by Jaron Lanier
A stern look would greet me. I would be taken aside. “Look, we know that and you know that, but consider our sponsor. All this work is funded by Xerox, the preeminent copying machine company.”
Indeed, in those days, Xerox was so associated with copying that it had to worry about whether its trademark would go generic. Visitors to PARC were reminded never to say “Xerox machine.”
The admonitions would continue: “No one can tell the Xerox execs that innovations from this lab could make the very idea of copies, even in the abstract, obsolete. They’ll freak out.”
The early computers built at PARC looked remarkably like modern PCs and Macs, and the concept prototypes and sketches foresaw modern phones and tablets. Xerox became notorious for having funded the lab that defined the core of the modern feeling of computation, and yet famously failed to capitalize on it.
Much later, when Tim Berners-Lee’s design for HTML first appeared, computer scientists who were familiar with the field Ted had pioneered—hypertext and networked media—offered the reaction you’d expect: “Wait, it only has one-way linking. That’s not adequate. It’s throwing away all the best information about network structure.”
HTML appeared at a tired moment for Silicon Valley. The way I remember it, there was a trace of panic right in the early 1990s about whether anyone would come up with new “killer apps” for personal computers. Would there ever be another idea like the spreadsheet? HTML was so easy to spread. Each node had no accountability, so nodes could accumulate in a “friction-free” way, even though there is no such thing as a free lunch, and the friction would surely appear later on in some fashion. We were all impatient and bored and leapt at the thrill of quick adoption.
Ted was the source point for much of what we hold familiar today. For instance, he called the new medium “hypertext.” Ted was very fond of cyber-, which originally related to navigation, and which Norbert Wiener adopted into cybernetics because navigation was a great example of the core process of feedback in an information system. But Ted’s preferred prefix was hyper-, which, he once told me, when I must have still been a teenager, also captured something of the frenetic edge that digital obsessions seem to bring into human character. So Ted coined terms like hypermedia and hypertext.
Much later, in the early 1990s, the Web would be born when Tim Berners-Lee proposed HTML, the foundational protocol for Web pages. The letters ML stand for “markup language,” but the HT stands for Ted’s coinage, hypertext.
Ted is the only person alive who invented a new humor to add to my scheme of humors.* Ted’s humor suggests an unlimited, but still human-centered future based on improving technologies.
*Positive, optimistic, but solidly humanistic science fiction, such as Star Trek, fits into this humor, but so far as I can tell, Ted’s early work predates the genre.
PART EIGHT
The Dirty Pictures (or, Nuts and Bolts: What a Humanistic Alternative Might Be Like)
CHAPTER 19
The Project
You Can’t Tweet This
Enough has been said about the problem. The time has come to pitch a solution.
The “elevator pitch” is a common phrase in Silicon Valley, even though few buildings have enough floors to require actual elevator rides. You are supposed to be able to pitch a startup quickly enough that a highly distracted person can get your idea before the next incoming tweet spurs the smartphone to buzz.
It wouldn’t be credible for me to compress a pitch for a whole new digital economy design into such a tiny packet. There must be sufficient detail for it to at least be meaty enough to criticize. And yet, my pitch would become ridiculous if I tried to specify such a huge new thing in detail in advance.
My best guess on the right level of detail is what I’ll call a space elevator pitch. A space elevator is a hypothetical technology that might make it easy to get into space. A very strong cable would be hung from a satellite to a tether in the ground, and you’d just climb up it. So far, we don’t know how to make a strong enough cable, and that’s only the start of the problems. But in principle, the idea might work someday.
This proposal is like that. I don’t pretend for a moment that all the problems implicit in it are already known, much less solved. And yet it might work, and the benefits would be huge, just like a cheap way to get into space.*
*As it happens, I am working on an alternative to space elevators, which is a gigantic lighter-than-air railgun to launch spacecraft.
A Less Ambitious Approach to Be Discouraged
One can imagine the gears turning inside the minds of policy wonks.
“This notion of Lanier’s is ambitious. The transition would be politically difficult. But he does have a point about how value is being driven off the books in order to concentrate wealth in a way that shrinks the economy as it becomes more about information. Maybe there’s an easier way to address the problem he’s attempting to solve. Wouldn’t it be easier just to treat the information space as a public resource and tax or charge companies somehow for the benefit of using it?”
We do have rules in place to charge commercial concerns for using the public airwaves. Maybe that model could be extended to information flows in general. The argument would be that every citizen contributes to the information space whether they want to or not. Everyone is measured and tracked in the network age. So why not have government collect compensation for the use of that value in order to fund social welfare?
In that case it would cost real money to use the resources needed to start an occult Wall Street scheme or to dangle “free” Internet bait in the hopes of trapping a population into paying for visibility. The benefit of a general “spy data tax” would be a lessening of “scammy” entrepreneurship and a corresponding increase in the funding of genuinely productive new ventures. Meanwhile, as more and more jobs are lost to automation, social welfare funds would burst with new revenues to cope with the deluge.
In the current American climate, what I just said would be called “fighting words.” Most Americans would probably fear that such a policy would promote unlimited growth of government bureaucracy, and that would ultimately lead to a loss of both liberty and innovation. The argument against the idea would generally go as follows: Since everything is becoming more and more software-mediated, a spy data tax would not lead to a bureaucracy of a fixed size, like the ones that deal with the public airwaves. Instead, there would be ever more kinds of spy data, more and more revenues collected for that information, and eventually a giant central planning agency that collects money from absolutely every aspect of activity and then doles it out. This would be the ultimate magnet for corruption. A colossal bureaucracy would take on all the worst characteristics of Siren Servers but in a more monolithic way.
An argument from the left is equally important. If you have to pay to use information in general, then experiments like Wikipedia would never get off the ground, because they’d first have to argue that they deserve an exceptional license to get free access. The granting of those exceptional licenses would become a political choke hold on expression. Even though I have criticized Wikipedia, I would abhor any system that regulates experiments of that kind.
Going “all the way” and treating information as genuinely valuable, from the moment it first originates from a person, is the path around these depressing bureaucratic failure modes.
Information systems can create problems, obviously, but they can also create new options. The existence of advanced networking creates the option of directly compensating people for the value they bring to the information space instead of having a giant bureaucracy in the middle, which could only implement an extremely crude and distorting approximation of fairness.
The path proposed here can’t be taken easily, because we have already gone far down a different one. A difficult transition would need to be endured. Even at its best this new path would ultimately still present serious annoyances.
Yet despite the titanic “friction” of a t
ransition, and the inevitable imperfection of the result, the path proposed here is still the better alternative.
A Sustainable Information Economy
A humanistic approach to future digital economies might, on first sniff, smell redistributionist, but it is nothing of the kind. Some people would contribute and earn more than others. The point is not to create a fake contest where everybody is guaranteed to win, but rather to be honest about who contributed to successes, so as not to foster fake incentives.
The most powerful arguments for a humanistic approach to high-tech economics don’t rely at all on a liberal concept of fairness. Instead they rely on more accurately marrying risk and achievement to reward.
I described the biggest long-term advantage to business earlier, which is an expanding economy as digital efficiencies become more pronounced. Valuing all the information on networks (instead of mostly valuing the information in the “most meta,” or most dominant network nodes) will create an economy that can continue to grow as more and more activity becomes software-mediated.
Right now, because we aren’t accounting for the value of most information on the ’net, efficiencies based on technology can seem to cause a market to shrink instead of grow, even though a few new fortunes are created along the way. This is ultra-stupid.
Some other benefits to business from humanistic information economics will include:
• an expanded range of long-term business models;
• addressing intellectual property rights incrementally and gracefully instead of as an exception or affront;
• more predictable liabilities and obligations related to privacy and other potentially creepy digital-settings policies;
• and, as I already argued, enabling an economic model that can continue into the future even as bits gradually expand their influence over physicality.
Furthermore, these benefits will accrue to both the individual and the large corporation, creating a shared interest between small and large players.
A Better Beach
The silly beach fantasy that opened this book would unfold differently in a humanistic economy. It’s a sunny day, and you are making a sand castle. Is it possible to make a stable bridge over the moat? You ask the seagull. “No, I can’t find any record of that having been done over such a large moat,” it replies. “Sand bridges collapse at that scale. Of course we could infuse robotic grains into the sand.”
“No,” you say to the seagull. “That would be cheating.” Besides, you don’t feel like spending money on nanobots to play with the sand.
You carefully shape a hill of sand and start to carve away a space within it. It is looking a little like the giant natural arch of Kashgar. “Seagull, set up a simulated twin of this arch.” Through your mixed-reality glasses, you experiment with shaping the simulation. Ah, a solution!
You call your friends over. They’re delighted.
“Seagull, quick! Post this thing before it collapses.” A little later, the seagull says, “Your arch has been replicated fifty-eight times around the world. Check out this giant version from a beach in Rio.” Through the mixed-reality glasses, you and your friends find yourselves sharing a beach with revelers in Rio.
Wow, a nice day’s earnings for you. “Seagull, that casino nearby has an excellent restaurant, doesn’t it? Let’s splurge.” You call out to your friends, “Who’s hungry?”
CHAPTER 20
We Need to Do Better than Ad Hoc Levees
Keep It Smooth
One problem with traditional middle-class aspiration is that the quest for security tends to have an all-or-nothing quality. The traditional journey to middle-class dignity has often been comprised of big, chunky thresholds. You won the big job, or the big promotion, or not. You got the mortgage, owned your own taxi medallion, got into the union, got the record deal—or not. Those who didn’t make it over such thresholds could still find means to success, but with greater risks and less security.
What felt like the attainment of economic dignity (through a levee) to one person inevitably felt to another, less successful aspirant like the insertion of an artificial barrier. This was a mad way to run a society, and one that often made middle-class people who only wanted to create stable family situations, or plan for their old ages, seem like the bad guys. There was a tremendous amount of vitriol hurled at union members, for instance.
The inherent tension was exacerbated with the arrival of the Internet, since young people became especially impatient. “Who is a musician to tell me not to use her music for free in my video just because it’s copyrighted?”
The project at hand is to imagine leveraging network technology to create a smoother kind of path to achieving ordinary, middle-class financial security.
Such security would no longer come in quantum blocks, but would build up gradually. It would not be absolutely assured, but would be accessible to a preponderance of people who seek it. Security would not be administered by bureaucrats, but would emerge in the marketplace.
A more incremental path to security would not answer the hard philosophical questions about such concepts as copyright, but it would make them less contentious. In a world in which a person starts to earn royalties on tens of thousands of little contributions made over a lifetime of active participation on the ’net, it will matter a little less if there is a conflict about attribution in some minority of those cases.
The creation of a much more general and ambient kind of intellectual property would happen in a routine, small-scale way. This new incremental form of accumulated financial dignity might supplement traditional systems like copyright, unions, or tenure during a transitional era, and eventually replace them. Or maybe both systems would coexist indefinitely. I cannot fill in all the details in this early sketch.
Ideally, earning full-on wealth, not just cash, will become more like what spending is like already. There will be a multitude of incremental wealth creation events instead of a few big game-changing leaps in one’s status.
In a more incremental world, attributions and rewards will still be contested, no doubt, but particular outcomes will no longer make or break lives. The consequences of losing a particular battle for attribution will become analogous to missing out on a good sale. There will be plenty of other occasions to make up for it.
Another problem with existing chunky levees is that they tend to have zero-sum gotchas. If everyone gets a taxi medallion, then medallions become worthless. That also means speculators can buy up medallions and corner the market, undoing the original purpose. What we should seek instead is a system where value increases as more and more people participate in it.
So, a way to conceive the project at hand is to imagine how computer networks could help create a fluid, incremental kind of wealth creation that thrives at a middle-class level and is not zero-sum.
Not Enough Money Grows on Trees
One of the most central qualities of a network is its “topology.” That means the way things are connected. Some networks are formed as “trees.” In a tree-shaped network, you can identify a top node, and none of the connections form loops. For instance, Apple is the top or “root” node* in its app store network, and your Apple device is an ordinary “leaf” node in that network. You can’t start your own app store and directly sell an app to another customer. If you could, you’d form a loop of connections, but you can’t.
*This gets confusing, since top and root mean the same thing when it comes to networks, even though they mean approximately opposite things in living trees. Other terms that are sometimes used to express the same concept are source and center. We must use the physically inspired vocabulary we have inherited in order to describe abstract ideas. Getting used to this awkwardness is a big part of becoming conversant in digital technology.
A less constrained topology is a “graph,” which can include loops. In a graph-shaped network, you could sell to someone else, who could sell to someone else, who could eventually sell something else back to yo
u, without involving the top node. Everyone’s used to graphs. That’s how social networking is structured, for instance. You can link to someone who links to someone who links to you, forming a loop. That type of graph is not where online commerce is happening, however, which is a big problem.
So far, the networks where ordinary people can make some money online have tended to be trees. For instance, you can make money on eBay, but eBay is the root node. It’s a violation of the terms to make a sale on the side, one that evades eBay’s root node.
However, information age commerce would become more beneficial to middle classes if it took place on a more general graph with loops. The reason is that the distribution of interest and connections gets “thicker” or “bushier” on a general graph than on a tree. More nodes become connected to a typical node.
The biggest shift since the publication of my previous book has been the rise of the app economy, pioneered by Apple. This is generating some serious cash flow, and I take that as a sign that a better, more useful information economy is possible.
However, the current information economy is simply not doing enough. If there were a universal app economy, it might be big enough to support a middle class. As it is, the app economy is confined to proprietary tree-shaped company stores. Even so, this sub-economy is getting bigger, but not big enough fast enough to save the middle class.
In speaking with a wide variety of app developers, what I find is that there is indeed an upper stratum of successful app entrepreneurship that is supporting not only individuals, but in fact significant companies. This is really a wonderful development, recalling the growth of the software industry during the rise of the PC.