Who Owns the Future?

by Jaron Lanier

  For instance, activists use social media to complain about lost benefits and opportunities, but social media (as we currently know it, organized around Siren Servers) also gradually concentrates capital and shrinks opportunities for ordinary people. Within a democracy, the resulting increased income concentration gradually enriches an elite, which is likely to promote candidates who will support yet further concentration.

  On the world stage, the same conundrum makes it harder for developing nations to sprout good jobs for educated people, because information flow is currently fated to be “free.” No one expects Twitter to help create jobs in Cairo.

  It’s impossible to divorce politics from economic reality.

  Alienating the Global Village

  Economic interdependence has lessened the chances of war between interconnected nations. This is the gift I thanked Wal-Mart for earlier. Unfortunately, by forcing more and more value off the books as the world economy turns into an information economy, the ideal of “free” information could erode economic interdependencies between nations.

  Nations have been far more willing to engage in cyber-attacks on each other than other kinds of attacks, because the information sphere is largely not on the books, which would otherwise reflect how globally interdependent it really is. Chinese interests have hacked American corporations like Google, but they would hardly be motivated to toy with the infrastructure in America that delivers Chinese goods.

  A warehouse should not be perceived as being in a separate economic category than a website. China is as economically dependent on an American website’s security as it is on the truck that delivers goods made in China. But that dependency doesn’t show up adequately in international accounting.

  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.

  Electoral Siren Servers

  Only genuinely empowered masses of people, with real wealth, clout, and economic dignity, can balance state power. We have seen this in U.S. electoral politics. The cyber-activist community, which leans in a knotted lefty/libertarian fashion, fancies itself able to organize the vote, but actually it turns out that “big money” is even more able to do so.1 Social media are used to raise money first, and directly influence the vote second.

  But what does “big money” really mean? At least in the United States we aren’t bribing voters as yet. In fact, voters often seem to vote against their own immediate economic interests. Democrats might vote to raise their own taxes, while Republicans might vote often enough to reduce their own safety nets and earned benefits.

  No, what “big money” means is turning election campaigns into Siren Servers. Candidates hire big data professionals and use the same math and computer resources that enable every other type of Siren Server to operate to optimize the world to their advantage.2 The interesting thing about elections is that law dictates multiple competing players. This makes elections unusual in the era of big data, since the “exclusion principle” doesn’t hold. As with wireless operators, there are multiple Sirenic schemes occupying a single niche.

  If elections were run like markets, a winning political party would emerge and become quite persistent. This is the failure mode of politics in which a “party machine” emerges. The terminology is instructive. The process becomes deterministic, as if it were a machine. Democracy relies on laws that impose diversity on a market-like dynamic that might otherwise evolve toward monopoly.

  Democracies must be structured to resist winner-take-all politics if they are to endure. That principle applied in the network age leads to periodic confrontations between competing mirror-image big data political campaigns. It is a fascinating development to watch.

  Perhaps we should expect to see more elections that are either extremely close or extremely lopsided from here on out. If opposing Siren Servers are well run, they might achieve parity, while if one is better than the other, its advantage ought to be dramatic. It’s too early to say, since big data and politics haven’t mixed long enough to generate much data as yet. It’s like climate change was for a long time—not enough data yet to really say—though it does look like we’re seeing this pattern.

  Just as a small, local player in a market loses local information advantages in the shadow of a Siren Server, so does a local political activist. I remember when I was a young person working for political campaigns, we would inform a campaign about potential voters who might be swayed because we knew our own territory. (This often involved seeking out grouchy old New Mexicans and convincing them that the political opponent was a little too cozy with the Texans.)

  These days, the central database of a political campaign more often informs local activists of the optimal way to scour the land for votes. The activist becomes like a general practitioner doctor, who acts more and more as a front man for insurance or pharmaceutical Siren Servers.

  The problem with optimizing the world to the benefit of an electoral Siren Server is the same as it is for the other species of such servers. It’s not that it doesn’t work in the short term, because it does, but that it becomes increasingly divorced from reality. Just as networked services that choose music for you don’t have real taste, a cloud-computing engine that effectively chooses your politicians doesn’t have political wisdom.

  The process is increasingly divorced from real-world events. A message is fine-tuned and tested. Feedback signals are fed into statistics engines. Just as big data in business can function with lower standards of veracity than big data in science, so can big data in politics.

  Optimization is not the same thing as truth. The 2012 elections in the United States were widely described as more divorced from facts than any other in history. Before, we could not use central servers to find every person vulnerable to paranoia about Texas; now we more or less can, but that doesn’t mean that paranoia is any more justified or useful.*

  *I doubt that political views have become more extreme as a result; there have always been extreme views. Politics has always nurtured and exploited paranoia, and I chose Texaphobia only because it is the funniest and mildest example I could think of.

  If the party with the biggest/best computer wins, then a grounded political dialog doesn’t matter so much. Reality becomes less relevant, just as it does in big business big data.

  Big data means big money works in politics. So if democracy is the goal, it becomes truer than ever that the middle class must have more money in aggregate than elites who might employ Siren Servers. The bell curve must overwhelm the winner-take-all curve.

  Maybe the Way We Complain Is Part of the Problem

  Two diametrically opposed schools of thought appeared in response to the Great Recession. Roughly speaking, an austerity/trickle-down tendency—a Hayek/Rand axis—opposes a Keynesian/fairness tendency, but the two sides agree about one thing. Both agree that social media like Facebook and Twitter are part of the solution.

  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. By glorifying the tools that enable this trend as our channels of complaint, we’re only amplifying our own predicament.

  There are ongoing calls for rights that might provide a balance to the trend, with an example being calls for digital privacy rights or intellectual property rights. (These are deeply similar, but people trapped in fake conflicts between old media and new media might fail to see that.)

  But those arguments are increasingly irrelevant. Trying to update legal rights to catch up with technology only sets up a dismal contest between prohibitions and what actually happens.

  Campaigns for rights have tended to play out as benefiting one or another cabal that seeks to run a top server. In a contest between, say, a Hollywood studio and a “pirate” video-sharing site over who should be favored by the law, the answer will hopefully evolv
e to become a clear “neither.” The idea of humanistic information economics presented here is an attempt to open up a third way.

  CHAPTER 17

  Clout Must Underlie Rights, if Rights Are to Persist

  Melodramas Are Tenacious

  My conviction that building a strong middle class in the information economy must underlie the pursuit of rights unfortunately pits me against the kinds of rascals I would otherwise tend to feel more organically at home with. It would perhaps feel better to go with the flow and celebrate outfits like WikiLeaks, but I believe that would ultimately be a self-defeating choice.

  We who are enthusiastic about the Internet love the fact that so many people contribute to it. It’s hard to believe that once upon a time people worried about whether anyone would have anything worthwhile to say online! I have not lost even a tiny bit of this aspect of our formative idealism from decades ago. I still find that when I put my trust in people, overall they come through. People at large always seem to be more creative, good-willed, and resourceful than one might have guessed.

  The problem is that mainstream Internet idealism is still wedded to a failed melodrama that applies our enthusiasms perversely against us. A digital orthodoxy that I find to be overbearing can only see one narrow kind of potential failure of the Internet, and invests all its idealism toward avoiding that one bad outcome, thus practically laying out invitations to a host of other avoidable failures.

  From the orthodox point of view, the Internet is a melodrama in which an eternal conflict is being played out. The bad guys in the melodrama are old-fashioned control freaks like government intelligence agencies, third-world dictators, and Hollywood media moguls, who are often portrayed as if they were cartoon figures from the game Monopoly. The bad guys want to strengthen copyright law, for instance. Someone trying to sell a movie is put in the same category as some awful dictator.

  The good guys are young meritorious crusaders for openness. They might promote open-source designs like Linux and Wikipedia. They populate the Pirate parties.

  The melodrama is driven by an obsolete vision of an open Internet that is already corrupted beyond recognition, not by old governments or industries that hate openness, but by the new industries that oppose those old control freaks the most.

  A personal example illustrates this. Up until around 2010, I enjoyed a certain kind of user-generated content very much. In my case it was forums in which musicians talked about musical instruments.

  For years I was warned that old-fashioned control freaks like government censors or media moguls could separate me from my beloved forums. A scenario might be that a forum would be hosted on some server where another user happened to say something terrorist-related, or upload pirated content.

  Under some potential legislation that’s been proposed in the United States, a server like that might be shut down. So my participation in and access to nonmogul content would be at risk in a mogul-friendly world. This possibility is constantly presented as the horrible fate we must all strive to avoid.

  It’s the kind of thing that has happened under oppressive regimes around the world, so I’m not saying there is no potential problem. I must point out, however, that Facebook is already removing me from the participation I used to love, at least on terms I can accept.

  Here is how: Along with all sorts of other contact between people, musical instrument conversations are moving more and more into Facebook. In order to continue to participate, I’d have to accept Facebook’s philosophy, which includes the idea that third parties would pay to be able to spy on me and my family in order to find the best way to manipulate what shows up on the screen in front of us.

  You might view my access to musical instrument forums as an inconsequential matter, and perhaps it is, but then what is consequential about the Internet in that case? You can replace musical instruments with political, medical, or legal discussions. They’re all moving under the cloak of a spying service.

  You might further object that it’s all based on individual choice, and that if Facebook wants to offer us a preferable free service, and the offer is accepted, that’s just the market making a decision. That argument ignores network effects. Once a critical mass of conversation is on Facebook, then it’s hard to get conversation going elsewhere. What might have started out as a choice is no longer a choice after a network effect causes a phase change. After that point we effectively have less choice. It’s no longer commerce, but soft blackmail.

  And it’s not Facebook’s fault! We, the idealists, insisted that information be demonetized online, which meant that services about information, instead of the information itself, would be the main profit centers.

  That inevitably meant that “advertising” would become the biggest business in the “open” information economy. But advertising has come to mean that third parties pay to manipulate the online options in front of people from moment to moment. Businesses that don’t rely on advertising must utilize a proprietary channel of some kind, as Apple does, forcing connections between people even more out of the commons, and into company stores. In either case, the commons is made less democratic, not more.

  To my friends in the “open” Internet movement, I have to ask: What did you think would happen? We in Silicon Valley undermined copyright to make commerce become more about services instead of content: more about our code instead of their files.

  The inevitable endgame was always that we would lose control of our own personal content, our own files.

  We haven’t just weakened old-fashioned power mongers. We’ve weakened ourselves.

  Emphasizing the Middle Class Is in the Interests of Everyone

  Figuring out how advancing digital technology can encourage middle classes is not only an urgent task, but also a way out of the dismal competition between “liberal” and “conservative” economics.

  To a libertarian or “austerian” I say: If we desire some form of markets or capitalism, we must live in a bell-shaped world, with a dominant middle class, for that is where customers come from. Neither a petro-fiefdom, a military dictatorship, nor a narco-state can support authentic internal market development, and neither does a winner-take-nearly-all network design.

  Similarly, anyone interested in liberal democracy must realize that without a dominant middle class, democracy becomes vulnerable. The middle of the bell has to be able to outspend the rich tip. 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.”*

  *I have been unable to find an original attribution for this quote, so am not certain it is authentic. Once I cited a quote of Einstein’s (“Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler”) and was informed by an Einstein biographer that there was no evidence he had said it. Then I met a woman who had known Einstein and heard him say it! In this case, I have no idea, but it’s a super quote, whoever said it.

  Even for those who might dispute the primacy of either markets or democracy, the same principle will hold. A strong middle class does more to make a country stable and successful than anything else. In this, the United States, China, and the rest of the world can agree.

  Another basic function of the design of power must be to facilitate long-term thinking. Is it possible to invest in something that will pay off in thirty years or a hundred, or is everything about the next quarter, or even the next quarter of a millisecond?

  These two functions of the design of power in a civilization will turn out to be deeply intertwined, but the middle class will be our immediate concern.

  A Better Peak Waiting to Be Discovered

  We’re used to getting Google and Facebook for free, and my advocating otherwise puts me in the position of having to sound like the Grinch stealing a present, which is a crummy role to have to take. But in the long term it’s better to be a full economic participant rather than a half participant. In
the long term you and your descendants will be better off, much better off, if you are a true earner and customer rather than fodder for manipulation by digital networks.

  Even if you think you really can’t get past this point, please just try a little longer. I think you’ll see that the benefits outweigh the costs.

  One way to think about the third way I am proposing, the humanistic computing path, is that it is a “cyber-Keynesian” scenario of kicking cloud-computing schemes up onto a higher peak in an energy landscape.

  Recall the graphs of energy landscapes. We can draw various pictures of the central hypothesis of this book as such a landscape. In the picture below, I’ve labeled one of the axes vaguely as “degree of democracy,” since that’s one of the primary concerns that confuse discussions about monetizing information. (An illustration might have instead a Y-axis labeled “accessibility of material dignity.”)

  At any rate, however one defines democracy, or if democracy is even a concern, the core hypothesis of this book is that there are higher peaks, meaning more intense, higher-energy digital economies to be found. Of course, if that is true, it also means there are more valleys, as yet undiscovered and unarticulated, to be avoided.

  Cyber-Panglossian fallacies rule Silicon Valley conversations. The very idea that demonetized information might not mean the most possible freedom meets resistance in the current climate. I defy convention when I draw the vague “degree of democracy” as being only halfway up to its potential when the cost of information is zero.