by Jaron Lanier
Doing these things seems unimaginable now, and yet the creation of giant stupid ghost suburbs in places like Las Vegas during the leveraged mortgage debacle of the last decade was practically automatic. This was a remarkably expensive activity at the time and turned out after only a few more years had passed to be catastrophically more expensive than anyone anticipated.
There is no shortage of explanations for why politics has become impossible just when we need it most. We’ve never faced genuinely global long-term political issues before, so never needed genuinely global politics. For instance, nuclear weapons treaties were multilateral, but not genuinely global. Only a small number of people needed to agree.
People are clannish, and politics among humans is therefore by nature about tribal inclusion and confrontations between tribes. We can have conferences about global climate change, but the outcomes don’t really stick. The very idea of global politics can make sense to the human mind but is usually nonsense to the human heart.
What Can We Do About Big Data and the Reality Problem?
It’s worse than foolish to imagine that technologists will be able to fix the world if economics and politics have gone insane. We can’t function alone. What we do is empower people. The world needs to be approximately sane for us to make any positive difference.
But the world is not converging on sanity. For evidence, look no further than the lack of action on the matter of global climate change. As discussed earlier, we only know about global climate change because of scientific big data, but big business data is more influential and undermines the benefits we should gain from the insights of big climate science.
I am not condemning big business data, but celebrating it. People might find better liberty in the extremely automated economies of the future by making the accounting of big business data more comprehensive.
However, we confuse big business data with big science data at our peril.
So let’s reframe the global sanity question this way: How can big science data interface with big business data in a way that doesn’t confuse the two? Instead of suppressing big business data, and favoring big science data, I suspect that the best results would come from making big business data more successful. The happier markets get, the less they will interfere with science.
Markets are happier when they are expanding. This point becomes critical in considering how markets can be better aligned with reality.
If a market is stagnant or contracting, it is in the interests of players to protect their positions and contest the positions of others. Antagonism becomes more prevalent in a zero-sum game. The whole of the game becomes the besting of others.
If a market is expanding, the game is non-zero-sum. Then win-win thinking becomes rational more frequently. The opportunity of the new can often outweigh the opportunity of fighting over the old.
This is not to say that an expanding market is automatically aligned to reality. The real estate market was expanding in Las Vegas during the stupid boom. But I am claiming here that if a market is not expanding, then players will find it hard to look beyond their immediate contests with each other. Fights over redistribution or concentration of wealth are necessarily focused inward on the affairs of people, and not outward at the larger reality.
For this reason alone, the Siren Server model of wealth that emerged in the first decade of this century is pro-stupidity. When a venture capital firm openly advertises that it is only looking for investment opportunities that shrink markets,1 we should know we have entered into a game in which we are choosing zero-sum thinking, and baiting the world to ignore reality.
What should happen instead is that information technology should create a persistent expansion of markets by monetizing more and more information, enshrining the potential for non-zero-sum thinking.
Carbon Copies Ruin Carbon Credits
If economics were perfect, then human activity would be aligned with human interests—or at least that ideal is the only imaginable one for economics. So when human activities are obviously not well aligned with human interests, it’s worth searching for sources of illusion that might distance economic motivations from reality.
I suspect that Sirenic effects are already creating illusions that dilute the potential benefits of carbon credits, for example. Such credits are one approach to making markets rally to fundamental needs—as opposed to random projects like building empty suburbs.
The very idea of economics is based on a feedback model that is fast enough to be relevant to one’s decisions. Long-term global outcomes are not fast enough. Carbon credits attempt to bridge that gap.
However, in the context of today’s dysfunctional, one-sided networked finance, there is a risk that catastrophic speculation and derivatives bundling of carbon credits would overwhelm the original purpose, should those credits become more widely used. On the other hand, absent those scams, carbon credits will have a hard time gaining traction.
Governments can introduce exceptional mechanisms like carbon credits, but these don’t seem to rise to the forefront of investment strategies in their own right. The reason why is that “scammy” investments offer better returns, and for carbon credits to compete, they’d have to become scammy, too, but they benefit from too many altruistic guardians to allow that to happen. Therefore, the prominence and influence of carbon credits are limited.
How Fighting “Fraud” Might Also Fight “Scams”
Exotic and experimental ideas in finance are not necessarily scammy. Betting on the climate has a place. In my previous book I advocated the exploration of new exotic financial instruments for just this reason. We need them. But we need a more honest and sustainable approach to networked economics even more—an approach that could bring about the very positive side benefit of subduing the scams that blind.
Consider an old-fashioned way to fight economic scamminess, regulation. Critics of financial deregulation in the United States point out that before the Great Depression there had been a decades-long sequence of frequent and destructive market busts. Regulations put in place in response to the Depression seemed to lead to happier market conditions until deregulation in the late 20th century ushered back in the same old chaos.
The politics of reinstating old regulations appear to be uncertain, but also it’s becoming harder for regulation to keep up with technology. It is doubtful that new language in a law could anticipate the cleverness of programmers. A rejection of Siren Servers in network architecture might, however, do the same job as old-fashioned regulation, but in a way that forestalls even highly inventive network schemes.
If homeowners with mortgages had been owed something resembling royalties whenever a mortgage was leveraged, then there would not have been overleveraging. The cost of risk would have been built in from the start, and would have been paid for by the investor creating the risk. Benefits would have been shared with those who were creating the fundamental value: homeowners who promised to pay the mortgages. Economic symmetry would have prevented investors from taking risks on other people’s uninformed behavior, using yet other people’s money.
A more honest and complete accounting of who is responsible for data could perhaps accomplish the same good as old-fashioned regulation, but in a new, less political way.* If we demand that sources of data always be tied to the real people who are responsible for the data’s presence in the first place, not only would those people be compensated, but also the value of data could not be fraudulently multiplied.
*Though newness is in the eye of the beholder. In a sense the project of this book was foreseen by one of the Ten Commandments, the one about not bearing false witness. As a technologist I feel entitled to claim newness for things, and it seems to work in raising interest in them.
A more honest network economy wouldn’t be one where no risks are taken, but one where risks would be taken more wisely, as there would be informed participation by the ground level creators of value. It’s a simple principle that could reach far. A sc
am is always an illusion of creating something from nothing, but there is no nothing. A well-implemented information economy would always remember the source, the something.
Siren Servers make money by shorting the whole of the project of human civilization. They bet that the improvement of reality couldn’t keep up with the supernatural and extrahuman realm of “something from nothing.” They are the opposite of carbon credits.
Feeding the Frenetic Mind of the Networked Person
So, one potential benefit of retiring Siren Servers is to make room for investments like carbon credits. But there is another network idea for addressing climate change that might also work, based on the way networking feels. Networking feels like a game.
This is how derivative funds and high-frequency trading outfits feel to the people who operate them, like video games. This is also what the housing bubble or the earlier dot-com bubble was like for the most engaged, and victimized, small-time investors. People get drawn into the obsessive feedback loop of interacting over a network in real time. The draw might be most profound in social media.
In order for any scheme for idealistic finance to work well, the experience of entering into it would have to be appealing on this profound organic level. Entertainment is based on pacing, and so are cybernetic networks.
It’s All in the Timing
All markets are based on feedback loops with characteristic time delays. The interval between choice made and feedback received varies according to the type of transaction. The timing determines a lot about what use a market can be to people.
Short feedback intervals are often criticized, and I tend to agree with the criticisms. High-frequency trading can’t possibly incorporate information about the real world because there isn’t time for that information to get into the feedback loop. This is a different criticism than the more common question of fairness. Aside from fairness, the problem with high-frequency trading is nonsense.
Similarly, though on a much slower time scale, critics bemoan the quarterly report, which forces corporations to please investors four times a year even when they are in businesses that demand planning years in advance. The biggest problems we face are often even slower than that, however. Climate change happens over decades and centuries.
Therefore, if there is to be any reconciliation between market forces and a problem like global climate change, some mechanism must come into play to create short-term, entertaining feedback within the information sphere on actions that ultimately matter in a much longer time frame.
People who drive cars that give constant energy efficiency feedback, like the Toyota Prius, seem to enjoy playing the game of driving more efficiently. That principle could be extended to other areas of life, and designs to do exactly that have been proposed by researchers such as Natalie Jeremijenko.*
*Natalie proposed devices similar to personal exercise monitors, but more comprehensive, that would constantly measure how much energy one was expending, and how much it cost. At the same time, one might constantly know how much one has saved or wasted in comparison to a “what if” scenario.
In such a scenario, your carbon footprint might be estimated constantly.† Through the use of economic avatars, you would not be forced to start paying for carbon immediately and explicitly, but instead could enter into the practice at your leisure as it became appropriate for you.
†Results could be displayed on your phone, or to better get your attention, could be more persistent and novel, like an animated tattoo on your wrist, or pixels grafted into your eyelashes so you could always look up at them. (Yes, this author has looked into both possibilities. In the 1990s I used to give undergraduate students an assignment to work out the engineering of body modifications their children would someday perform to freak them out. These were two ideas I gave as examples.)
The Treachery of Toys
But there’s a potential serious problem. This approach would involve constant measurement of your personal activity. That in turn could lead to a horrific surveillance society. There is already something of a revolt against “smart power meters,” which send information back to utilities.2 Energy use is fundamental to our lives, so carbon footprint feedback could form the basis of a truly creepy new kind of Siren Server.
One can imagine the nightmare scenarios: “Your energy bill indicates your girlfriend has been over a lot. Now your rent is going up, since two are technically living there.” “Your refrigerator has been opened a lot and is using more power than would be ideal. Your friends will be alerted that you ought to attend a class on green living and food preparation.” Or: “What’s going on with that electricity flow, dude? Grow lights? The authorities have been alerted.”
Can any design improve feedback to help people live their lives more knowingly without also centralizing power in yet another Siren Server? That is the topic of the next chapters.
CHAPTER 29
Creepy
Three Pervasive Creepy* Conundrums
*Eric Schmidt famously applied the term creepy to the Internet when he was CEO of Google, while discussing the possible future of facial recognition.
There’s an industry built around a set of tricky problems that include online security, privacy, and identity. The industry extends into antivirus protection, online reputation management, credit repair, data recovery, help desk subcontractors, fancy firewalls, and too many other examples to list. At times I have mused that the servicing of these concerns might be the way to support middle classes in the long term.† Billions of people could labor to fix each other’s privacy and security debacles.
†In my previous book, this was the scenario called “Planet of the Help Desks.”
Alas, aside from the dark absurdity, an economy based on this principle wouldn’t create enough wealth. If middle classes aren’t earning money from something else, they won’t be able to pay each other to man the help desks. Is there any other way to manage the complexity of creepiness?
All three creepy vexations—privacy, identity, and security—have ancient pedigrees but have been made catastrophically more confusing by big data and network effects. Much of what is said about these problems individually is interesting, but here I will make things simpler by treating them as faces of the same underlying quandary.
Creepiness is when information systems undermine individual human agency. It happens when you feel violated because the flow of information disregards your reasonable attempts to control your own information life. The principle can be extended to organizations that are undermined by hacking, for instance.
All three sorts of creepiness are promoted by an ever-splintering menagerie of powerful remote interests hoping to hijack your informational life.
Some of the most visible and immediately annoying instigators of creepiness are criminals and vandals. To my mind, however, the actions of legitimate corporations and governments are often not far removed from those of hooligans on the creepiness spectrum.
For instance, Google wants you to be “open” so that it can search all the data related to you, even if you didn’t initially enter it through the company’s services. Google also wants to be closed about how it compiles and exploits your information. Facebook wants you to have only one identity, so that it’s easier to collate information about you and reliably influence the options put in front of you, and it also doesn’t want to share how your information is used (it also doesn’t want Google to have access to it).
Loan and insurance companies demand information about you but don’t share how they make decisions based on that information. Even if you attempt to browse the Web anonymously you will still be tracked and identified by hundreds of stealthy “marketing” companies, unless you develop a rarefied degree of technical skill to insulate yourself.
Distant corporate machinations gradually change your life in unfathomable ways. You never really know what might have been if someone else’s cloud algorithm had come to a different conclusion about your potential as a loan taker, a
date, or an employee.
A Hacker’s Paradise
The creepiness problem is basically that most people aren’t idiot savants.
The hacker attitude is often approximately this: “Open up your life to the ’net, all you ordinary people. The world is about to become transparent and that transparency will be the beginning of a golden age. Sharing is good. However, encrypt your life like crazy. Use VPN, etc. Only the smartest people can make no sound in the digital forest.”
This is basically a way of saying that the better your computer skills are, the more right you have to be a genuine individual in control of your own digital life. But we technologists ought to be serving mankind, not turning ourselves into a privileged class.
Creepiness intrudes into the lives of ordinary people with varying levels of sophistication. For instance, it’s rare that criminals or vandals exhibit technical brilliance, although that does happen on occasion. What’s vastly more commonplace is that mediocre hoodlums search for an opening created by a victim’s little mistake or oversight.
No one can remember as many IDs and passwords as we’d wish. This has been one of the choke points of online commerce. So now the industry is shifting to new identity verification schemes, like asking users to draw squiggles. The problem is that we are in an eternal cat-and-mouse game with criminals.
If people were like ideal machines, then perhaps we’d maintain and periodically update different log-ins for many different types of online data, but in reality no one is that perfect. Users do not understand the endless choices that must be made to master privacy policies and even the top companies routinely screw up the administration of such policies. No set of rules foresees all the twisted circumstances that occur in online life.