Who Owns the Future?

by Jaron Lanier

  Building bridges between the big online services, and turning everyone into a first-class economic participant, might just cause a Nelsonian economy to eventually arise out of the private sector without government intervention.

  From a Wall Street perspective, the heretofore unacknowledged but valuable contributions of ordinary individuals will finally be counted in the cloud. That will mean that finance can be built on all that people do to create value in the network age. Suddenly investors will be making money from having bet on a confederacy of bloggers (though the bloggers would know about it and risks would not be hidden, as they were when mortgages were leveraged in secret).

  The economy will grow spectacularly. A golf resort will be financed on the moon for the next meeting of the CEOs.

  I can hear the groans from my lefty friends. Why would we want big players involved? Big-time players aren’t aliens. They’re just people who are in particular positions. If we were to depose them in a revolution, a new class of big players would appear.

  Why would big players cooperate? To kick the economy to the next peak in the energy landscape, great scale is needed, more scale than any one company or financial player can provide. The Apple Store and the Amazon store can’t grow as much, and as fast separately as they could together in a universal market.

  To understand why, recall some basic algebra. Start with Metcalf’s Law, which states that the value of a network is proportional to the square of the number of nodes. The square of the number of Apple users plus the square of the number of Amazon users is far less than the square of the combined user base.

  So, the moguls might realize that it makes sense to work together, in a general sort of way that increases competition but increases scale and opportunity even more.

  The CEOs would not be colluding in an evil way! Please, antitrust regulators of the future, if a meeting like this seems to be happening, take a moment to think before you barge through the door and arrest everyone. If done right, this baseline of cooperation would make for a more competitive marketplace that would be good for the big businesses represented at the meeting and the average person—especially for the average person. This would be an excellent moment for government not to blow it.

  You might think this is a mad fantasy. CEOs from all the big network companies in a room, talking to each other rationally, even as they are suing each other over patents or whatever other conflicts hold sway. Sounds unlikely. I can’t argue with that assessment, but I can put it in perspective. Is it really any madder than the ways all these companies became powerful in the first place? Is it any madder than the cooperation that made the Internet possible in the first place?

  EIGHTH INTERLUDE

  The Fate of Books

  BOOKS INSPIRE MANIACAL SCHEMING

  If there’s one blessed sweet feature of Silicon Valley culture, it’s that we don’t have many deadly dull mandatory social affairs where you have to sit in an assigned seat at a table and make your choice of beef, fish, or veggies while you pretend to listen to boring toasts and bad jokes until you get to leave. But we do have a few.

  I was once seated at a linen-coated affair between Jeff Bezos of Amazon and Eric Schmidt, then the CEO of Google. This was before the Kindle. Two Silicon Alphas eyed each other and suddenly locked into a manic exchange. They started trading figures and anecdotes about the book business. It all happened so fast, a blur.

  Someone at the podium was talking about installing a solar-powered computer in Africa. The image came into my mind of an overcaffeinated hyena trying to trump its own reflection. I sat there, mostly staring straight ahead—a patch of background celluloid in a 1920s cartoon, peeking out between frenetic characters mirroring each other, running at double speed.

  Eric and Jeff are acquaintances, so I knew they were not actually moving any faster than normal, but on this occasion what counted as normal speed contrasted severely with a lugubrious process I was going through, something called “trying to finish a book.” The process of book writing inducts authors into a different kind of time.

  AN AUTHOR’S EXPERIENCE OF A BOOK

  I had been trying to finish a first book for not just years but decades. The book contract hung over me, a sword of Damocles suspended from a radio-controlled model helicopter, tracking my every move.

  You can try to make a joke of endless stress. There was an informal contest among hypertardy deliverers to see who could keep a book contract overdue the longest before having to pay the advance back. Ornette Coleman played for a couple of decades, as did John Perry Barlow.

  It wasn’t that I was lazy. During the years that I didn’t deliver a book I helped found several startups that went on to become parts of big companies. I became a father, led a multiuniversity research program, released a major-label record, had symphonies commissioned and performed, and played music around the world. And I wrote plenty of articles, including a monthly magazine column. But writing a book was different.

  A book is not just a read, it is also a summit, a codification of a point of view. My problem with finishing was that, even if I wasn’t ready to admit it consciously, my thoughts had not yet matured. It really took all those years for me to be ready to publish You Are Not a Gadget. Without the years of trying, I might never have gotten there. When I was finally ready, it came together fairly quickly. To publish before I was ready would have been to lessen the meaning not only of my book but of all books. Meanwhile, these two Silicon titans were in the throes of realizing that the fact that they happened to run some central computers on the Internet put them in a position of potentially taking over the whole book world in just a few years.

  IT’S NOT ABOUT PAPER VERSUS EBOOKS

  It’s not that a book might be read on an electronic tablet instead of paper that bothers me, but the backstage economics and politics—and the sense of time—that that might bring about. What ebooks might lose is the pattern of what a book is in the stream of human life and thought. Whether we will destroy culture in order to save/digitize it is still unknown.*

  * For those too young to catch the reference, this recalls a comment made by an American military official in a famous documentary about the Vietnam War called Hearts and Minds suggesting that a village had to be destroyed in order to be saved.

  It amazes me that traditional book publishers don’t understand the emotional value of paper, however. They are still trying to sell a one-price-fits-all consumer product in a gilded age, and thus are missing out on the obvious business opportunity under their noses. As long as the Sirenic era lasts, there will be a hollowed-out market with a weakened middle class. To survive, the book business has to define a product for the upper horn, for the rich.

  In the music business, that upper tier takes the form of insanely expensive audiophile equipment and super-high-quality limited editions on vinyl. In the book business, there should be hyperlimited editions of books like this one, hand copied by monks onto handmade paper, using organic fair-trade inks, and sold only in VIP rooms at parties where almost no one can get in. Listen up, publisher, you are with these very words publishing the advice that could win you a fortune, but you are choosing to ignore a way to get through these tough times.

  THE BOOK AS SILICON VALLEY WOULD HAVE IT

  What will books be like once Silicon Valley has had its way with them? The story isn’t over, and if I thought any particular outcome was really inevitable, I wouldn’t bother trying to influence it. What I can do is capture an impression of what seems to be coming if nothing changes. We’ve learned a little from watching what has happened with music, video, news, and photography.

  Here is a likely, though not inevitable, outcome:

  • There will be little barrier to entry for authors, except for writing the damned book. You’d just write a book and upload it. That’s already true, but it will become a little truer still. You’ll be able to enlist ghost coauthors even more easily than now, and they might be crowdsourced or just plain Artificial Intelligence software. A
service will collect splendid blurbs automatically: “The book we have all been waiting for.” Self-publishing can yet become a more friction-free experience than it is today. A self-declared author will perhaps pay a fee or just agree to live under a deeper spyglass and be advertised at more intensely.

  • The number of published authors will quickly become similar to the number of readers who will pay for a book. This is what happened with music.

  • Some good books from otherwise obscure authors will come into being. These will usually come to light as part of the rapid-growth phase, or “free rise” of a new channel or device for delivering the book experience. For instance, if a company introduces a new reading device, there will be heightened visibility for a while for authors who are uniquely available early on on that device. In this way, an interesting author with just the right timing will occasionally get a big boost from a tech transition.

  • The total money flowing to authors in the system will decline to a fraction of what it was before digital networks, and that will be paid by a combination of advertising and fees from people who are locked into proprietary devices or delivery channels.

  • Most authors will make most of their book-related money in real time, from traveling, live appearances, or consulting instead of from book sales. This will change the demographics of authorship. Authors will tend to be either young and childless, independently wealthy, beneficiaries of an institutional post, or more fundamentally like performers. They will tend not to be independent scholars with families.

  • A lot of people will pretend to be commercially successful authors, and will put money into enhancing the illusion. Most of these will rely on family support or inheritance. Gradually an intellectual plutocracy will emerge.

  • Readers will be second-class economic citizens. (A recap of why: When you buy a paper book, you own something you can resell. The value of that object might go up or down. When a reader “purchases” an ebook, it is only a contract of access. The reader has no capital, nothing to resell, nothing that might accrue value. This is a fundamental rejection of the very idea of a market economy.* When only certain privileged players can own capital, while everyone else can only buy services, the market will eventually consume itself and evolve into a nonmarket.)

  * This inequity disturbs me a great deal. Being a technologist, I have tried to think of solutions. Here is one idea: Suppose you could etch or in some other manner place a permanent author’s signature on the back of a reading slate or tablet. Then a reader could accumulate interesting combinations of author’s signatures, and the combinations would be intrinsically rare. For instance, one could collect the signatures of all the cyberpunk science fiction authors on one slate.

  • Books will be merged with apps, video games, virtual worlds, or whatever other digital format becomes prominent. These will make some serious money for authors at first, while they are novel, before the biggest servers commoditize them.

  • The distribution of book sales will be even more lopsided than in traditional markets. There will be a small number of superwinners and a huge number of vanity authors, with little in between.

  • Many readers will read what is put in front of their eyes by crowdsourcing algorithms, and often will not be aware of the identity of the author or the boundary between one book and another.

  • Many books will be available only via a particular device, such as a particular company’s tablet.

  • Algorithmically generated books and books written in sweatshops will be plentiful, because they can be made so cheaply in quantity that even tiny streams of revenue can add up to a business proposition.

  • There will be much more information available in some semblance of book form than ever before, but overall a lower quality standard.

  • A book won’t necessarily be the same for each person who reads it or if the same person reads it twice. On the one hand this will mean better updates for some kinds of information and fewer encounters with typos, but on the other will deemphasize the rhythm and poetics of prose, minimize the stakes of declaring a manuscript complete, and expand the “filter bubble” effect.

  • The means to find reading material will be where business battles are fought. The fights often will not be pretty. The interface between readers and books will be contested and often corrupted by spam and deception.

  • Writing a book won’t mean as much. Some will think of this as a democratic, antielitist benefit, and others will think of it as a lowering of standards.

  • Readers will spend a lot of time hassling with forgotten passwords, expired credit cards, and being locked into the wrong device or mobile-service contract for years at a time. They’ll lose their own libraries, notes, and even their own writing when they switch vendors. Net neutrality will exist in celebrated theory but not in practice.

  • Technically adept readers will make fun of other readers who have trouble dealing with the new system. The more hackerlike you are, the more you will feel advantaged.

  • Overall, people will pay less to read, which will be lauded as being good for consumers, while people will earn still less from writing. If this pattern held only for music, writing, and other media, it would be just one feature in the transition to an ever-more digital world in which software swallows everything.* However, if it is a precedent to be repeated in transportation, manufacturing, medicine, education, and other major sectors, the overall economy will shrink, making capitalism a little less viable in the long term. Well, that’s a restatement of a core idea of this book, but at any rate this much can be said:

  * The portrayal of software as an insatiable gourmand is common in Silicon Valley. “Software Will Eat Everything” is the phrasing from a well-known essay by Web pioneer and tycoon Marc Andreessen.

  • By the time books have mostly gone digital, the owners of the top Internet servers that route readers, probably run by Silicon Valley companies, will be more powerful and richer than they were before.

  Some of these prospects appeal to me. My favorite is the potential for experiments merging books with apps, games, music, movies, virtual worlds, and all the other forms that can be sent over the ’net. This ought to yield some interesting fruit, though remember culture still takes its time, however fast a technology transition occurs. With time, probably enough time for another generation to come of age, there ought to be some good fun to be had.

  The desirability of being more directly connected to readers will vary with each author. I would love it if all I did were write. Since I also make technology and music and parent, I find it’s absolutely impossible to find the moments to authentically respond to all the readers who contact me. This is a drag, since there are such lovely notes that come in, but what can one do? I don’t want to use lazy social-media interactions to pretend to be more responsive than I really can be, even though that’s the fashion. I do know writers, particularly of genre fiction, business books, and self-help books, who adore being tightly connected to their readers and spend hours a day interacting with them.

  WHAT IS IT ABOUT A BOOK THAT IS WORTH SAVING?

  What’s wrong with this bulleted list overall? There are both good and bad things in it, but there’s an overall pattern that feels off kilter, a throwing-the-baby-out-with-the-bathwater feeling.

  A book isn’t an artifact, but a synthesis of fully realized individual personhood with human continuity. The economic model of our networks has to be optimized to preserve that synthesis, or it will not serve mankind.

  This email is completely typical of what shows up every morning:

  I’m a postdoc at [ . . .] working on a paper about collaborative creativity and we wanted to see if you can point us to some relevant literature. To be more specific, we are finding empirical evidence [ . . .] that collaborative works are more positively received than single-authored works. We are studying this in the context of [ . . .] an online community where kids can create their animations, video games, and interactive art.

  We
read your article on Edge.org on Digital Maoism and we were wondering if you know of anyone else who might be arguing that individual works are of higher quality than collective works.

  This came from one of the top computer science labs in the world. Unfortunately, I can become impatient when I attempt to answer questions like this.

  No one in the tech world practices what we preach about these ideas. We treat the top entrepreneurs as irreplaceable heroes. I’ve never, ever seen a serious proposal that a collective or artificial cloud software experiment could replicate the value of a Steve Jobs.

  So it’s hard to even know where to start to answer email like this. Look at the world, look at history. Rock stars, novels, great physicists . . . . Even the entries in Wikipedia about human achievements are mostly about individuals rather than collectives. How could an old essay of mine from 2006 be the sole reference to the preponderant pattern in the whole of human history?

  First, I might point out, the assumption is put forward with no justification that the human role is to produce an output in the same sense that an algorithm or a collective could.* That is wrong. Then, a marketplace method, typically formulated as winner-takes-all, is put forward as the only means of valuing outputs from people and machines.