by Jaron Lanier
So, for instance, in the future economy foreseen here you’ll be able to organize your commercial life around the principle of trying before you buy, but that means you’ll pay a little more when you do buy. The theatrical mechanism of economic avatar creation will protect you from having to track that consequence in detail.
The principle must work in both directions. You can pretend that someone else isn’t allowed to try your stuff before they buy, but in fact when they do buy, they’ll pay a little more, so it’s irrelevant to you how it seemed to them.
Any sustainable economy must be sustained almost entirely by voluntary participation, rather than by enforcement. But the transition to becoming a full economic participant won’t be “in your face” since instead there will be avatars—and people who aren’t used to economic symmetry might tend to prefer more self-deceptive economic avatars at first.
Economic Network Neutrality
Google, Facebook, and other Siren Servers already depend on an elaborate filigree of calculations that are similar to what is proposed here for their livelihoods. Auctions, click-through counts, behavioral models, and an evolving book of other tricks might or might not be valid in a scientific sense, but these ideas are apparently good enough to run an industry. These are the calculations that form the basis of pricing for vast oceans of transaction on the Internet, like the fee to place an ad or a link in front of your eyes.
A humanistic economy would extend the type of calculation already taking place and make it symmetrical. Therefore the same rules of assessment applied to one party in an online transaction would be applied to all other parties.
So, for instance, if Google placed the ads that referenced your marriage, and earned a certain amount based on auction and click-through results, your instant remuneration would be proportional to Google’s.
Note that it no longer makes sense to worry about whether your nanopayment comes from Google or the dating service. Each calculation, whatever computer carries it out, as a matter of course generates nanopayments to everyone who sent it data, whether the players are small or large. Everyone benefits from the same system.
This is another way of saying that everyone is a first-class citizen. It is similar to the idea that a nation needs a single currency, and the rights for whoever holds that currency are the same. There can’t be a different kind of dollar just for certain stores.
In practice, an implementation of humanistic economics would be more complex than I can indicate in a couple of pages, but the complexity would not be intractable. What we do online is already crazily complicated. The kinds of calculations proposed here are not particularly scary in comparison.
The principle of using the same valuation mechanisms for all the parties to a calculation can be called economic network neutrality. “Network neutrality” is the term1 used to describe the idea that a business that transports bits should not play favorites with those bits for financial gain. An Internet access company that also offers a video streaming service should not be able to slow down videos from a competing source to make its own video streaming look better, for instance. To do so would break the principles of a network and centralize all power in a transport layer.
Economic network neutrality is simply a generalization of that idea and recognizes that as information technology becomes central, the economy becomes a form of bit transport. The motivation is the same, to avoid extreme and useless concentrations of wealth or power based purely on the position of a player, also known as moral hazard.
Symmetry as a Disincentive to Game the System
An advanced economy should let people try on different economic participant styles easily, without having to build up a lot of personal capital at first. That doesn’t mean people will get a free ride. Those who enjoy the illusion must eventually pay for the cost of credit needed to finance it.
It is too early for me to solve every problem brought up by the approach I’m advocating here, but I imagine the cost of ambient credit might actually be paid a little in the near term and a little in the long term.
In the near term, each person would have to make their income and spending principles equivalent. That is, if you want to minimize your initial spending (as when you can try before you buy), then it will also be true that your earnings from other people will eventually be adjusted to reflect what would have happened if they had made the same choice regarding the value you offer to them.*
*An actual implementation of these ideas would require sorting out a lot of details, which would be wildly premature to attempt at this stage. A lot of the details will concern the basis on which “what if” calculations are performed. For instance, if you change your mind about the kind of transactions you prefer, the changes must be reflected proportionally. The proportions can be calculated based on bandwidth used, or time spent online, or some other rough measure. If you choose to spend an hour as a pay-as-you-goer, and another as a free-the-first-timer, then half of your income over that period (if time is the basis) will also seem to have come from people making the first choice, and the other half from people making the other choice.
Over time, people will hopefully adjust to the idea that you have to pay others as you would like to be paid. The more interests a person perceives in common with others, even when commonalities are best illuminated by theatrical effects, the more likely the market will function well, and grow. The psychology of a social contract will eventually take hold.
In isolation, economic symmetry might pose a risk of a race to the bottom. Wouldn’t everyone initially want stuff for free, and then never be able to compete with the expectation of free stuff from others in order to start charging? This is approximately what happens when a traditional economy stalls and falls into a depression.
Recall, though, the “legacy” portion of the calculation of price described earlier. The “instant” portion of a price is vulnerable to the same old Keynesian catastrophes that have always plagued markets, but the legacy portion is something new, only possible in an information economy run by large computers enabled by Moore’s Law.
The accumulated payments due to past contributions will provide a momentum to prevent stalls.
Faith and Credit
When there’s a deal between two people who prefer different styles of transaction, then one might offer a different mix of cash and credit (to use retro language) than the other expects to receive. This transaction between parties would just be a fine-grained, minuscule version of what already happens with mortgages all the time.
As explained earlier, when you credibly promise to pay your mortgage you can help to create new money in the world, because your promise does in fact generate new value. A generalization of that principle can give people legitimate access to ambient credit in new ways. This is a fundamental reason why, in a well-realized information economy, information needn’t be free in order to be accessible.*
*I wish I didn’t have to use mortgages as a point of reference since as I’m writing this, the world is still suffering from financial troubles that radiated from stupidly securitized mortgages. Mortgages were a reliable, clean mechanism for many years. What happened in the early 21st century was exceptional, and caused by the poor use of digital networks. It’s exactly the kind of failure all these ideas are intended to prevent.
There would need to be a mechanism similar to a “central bank of the ’net.” You can’t have an expanding economy without one. New value has to be reflected as new money, which must enter the system somehow.
Since people will be looking for income as well as bargains, this fund will not just be a charity operation to pay for everyone getting everything for free. People will be paying into the general fund as often as they are pulling from it, through the mechanism of financing their avatars.
Tax
There will be a cost to calculate all that must transpire in a mature, humanistic digital economy. This cost will not be trivial, but will not introduce an undue burden compared to what Sir
en Servers already do today. Search engines, for instance, must scrape the entire Internet all the time to approximate the context lost because all the links are one-way instead of two-way.
The cost of calculation will be like older forms of the cost of governance, or the cost of civilization. Taxes, whether that is the term used or not, will inevitably be taken as part of the respiratory cycle of an advanced network credit system, as it inhales and exhales money to balance gaps between credit and cash, billions of times a second.
Taxes are always a hard pill to swallow, but you must swallow it. If you are only willing to consider a utopia without central authority or taxes, you will create a phony utopia where power is ultraconcentrated behind impregnable private gates. This will lead to epochal decrepitude and poverty through the mechanism of titanic moral hazards. Change the language if you must. What I’m talking about needn’t be called taxes. Infrastructure fees? You can get a good deal on having a decent civilization, but they never come for free.
CHAPTER 27
Inclusion
The Lower Half of the Curve
What about those people who fall into the bottom half of the information economy bell curve, and would have to pay more for information than they make from it? While there are problems with what I have proposed, they should be compared to the existing alternatives, not to abstract utopias. Utopia is by nature another dangerous siren.
Trying to create an overly flattened society inevitably and unintentionally creates new centers of power. A revolution might dethrone the old rich, but only at the expense of empaneling an unchallenged communist party, along with a politburo and legions of clever schemers and ass kissers who turn into a new privileged class. The right way to deal with concentrations of power is not to try to vaporize them, but to balance them.
Similar unintended side effects appeared with attempts to make information free. Efforts like Linux and Wikipedia might have weakened some old centers of power, but that only created the space for new centers of power. In what sense is becoming dependent on private spy agencies crossed with ad agencies, which are licensed by us to spy on all of us all the time in order to accumulate billions of dollars by manipulating what’s put in front of us over supposedly open and public networks, a way of defeating elites? And yet that is precisely what the “free” model has meant.
To restate the premise of this project, it’s ultimately better to have paid information in order to create a middle class. So with that in mind, let’s consider the hard question stated above: How might a humanistic economic system support information access for those who find themselves persistently in the bottom ranks of the information economy, meaning that they have to pay more for cloud services than they earn from cloud services?
We might first ask how many people will be in this situation. If the overall economy is growing, the answer is less than half. If the economy is absolutely stagnant, then the answer is half. If the economy doesn’t grow or shrink at all, then a market system is just churn, or worse, plutocracy. But there’s no reason to think that innovation and creativity will suddenly run out in the information space, so we should expect a humanistic information economy to grow in the long term.
Beyond that, just because someone is on the bum side of the information economy doesn’t mean that person will be poor. There ought to be plenty of people who do very well in physicality. Deeply physical professions like child care, lutherie, or massage might become better paid than ever in an advanced information economy. The more advanced our electronic gadgets become, the more expensive “artisan” organic produce seems to become. Virtuality reveals physicality to be ever more precious in comparison.
At the same time, creative practitioners of inherently human physical trades ought to do well in the information economy, too, by starting trends and helping supply the most valuable example data to cloud algorithms. Hopefully, the number of people who could not afford to pay for information would be small. That’s not to say it will be zero, so the question of their status is important.
The Lowly Tail of the Curve
What about someone who can’t help but be a failure in the terms of the marketplace? What’s it like to be a bum in a highly advanced technological world? We don’t know yet. Computation can’t work miracles. If there is limited space in a city center, an algorithm can’t whip up a new fold in space-time to make room for someone who doesn’t want to pay rent but still wants to live there.
The nexus of problems around motivation and responsibility will still be with us, no matter how advanced our information systems become. It goes without saying that all people will need to have access to information services or else there will be a crushing end to social and economic mobility. That would be a terribly destructive development.
My tendency is toward liberalism, so I would advocate a state role, but on the other hand, the project of a humanistic economy doesn’t rest on liberal or conservative thinking. A liberal might be inclined to extend the safety net, perhaps including a highly evolved version of the public library. In such a place you might be able to print out the medical prosthetic you need for free. In that scenario, the state would serve as a surrogate customer for information services for those who cannot afford to be customers directly. Beneficiaries would have access, but perhaps not in precisely the most convenient way.
A conservative might prefer to send those who cannot afford information services to churches or foundations to find access to information. There are precedents for that in the pre-digital world as well. In my youth I occasionally made use of Christian Science reading rooms, which could be found most anywhere and graciously offered access to a wide variety of information, with far less preaching or advertising for the church than you find in any modern social network or search engine, at no charge. Neither the libraries nor the reading rooms demanded that authors not be paid.
Wealth and Civility
My current guess is that in a humanistic information economy, it would be best if it were easy for people to keep their wealth secret. The reason for this is that it would defuse the tendency of prejudices to congeal around a single status hierarchy. I have found that people behave better when there are multiple status hierarchies present, overlapped and confused.
Of course, one’s wealth is the very first datum every Siren Server covets. But in a world where the sirens have been silenced, or at least where the volume has been turned down, maybe that particular signal would remain hidden under the cloak of personal privacy.
In Silicon Valley, a high-status person might be rich, or an accomplished engineer, or renowned in some other way. They all mix. It isn’t always clear which kind of status is the most important.
This is a lovely quality of our little society that deserves emulation.
CHAPTER 28
The Interface to Reality
How Great Are Our Powers?
If the climate is getting screwed up, technologists propose infusing the atmosphere with corrective particles, or positioning mirrors in space to deflect excess solar energy. When politics is dysfunctional, we propose new floating nations at sea. If rare elements are in short supply, we’ll mine asteroids. We’ll find new sources of water on the moon. We don’t accept the limits of earthly physicality.
Technologists can therefore become complacent about the lure of Panglossian economic daydreams. We have faith that tech fixes will come along in time to fix core problems, whether or not an economic system is blind to them. Furthermore, we presume that a competent technologist will always be well positioned to implement a fix, and will easily outmaneuver any obstacles presented by economics or politics.
It’s easy to doubt the faiths of technologists, and it’s healthy for us to be questioned so that we don’t get too full of ourselves. At the same time, our faith is not completely off base. I am genuinely optimistic that people will figure out how to do more and more. However, it’s foolish to pretend to know how long it will take for any particular technology to mature.
Waiting for Technology Waiting for Politics
Suppose it is true that various tech fixes can moderate the global climate, but that it will take two hundred years for them to become viable? That would be an impressive achievement, but we need a solution for this century.*
*There’s a wise old joke that if a programmer thinks a project will be done in two weeks, that really means “I have no idea.” If he says it’ll take a year, then that might be right. “Two weeks” is how uncertainty reads inside a programmer’s brain.
In the realm of big real-world problems, I often hear my fellow technologists declare that a solution or transformation will occur in fifteen or twenty years. That is like “two weeks.” If you hear a date like 2030 as the expected time frame for solving global warming or water shortages through quick tech fixes, be worried. That sense of timing is usually just a way of saying we have no idea how long it will take. (Yes, you are welcome to note that this is the time frame I used to anticipate elder-care robots and other events. It’s the best I can do.)
Despite the uncertainty of the timing of tech fixes for the biggest core problems we face, it is bizarre that they are only funded in token ways, and in scattershot, weird situations. If we were for a moment to forget the mirror maze of economics, and the circular firing squad of politics, and only think about the fundamentals, then a rational response to global climate change would be to supercharge all large-scale curative climate research, at least at the scale of the Manhattan and Apollo projects combined. There would also be massive social engineering experiments in order to reduce the carbon footprint of humanity in case the tech fixes don’t work as soon as we’d like.