is Too Long to Wait?
A little over a decade and a half ago, with the birth of the World Wide Web, a clock started. The old-media empires were put on a path of predictable obsolescence. But would a superior replacement arise in time? What we idealists said then was, “Just wait! More opportunities will be created than destroyed.” Isn’t fifteen years long enough to wait before we switch from hope to empiricism? The time has come to ask, “Are we building the digital utopia for people or machines?” If it’s for people, we have a problem.
Open culture revels in bizarre, exaggerated perceptions of the evils of the record companies or anyone else who thinks there was some merit in the old models of intellectual property. For many college students, sharing files is considered an act of civil disobedience. That would mean that stealing digital material puts you in the company of Gandhi and Martin Luther King!*
If we choose to pry culture away from capitalism while the rest of life is still capitalistic, culture will become a slum. In fact, online culture increasingly resembles a slum in disturbing ways. Slums have more advertising than wealthy neighborhoods, for instance. People are meaner in slums; mob rule and vigilantism are commonplace. If there is a trace of “slumming” in the way that many privileged young people embrace current online culture, it is perhaps an echo of 1960s counterculture.
It’s true that the record companies have not helped themselves. They have made a public fuss about suing the most sympathetic people, snooped obnoxiously, and so on. Furthermore, there’s a long history of sleaze, corruption, creative accounting, and price fixing in the music business.
Dreams Still Die Hard
By 2008, some of the leading lights of the open culture movement started to acknowledge the obvious, which is that not everyone has benefited from the movement. A decade ago we all assumed, or at least hoped, that the net would bring so many benefits to so many people that those unfortunates who weren’t being paid for what they used to do would end up doing even better by finding new ways to get paid. You still hear that argument being made, as if people lived forever and can afford to wait an eternity to have the new source of wealth revealed to them. Kevin Kelly wrote in 2008 that the new utopia
is famously good news for two classes of people: a few lucky aggregators, such as Amazon and Netflix, and 6 billion consumers. Of those two, I think consumers earn the greater reward from the wealth hidden in infinite niches.
But the long tail is a decidedly mixed blessing for creators. Individual artists, producers, inventors and makers are overlooked in the equation. The long tail does not raise the sales of creators much, but it does add massive competition and endless downward pressure on prices. Unless artists become a large aggregator of other artists’ works, the long tail offers no path out of the quiet doldrums of minuscule sales.
The people who devote their lives to making committed cultural expression that can be delivered through the cloud—as opposed to casual contributions that require virtually no commitment—well, those people are, Kevin acknowledges, the losers.
His new advice at the time was similar to the sorts of things we used to suggest in fits of anticipation and wild hope ten, fifteen, and even twenty-five years ago. He suggested that artists, musicians, or writers find something that isn’t digital related to their work, such as live appearances, T-shirt sales, and so on, and convince a thousand people to spend $100 each per year for whatever that is. Then an artist could earn $100,000 a year.
I very much want to believe that this can be done by more than a tiny number of people who happen to benefit from unusual circumstances. The occasional dominatrix or life coach can use the internet to implement this plan. But after ten years of seeing many, many people try, I fear that it won’t work for the vast majority of journalists, musicians, artists, and filmmakers who are staring into career oblivion because of our failed digital idealism.
My skepticism didn’t come easily. Initially I assumed that entrepreneurial fervor and ingenuity would find a way. As part of researching this book, I set out once again to find some cultural types who were benefiting from open culture.
The Search
We have a baseline in the form of the musical middle class that is being put out of business by the net. We ought to at least find support in the new economy for them. Can 26,000 musicians each find 1,000 true fans? Or can 130,000 each find between 200 and 600 true fans? Furthermore, how long would be too long to wait for this to come about? Thirty years? Three hundred years? Is there anything wrong with enduring a few lost generations of musicians while we wait for the new solution to emerge?
The usual pattern one would expect is an S curve: there would be only a small number of early adaptors, but a noticeable trend of increase in their numbers. It is common in Silicon Valley to see incredibly fast adoption of new behaviors. There were only a few pioneer bloggers for a little while—then, suddenly, there were millions of them. The same could happen for musicians making a living in the new economy.
So at this point in time, a decade and a half after the start of the web, a decade after the widespread adoption of music file sharing, how many examples of musicians living by new rules should we expect to fin
d?
Just to pick a rough number out of the air, it would be nice if there were 3,000 by now. Then maybe in a few years there would be 30,000. Then the S curve would manifest in full, and there would be 300,000. A new kind of professional musician ought to thunder onto the scene with the shocking speed of a new social networking website.
Based on the rhetoric about how much opportunity there is out there, you might think that looking for 3,000 is cynical. There must be tens of thousands already! Or you might be a realist, and think that it’s still early; 300 might be a more realistic figure.
I was a little afraid to just post about my quest openly on the net, because even though I’m a critic of the open/free orthodoxy I didn’t want to jinx it if it had a chance. Suppose I came up with a desultory result? Would that discourage people who would otherwise have made the push to make the new economy work?
Kevin Kelly thought my fear was ridiculous. He’s more of a technological determinist: he thinks the technology will find a way to achieve its destiny whatever people think. So he volunteered to publicize my quest on his popular Technium blog in the expectation that exemplars of the new musical economy would come forward.
I also published a fire-breathing opinion piece in the New York Times and wrote about my fears in other visible places, all in the hope of inspiring contact from the new vanguard of musicians who are making a living off the open web.
In the old days—when I myself was signed to a label—there were a few major artists who made it on their own, like Ani DiFranco. She became a millionaire by selling her own CDs when they were still a high-margin product people were used to buying, back before the era of file sharing. Has a new army of Ani DiFrancos started to appear?