by Jaron Lanier
Nelson is perhaps the most formative figure in the development of online culture. He invented the digital media link and other core ideas of connected online media back in the 1960s. He called it “hypermedia.”
Nelson’s ambitions for the economics of linking were more profound than those in vogue today. He proposed that instead of copying digital media, we should effectively keep only one copy of each cultural expression—as with a book or a song—and pay the author of that expression a small, affordable amount whenever it is accessed. (Of course, as a matter of engineering practice, there would have to be many copies in order for the system to function efficiently, but that would be an internal detail, unrelated to a user’s experience.)
As a result, anyone might be able to get rich from creative work. The people who make a momentarily popular prank video clip might earn a lot of money in a single day, but an obscure scholar might eventually earn as much over many years as her work is repeatedly referenced. But note that this is a very different idea from the long tail, because it rewards individuals instead of cloud owners.
The popularity of amateur content today provides an answer to one of the old objections to Nelson’s ideas. It was once a common concern that most people would not want to be creative or expressive, ensuring that only a few artists would get rich and that everyone else would starve. At one event, I remember Nelson trying to speak and young American Maoists shouting him down because they worried that his system would favor the intellectual over the peasant.
I used to face this objection constantly when I talked about virtual reality (which I discuss more fully in Chapter 14). Many a lecture I gave in the 1980s would end with a skeptic in the audience pointing out loudly and confidently that only a tiny minority of people would ever write anything online for others to read. They didn’t believe a world with millions of active voices was remotely possible—but that is the world that has come to be.
If we idealists had only been able to convince those skeptics, we might have entered into a different, and better, world once it became clear that the majority of people are indeed interested in and capable of being expressive in the digital realm.
Someday I hope there will be a genuinely universal system along the lines proposed by Nelson. I believe most people would embrace a social contract in which bits have value instead of being free. Everyone would have easy access to everyone else’s creative bits at reasonable prices—and everyone would get paid for their bits. This arrangement would celebrate personhood in full, because personal expression would be valued.
Pick Your Poison
There is an intensely strong libertarian bias in digital culture—and what I have said in the preceding section is likely to enrage adherents of digital libertarianism.
It’s not hard to see why. If I’m suggesting a universal system, inspired by Ted Nelson’s early work, doesn’t that mean the government is going to get in the middle of your flow of bits in order to enforce laws related to compensation for artists? Wouldn’t that be intrusive? Wouldn’t it amount to a loss of liberty?
From the orthodox point of view, that’s how it probably looks, but I hope to persuade even the truest believers that they have to pick their poison—and that the poison I’m suggesting here is ultimately preferable, especially from a libertarian perspective.
It’s important to remember the extreme degree to which we make everything up in digital systems, at least during the idyllic period before lock-in constricts our freedoms. Today there is still time to reconsider the way we think about bits online, and therefore we ought to think hard about whether what will otherwise become the official future is really the best we can do.
The scarcity of money, as we know it today, is artificial, but everything about information is artificial. Without a degree of imposed scarcity, money would be valueless.
Let’s take money—the original abstract information system for managing human affairs—as an example. It might be tempting to print your own money, or, if you’re the government, to print an excessive amount of it. And yet smart people choose not to do either of these things. It is a common assertion that if you copy a digital music file, you haven’t destroyed the original, so nothing was stolen. The same thing could be said if you hacked into a bank and just added money to your online account. (Or, for that matter, when traders in exotic securities made bets on stupendous transactions of arbitrary magnitudes, leading to the global economic meltdown in 2008.) The problem in each case is not that you stole from a specific person but that you undermined the artificial scarcities that allow the economy to function. In the same way, creative expression on the internet will benefit from a social contract that imposes a modest degree of artificial scarcity on information.
In Ted Nelson’s system, there would be no copies, so the idea of copy protection would be mooted. The troubled idea of digital rights management—that cumbersome system under which you own a copy of bits you bought, but not really, because they are still managed by the seller—would not exist. Instead of collections of bits being offered as a product, they would be rendered as a service.
Creative expression could then become the most valuable resource in a future world of material abundance created through the triumphs of technologists. In my early rhetoric about virtual reality back in the 1980s, I always said that in a virtual world of infinite abundance, only creativity could ever be in short supply—thereby ensuring that creativity would become the most valuable thing.
Recall the earlier discussion of Maslow’s hierarchy. Even if a robot that maintains your health will only cost a penny in some advanced future, how will you earn that penny? Manual labor will be unpaid, since cheap robots will do it. In the open culture future, your creativity and expression would also be unpaid, since you would be a volunteer in the army of the long tail. That would leave nothing for you.
Everything Sounds Fresh When It Goes Digital—Maybe Even Socialism
The only alternative to some version of Nelson’s vision in the long run—once technology fulfills its potential to make life easy for everyone—would be to establish a form of socialism.
Indeed, that was the outcome that many foresaw. Maybe socialism can be made compassionate and efficient (or so some digital pioneers daydreamed) if you just add a digital backbone.
I am not entirely dismissive of the prospect. Maybe there is a way it can be made to work. However, there are some cautions that I hope any new generations of digital socialists will take to heart.
A sudden advent of socialism, just after everyone has slid down Maslow’s pyramid into the mud, is likely to be dangerous. The wrong people often take over when a revolution happens suddenly. (See: Iran.) So if socialism is where we are headed, we ought to be talking about it now so that we can approach it incrementally. If it’s too toxic a subject to even talk about openly, then we ought to admit we don’t have the abilities to deal with it competently.
I can imagine that this must sound like a strange exhortation to some readers, since socialism might seem to be the ultimate taboo in libertarian Silicon Valley, but there is an awful lot of stealth socialism going on beneath the breath in digital circles. This is particularly true for young people whose experience of markets has been dominated by the market failures of the Bush years.
It isn’t crazy to imagine that there will be all sorts of new, vast examples of communal cooperation enabled through the internet. The initial growth of the web itself was one, and even though I don’t like the way people are treated in web 2.0 designs, they have provided many more examples.
A prominent strain of enthusiasm for wikis, long tails, hive minds, and so on incorporates the presumption that one profession after another will be demonetized. Digitally connected mobs will perform more and more services on a collective volunteer basis, from medicine to solving crimes, until all jobs are done that way. The cloud lords might still be able to hold on to their thrones—which is why even the most ardent Silicon Valley capitalists sometimes encourage this way of
thinking.
This trajectory begs the question of how a person who is volunteering for the hive all day long will earn rent money. Will living space become something doled out by the hive? (Would you do it with Wikipedia-style edit wars or Digg-style voting? Or would living space only be inherited, so that your station in life was predetermined? Or would it be allocated at random, reducing the status of free will?)
Digital socialists must avoid the trap of believing that a technological makeover has solved all the problems of socialism just because it can solve some of them. Getting people to cooperate is not enough.
Private property in a market framework provides one way to avoid a deadening standard in shaping the boundaries of privacy. This is why a market economy can enhance individuality, self-determination, and dignity, at least for those who do well in it. (That not everybody does well is a problem, of course, and later on I’ll propose some ways digital tech might help with that.)
Can a digital version of socialism also provide dignity and privacy? I view that as an important issue—and a very hard one to resolve.
It Isn’t Too Late
How, exactly, could a transition from open copying to paid access work? This is a situation in which there need to be universal, governmental solutions to certain problems.
People have to all agree in order for something to have monetary value. For example, if everyone else thinks the air is free, it’s not going to be easy to convince me to start paying for it on my own. These days it amazes me to remember that I once purchased enough music CDs to fill a wall of shelves—but it made sense at the time, because everyone I knew also spent a lot of money on them.
Perceptions of fairness and social norms can support or undermine any economic idea. If I know my neighbor is getting music, or cable TV, or whatever, for free, it becomes a little harder to get me to pay for the same things.* So for that reason, if all of us are to earn a living when the machines get good, we will have to agree that it is worth paying for one another’s elevated cultural and creative expressions.
There are other cases where consensus will be needed. One online requirement that hurt newspapers before they gave up and went “open” was the demand that you enter your password (and sometimes your new credit card numbers) on each and every paid site that you were interested in accessing. You could spend every waking minute entering such information in a world of millions of wonderful paid-content sites. There has to be a universal, simple system. Despite some attempts, it doesn’t look as if the industry is able to agree on how to make this happen, so this annoyance seems to define a natural role for government.
It is strange to have to point this out, but given the hyper-libertarian atmosphere of Silicon Valley, it’s important to note that government isn’t always bad. I like the “Do not call” list, for instance, since it has contained the scourge of telemarketing. I’m also glad we only have one currency, one court system, and one military. Even the most extreme libertarian must admit that fluid commerce has to flow through channels that amount to government.
Of course, one of the main reasons that digital entrepreneurs have tended to prefer free content is that it costs money to manage micro-payments. What if it costs you a penny to manage a one-penny transaction? Any vendor who takes on the expense is put at a disadvantage.
In such a case, the extra cost should be borne by the whole polis, as a government function. That extra penny isn’t wasted—it’s the cost of maintaining a social contract. We routinely spend more money incarcerating a thief than the thief stole in the first place. You could argue that it would be cheaper to not prosecute small crimes and just reimburse the victims. But the reason to enforce laws is to create a livable environment for everyone. It’s exactly the same with putting value on individual human creativity in a technologically advanced world.
We never record the true cost of the existence of money because most of us put in volunteer time to maintain the social contract that gives money its value. No one pays you for the time you take every day to make sure you have cash in your wallet, or to pay your bills—or for the time you spend worrying about the stuff. If that time were reimbursed, then money would become too expensive as a tool for a society.
In the same way, the maintenance of the liberties of capitalism in a digital future will require a general acceptance of a social contract. We will pay a tax to have the ability to earn money from our creativity, expression, and perspective. It will be a good deal.
The Transition
The transition would not have to be simultaneous and universal, even though the ultimate goal would be to achieve universality. One fine day your ISP could offer you an option: You could stop paying your monthly access charge in exchange for signing up for the new social contract in which you pay for bits. If you accessed no paid bits in a given month, you would pay nothing for that month.
If you chose to switch, you would have the potential to earn money from your bits—such as photos and music—when they were visited by other people. You’d also pay when you visited the bits of others. The total you paid per month would, on average, initially work out to be similar to what you paid before, because that is what the market would bear. Gradually, more and more people would make the transition, because people are entrepreneurial and would like the chance to try to make money from their bits.
The details would be tricky—but certainly no more so than they are in the current system.
What Makes Liberty Different from Anarchy Is Biological Realism
The open culture crowd believes that human behavior can only be modified through involuntary means. This makes sense for them, because they aren’t great believers in free will or personhood.
For instance, it is often claimed by open culture types that if you can’t make a perfect copy-protection technology, then copy prohibitions are pointless. And from a technological point of view, it is true that you can’t make a perfect copy-protection scheme. If flawless behavior restraints are the only potential influences on behavior in a case such as this, we might as well not ask anyone to ever pay for music or journalism again. According to this logic, the very idea is a lost cause.
But that’s an unrealistically pessimistic way of thinking about people. We have already demonstrated that we’re better than that. It’s easy to break into physical cars and houses, for instance, and yet few people do so. Locks are only amulets of inconvenience that remind us of a social contract we ultimately benefit from. It is only human choice that makes the human world function. Technology can motivate human choice, but not replace it.
I had an epiphany once that I wish I could stimulate in everyone else. The plausibility of our human world, the fact that the buildings don’t all fall down and you can eat unpoisoned food that someone grew, is immediate palpable evidence of an ocean of goodwill and good behavior from almost everyone, living or dead. We are bathed in what can be called love.
And yet that love shows itself best through the constraints of civilization, because those constraints compensate for the flaws of human nature. We must see ourselves honestly, and engage ourselves realistically, in order to become better.
* This principle has even been demonstrated in dogs and monkeys. When Dr. Friederike Range of the University of Vienna allowed dogs in a test to see other dogs receive better rewards, jealousy ensued. Dogs demand equal treatment in order to be trained well. Frans de Waal at Emory University found similar results in experiments with capuchin monkeys.
CHAPTER 8
Three Possible Future Directions
IN THIS CHAPTER, I will discuss three long-term projects that I have worked on in an effort to correct some of the problems I described in Chapter 4. I don’t know for sure that any of my specific efforts to ensure that the digital revolution will enhance humanism rather than restrict it will work. But at the very least, I believe they demonstrate that the range of possible futures is broader than you might think if you listen only to the rhetoric of web 2.0 people.
Two of
the ideas, telegigging and songles, address problems with the future of paid cultural expression. The third idea, formal financial expression, represents an approach to keeping the hive from ruining finance.
Telegigging
There was a time, before movies were invented, when live stage shows offered the highest production values of any form of human expression.
If canned content becomes a harder product to sell in the internet era, the return of live performance—in a new technological context—might be the starting point for new kinds of successful business plans.
Let’s approach this idea first by thinking small. What if you could hire a live musician for a party, even if that musician was at a distance? The performance might feel “present” in your house if you had immersive, “holographic” projectors in your living room. Imagine telepresent actors, orators, puppeteers, and dancers delivering real-time interactive shows that include special effects and production values surpassing those of today’s most expensive movies. For instance, a puppeteer for a child’s birthday party might take children on a magical journey through a unique immersive fantasy world designed by the performer.
This design would provide performers with an offering that could be delivered reasonably because they wouldn’t have to travel. Telepresent performance would also provide a value to customers that file sharing could not offer. It would be immune to the problems of online commerce that have shriveled the music labels.
Here we might finally have a scenario that could solve the problem of how musicians can earn a living online. Obviously, the idea of “teleperformance for hire” remains speculative at this time, but the technology appears to be moving in a direction that will make it possible.