by Jaron Lanier
The app economy is, however, a new kind of star system, even worse than old Hollywood. At least Hollywood funded a range of hopefuls. Hollywood paid for its own risk pools, while app stores expect hopefuls to self-fund. The game Angry Birds is a big hit, but there isn’t a thick trunk in the curve of distribution of other games that do less well. Instead there is a steep drop-off to miserable numbers.
The pattern repeats in most of the cases where people are starting to find careers in the new information economy. A small number of people make some money from YouTube videos, for instance, because Google has started to share ad revenue with top stars. This is a great development, but the number is inherently small, and the tiny numbers of video producers who are making a living for the moment are not necessarily doing well enough to build wealth for their futures.
This tree-like distribution pattern isn’t surprising, but it contrasts with the graph-like distribution of interest found in the social networking world. There one finds a thus far unmonetized middle-class distribution of interest, meaning a very thick tail of outcomes. Instead of finding either stardom or abject obscurity, a great many people enjoy outcomes in the middle of the spectrum.
Proprietors of social networks are quick to point out research that distinguishes their lushly connected graph networks from more constrained tree networks. For instance, Facebook funded research showing that Facebook users are exposed to a great diversity of information from a great diversity of origins.1 (This does not address my complaints that Facebook’s design still rewards acquiescence to someone else’s categories. It just shows that information flows in thickly connected graphs really are thicker in character.)
In social networks we see a pattern in which lots of people are able to get each other’s attention, which contrasts with the star system that emerges in tree-shaped company stores.
Taken together, this is evidence that a graph-shaped information economy can support a middle class—as opposed to the winner-take-all outcome that emerges in tree-shaped economies. A monetized version of a many-to-many network could create an organic path to middle-class wealth that would be better than the ad hoc mountain of levees that sustained middle classes in pre-digital capitalism.
CHAPTER 21
Some First Principles
Provenance
The foundational idea of humanistic computing is that provenance is valuable. Information is people in disguise, and people ought to be paid for value they contribute that can be sent or stored on a digital network.
The primary distinguishing feature of humanistic computing is therefore two-way linking, just as networking and hypermedia might have possessed anyway, had the original ideas from Ted Nelson and other early pioneers prevailed.
If two-way linking had been in place, a homeowner would have known who had leveraged the mortgage, and a musician would have known who had copied his music.
New data can be created in all sorts of ways. It might be a side effect of what you do to have fun online. For instance, the videos you choose to watch might be announced over a social networking service. In other cases you might deliberately create data, as when you blog or tweet. You might just set up a webcam or some other sensor and feed the Web raw data. Or, your DNA might be measured, or your brain waves. All sorts of information might get onto a network because of your existence.
In all these cases, in a humanistic information economy, when new data is uploaded from a local device into a server or cloud computer, its provenance is remembered. That means a record of origin is connected to the data. This record is protected from error and fraud by redundancy between local devices and servers in the cloud, so faking or erasing provenance would at the very least require taking on nontrivial effort and risk.
In humanistic information economics, provenance is treated as a basic right, similar to the way civil rights and property rights were given a universal stature in order to make democracy and market capitalism viable.
Don’t worry: It’s not excessively expensive or a threat to the efficiency of the Internet to keep track of where information came from. It will actually make the Internet faster and more efficient.
Universal retention of provenance without commensurate universal commercial rights would lead to a police/surveillance state. Universal commercial provenance can instead lead to a balanced future, where a middle class can thrive with proportional political clout, and where individuals can invent their own lives without being unduly manipulated by unseen operators of Siren Servers. Instead of relying on dubious prohibitions to avoid disasters of privacy violation or coercion, the expense of using data would temper extreme exploitation.
Commercial Symmetry
We have come to accept as inevitable a duo of coexisting lousy extremes. Sometimes information is supposedly free but people are subject to weird surveillance and influence, with insufficient commensurate rights. This is the familiar world of Google, Facebook, et al. It will not be a sustainable path as technology advances.
On the flip side, customers can be locked into one-sided contracts in order to have access to what they want online. This is the world of proprietary tree-shaped stores found through mobile devices or boxes that put entertainment on a big screen at home. These include stores operated by Apple, Amazon, et al.
Unfortunately, paying for value over a network in this way also sets us down an untenable path in the long term. Consider eBooks. A purchase of an eBook is not as substantive for the buyer as was a paper book purchase in physicality. An eBook buyer is no longer a first-class citizen in a marketplace.
When you buy a physical book, you can resell it at will, or continue to enjoy it no matter where you decide to buy other books. It might become a collectible book and go up in value, so you might make a profit on your original purchase. Every purchase of an old-fashioned book opens an opportunity to earn money by enhancing provenance. You can get the author to sign it, to make it more meaningful to you, and to increase its value.
With an eBook, however, you are not a first-class commercial citizen. Instead, you have only purchased tenuous rights within someone else’s company store. You cannot resell, nor can you do anything else to treat your purchase as an investment. Your decision space is reduced. If you want to use a different reading device, or connect over a different cloud, you will in most cases lose access to the book you “purchased.” It wasn’t really a purchase, but a contract entered into, even though neither you nor anyone else ever reads such contracts.
If the information economy is to evolve on its present track, so that each player is either running a Siren Server or is an ordinary person ricocheting between two extremes of noncapitalism, between fake free and fake ownership, then markets will eventually shrink and capitalism will collapse.
So a primary task in imagining a sustainable information economy must be to imagine a sustainable model for transactions. A key idea that makes a transaction model sustainable is a kind of symmetry between buyer and seller, so that transactions harmonize with a social contract.
When a social contract works, you recognize that what’s good for others is ultimately good for you, too, even if it might not seem so at a particular moment. In a particular moment, having to pay for something might not seem so good for you. Ultimately, being paid by other people as part of the deal more than makes up for the initial sacrifice. That also means you empathize with the needs of those who sell to you, because you sometimes play the role of seller.
Right now it might seem draconian to charge for access to information we have come to expect for free, but it would feel very different if you knew that other people were also paying you at the same time for information services you have fractionally contributed to in the course of your life.
This is the only way that democracy and capitalism can be in alignment. The current online commerce models create a new kind of class division between full economic participants and partial economic participants. That means that there isn’t enough shared economic interest to sup
port long-term democracy.
If we can get to the point of symmetrical commercial rights, then a large space of potential transaction models becomes thinkable. While the structures of transactions will be some of the most critical elements of the workable information economies of the future, it would be premature for me to predict which ones will work best from this early perspective. There can be no doubt that entirely new models for transactions, unimaginable to me now, will be invented by young, brilliant generations of computer scientists, entrepreneurs, and economists. All their brilliance will go to waste, however, if the basic symmetries of a social contract are not expressed in the foundational architectures of our networks.
Some starting ideas about what future transactions might be like will be presented later on.
Only First-Class Citizens
Commercial symmetry suggests a radical difference between what I am proposing here and the world we currently know. Everyone will need to have a unique commercial identity in a universal public market information system. That contrasts with the way things work currently, where machines have unique identities, like IP addresses, but people don’t.
Human identity is currently handled on an ad hoc basis, and most people have multiple identities that are owned by remote companies like Facebook. This way of doing things might seem to favor the private sector over the public sector, but in the long term it actually hurts the private sector.
The most basic foundation of the way people connect to networks has to be the public sphere if the competition between private offerings is to be symmetrical, fair, and dynamic. When the very connection of people to each other or their own data is owned by remote concerns, then it’s impossible to outrun impedances and stagnation.
The Internet might have started out making better use of the public sphere, but in the 1970s and 1980s the mostly young men building what would turn into the Internet were often either pot-smoking liberals or CB-radio-using, police-evading conservatives who were violating speed limits. (That’s a bit of an exaggeration, but not much.) Both camps thought anonymity was the essence of coolness, and that it was wrong for the government to have a list of citizens, or for people to need government IDs. In retrospect I think we were all confusing the government with our parents. (This despite the fact that during the early stages, digital networking was a government-funded research endeavor.)
How times change. As I write this, one of the common ideas on the conservative side of American politics is that people should have to have government IDs on them if they want to vote, or even if they want to avoid arrest if the police want to talk to them and they don’t look proper. Meanwhile, many liberals favor a universal health care system that would build on a universal ID.
This is one of those cases where you have to choose the least of evils. You might not like the idea of a universal online identity, but face it, if you don’t allow one to come about in the context of government, it will happen anyway through companies like Google and Facebook. You might like and trust these companies now more than you like or trust the government, but you should see what happens to tech companies as they age.
Eschewing Zombie Siren Servers
It’s sad to say, but all young things change over time. The prototypical great Silicon Valley company Hewlett-Packard, which inspired all the rest to come, encountered in the not-too-distant past a period of not only crummy management but weird, tawdry scandals, board intrigues, and demoralization. Chances are that some of today’s bright young companies will go through similar periods someday. It could happen to Facebook or Twitter. That is one good reason why these are the wrong entities to be the long-term foundations of online identity.
Corruption, senility, and brutality emerge in democratically elected governments, of course, but the whole point of a viably designed democracy is to provide a persistent baseline for society. You can vote in new politicians without killing a democratic government, while a free market is a fake if companies aren’t allowed to die due to competition. When giant remote companies own everyone’s digital identities, they become “too big to fail,” which is a state of affairs that degrades both markets and governments.
One reason companies like Facebook should be interested in what I am proposing is that planning a regulation regime is better than morphing involuntarily into a dull regulated utility, which is what would probably happen otherwise. Suppose Facebook never gets good enough at snatching the “advertising” business from Google. That’s still a possibility as I write this. In that event, Facebook could go into decline, which would present a global emergency.
It’s not an outlandish scenario. It once seemed unthinkable that tech giants like Silicon Graphics could disintegrate. If Facebook starts to fail commercially, suddenly people all over the world would be at risk of losing old friends and family ties, or perhaps critical medical histories. Companies would suddenly lose connections with their customers. Facebook is only one example of many recent highly successful network players that have made themselves essential in advance of making themselves sustainable.
Facebook is becoming more like an electric utility every day. It’s a piece of infrastructure people need, and when people need something they eventually ask the government to make sure they have it. That’s why government ended up in the middle of water, electricity, roads, and the like. Businesses also demand that access to these things be constant and secure, so it is not a question of corporations versus individuals.
The death of Facebook must be an option if it is to be a company at all. Therefore your online identity should not be fundamentally grounded in Facebook or something similar.
Only First-Class Identity
Government must come to be the place where the most basic online identity will be grounded in the long term. That doesn’t mean that the government should run everything. The line where government should stop is not hard to draw, as it’s always been drawn.
Without any government ID it’s awfully hard to open a bank account. You need a bank account, but you can choose different banks and you can still live much of your life outside the banking system if you want. Government provides grounding, but no more. Your bank might fail, but you won’t lose your Social Security number. You are not totally dependent on remote private financial services in order to have a financial identity.
A balance along the lines of what has worked with banking in the pre-networked world will also be possible in a humanistic economy. In a future in which you own your data, you might agree to have a company like Facebook provide services, but if Facebook went bankrupt your online life and identity would not disappear; Facebook would not have been the exclusive holder of your data or identity.
There are interesting questions that must be left to sort out in the future. How much storage and computation would be part of the public sphere? How much would be given to each citizen as a birthright? Birthright provisions might be minimal, so you might have to open an account with a cloud computing service to hold even the most basic elements of your data and manage transactions, just as you need to find a bank today. Or maybe the government will provide a functional dollop of computation and storage to everyone. This will be a great new debate for liberals and conservatives to tear each other apart over in future elections.
CHAPTER 22
Who Will Do What?
Biological Realism
Naturally enough, we humans like to think of ourselves as if we were immortal. A conservative who opposes universal health care might argue that people should only have to pay for health care when they want it, since it’s a consumer choice. It’s as if we were talking about aliens with the super-power to choose when to get sick and how much it will cost when that happens.
Similarly, the Pirate Party/Linux/openness crowd suggests that instead of making money from recordings, musicians should play live gigs. This is a topic I addressed in my previous book, but to summarize: This strategy only works reliably for those who will always be healthy and childless. In fa
ct it works best if the person’s parents are still healthy and generous.
Any society that is composed of real biological people has to succeed at providing a balance to the frustrations of biological reality. There must be economic dignity, defined here as knowing you won’t fall off a cliff into abject poverty if you get sick, become a parent, or grow old. (Young, healthy, childless adults perhaps need not be protected from the danger of falling off that cliff. I certainly wasn’t protected from it when I was young. I’ll leave that question to the liberal-versus-conservative debates, which are separable from the project at hand.)
If we demand that everyone turn into a freelancer, then we will all eventually pay an untenable price in heartbreak. Most people won’t be able to pull freelancing off through the contingencies of a lifetime. We need those levees, not because we’re lazy, but because we are real.
When enough people lack economic dignity, there’s no way for the economy overall to function well. Even those who are reasonably successful on their own can get stuck in damage control, helping their family and friends. The recent absurdities of the financial markets served to disenfranchise aging people in particular. Their savings, jobs, and equity evaporated.
There are always feel-good ways to help out in a few of the most outrageous and visible tragedies. A local jazz club will have a night to raise money for an aging musician’s medical bills, for instance. But for every aging musician helped a little by a special benefit, there are dozens lost to the shadows.
Some decades from now all those idealistic people who contributed to open software or Wikipedia will be in the same position as today’s aging jazz musicians. We’ll help one per week through fund-raising on Reddit in order to feel good, even though on average that will be the equivalent of doing nothing.