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by Jaron Lanier

  If present online patterns continue, the answer will be no to the nurse, who will be expected to “share” her expertise and to forgo proper compensation for it.

  A Pharma Fable That Might Unfold Later in This Century

  The examples given so far are part of a standard set of anticipations in Silicon Valley. The pattern can be applied to almost any industry that isn’t yet fully software-mediated in the way that recorded music already is. Here I’ll tell a tale of how the pattern might be realized in the pharmaceutical industry:

  It was 2025. It all started in a Stanford dorm room. During a party someone knocked a bottle of vitamins to the floor and it shattered. “Dude! My vitamins.” No one had a car, and it was miles to the nearest drugstore.

  “Hey what about those reaction chips we use in chem?” Reaction chips were tiny chemistry experiment stations on a chip. Layers of gossamer shape-changing surfaces were puckered by charges from transistors in the top layer of an inch-squared chip, creating any desired architecture of chambers. Chambers could be manipulated to form tiny pumps, pressure chambers, or even itsy-bitsy centrifuges. The contents of a transient microchamber could be mixed, heated, cooled, or pressurized. Sensors of many kinds were also distributed on the chip’s surface. Every spot on the chip was monitored for temperature, color, conductivity, and many other properties.

  Tiny drops of antecedent chemicals were added to inlets at the surface of the chip by robotic eyedroppers within a desktop chip-filling station. Instead of spending hours to perform dozens of steps to synthesize a chemical at a bench, you could set up a chip to perform tens of thousands of steps while you went on with your life. More important, you could set up thousands of chips to perform variations on synthesis experiments in parallel. Chemistry finally merged with big data. A single typical senior project might test a million synthesis sequences to evolve a better one, or might test dozens of variations of an experimental material.

  The most fun thing was to watch a chip under a microscope while it was carrying out chemical synthesis. It looked like the world’s smallest Rube Goldberg device, squeezing, spinning, boiling, and squirting out tiny amounts of experimental substances. YouTube videos of chips in action drew a cult following. The ones where chips blew up were the most popular. T-shirts with the words CHIP FAIL became popular in chemistry departments everywhere.

  Anyway, back at the dorm room, one of the guys said, “Just get a chip to make your vitamins, dude. It’s stupid to go spend all that money at a store.”

  So a few chips went missing from the lab that night.

  It turned out to be a pain to keep chips in a dorm room drawer. The first one that made vitamins got lost in a bundle of underwear. But a roommate said, “Dude, you should visit the wearable computing lab. We should be wearing these chips.”

  Where to wear them? Chips started showing up in tattoos, like gold accents in a Klimt canvas.

  Amazingly, it took months for the administration to realize chips were being pilfered. First came the stern lecture, then, without even time to pee, a visit to Stanford’s intellectual property lawyers for the patent drafting.

  All the usual suspects in Silicon Valley put angel money into the startup, which was called VitaBop. The slide set at the first investors’ gathering showed skiers and a winner of a dance competition with VitaBop tattoos. An Olympic sprinter came up on stage and showed off his Bop Tat. Everyone with a Bop just exuded health and vitality. Of course they were all twenty-two.

  VitaBop created a no-hassle “fill-up station.” You’d press your chip up against the station to get a refill of antecedent chemicals. The chips also gained an ability to monitor the blood and vital signs.

  VB stations appeared at every café in Palo Alto. You could get a fill-up of the standard antecedents. Furthermore, a café might offer something exotic as a promotion. You could spend ten bucks to be part of a Bopathon, where everyone in the café would let the special chemistry of the day take hold. Despite all the hype, the active ingredient always turned out to be caffeine.

  Culture pundits remarked that at least people at Bopathons were looking at each other instead of at gadgets, because everyone was curious what the recipe would do to you. In a strange way, Boppers were more physically aware of each other than non-Boppers. The chips became a social gateway. If you didn’t have one, you became kind of invisible to someone who did.

  VitaBop grew like crazy. The chips were basically given away. It turned out that the thousands of tattoo shops, which had been going a little out of fashion, provided a ready retail network for VitaBop installs. The startup enjoyed a friction-free magic carper ride.

  Oh yes, the business plan. Well, there was a “recipe store” where you bought formulas that could be run on your Bop. Venues could pay to entice people to VB stations that would provide supposedly special formulas. Advertisers, insurance companies, and all kinds of other third parties paid for access to the amazing database VitaBop was building about what was going on within the bodies of Boppers. Privacy advocates worried, but the company assured everyone that only “aggregate” data was available.

  Revenues flowed in, though only a trickle compared to what was earned by the industries VitaBop might kill. Many took pleasure in seeing the Big Pharma companies scared out of their wits, but at the same time it was sad to see the coffee business shrivel. Some cafés survived, as Bopper dens, but there were heartrending stories about how all those hard-fought battles to create fair-trade coffee plantations in the developing world had come to bankruptcy.

  But back in Silicon Valley, all was well. It was to be expected that the shrinkage of old industries would be greater than the expansion of new industries. After all, making things more digital was all about efficiency.

  Somehow professional chemists and pharmacologists were surprised. The jobs were going away. Sure, if you got a gig at VitaBop itself, especially early in the game, you’d do great. But chem and bio graduates from campuses far from Stanford started noticing a drop-off of available jobs. At one school in Idaho, the head of the journalism school consoled the head of chemistry. “I’ve been there, my friend.”

  Somehow it took almost a year after the insane, ultraquick IPO before the culture wars discovered the world of Bopping. In theory there was an oversight board comprised of distinguished physicians and professors of public health who approved every program that could be distributed on the VitaBop store.

  However, what was purported to be a hacking site in New Zealand soon posted a method to “root” or “jailbreak” VBs to gain access to the entire spectrum of their functions, not just those approved by the manufacturer. Now wearers could enter any program into a VB. Anti-abortion groups were horrified that a young woman could synthesize a morning-after pill without anyone knowing. Sports medicine was thrown into turmoil. Efforts to ban Bops in college and pro sports sputtered and ultimately failed.

  If you have the luxury of programming tens of thousands of steps, you can synthesize an awful lot of results from commonplace antecedents. The psychedelics came first. An interesting feature of VitaBops was that smaller doses were needed than for what came to be known as “stuffing,” or old-fashioned drug taking. You could titrate measured amounts directly into the bloodstream, controlled by how the body was responding at that moment. At first, police couldn’t figure out how to prove a VitaBopper had programmed an illegal substance.

  Boppers argued that you couldn’t overdose off a Bop. This was a device measuring what was going on with your body millisecond to millisecond, after all. It wasn’t like stuffing an illicit substance to see what would happen. Somehow, the staid pre-Bop society wasn’t quite ready to hear that argument.

  A youth culture around rooted* Bops was all about recreational substances, but Bops were also squirting out therapeutic drugs. It took about a month after a huge bust of Bop rooters at the University of California, Berkeley for an organization called the Granny Boppers to distribute recipes over the same file-sharing sites that had recently been condui
ts for pirated movies and TV shows. Legit pharmacy sales of drugs for diabetes, blood pressure, migraines, and erectile dysfunction suddenly sank.

  *A rooted device is typically a phone or tablet which is no longer governed by the company that sold it, but instead by the owner who bought it. For instance, a “jailbroken” phone can load unapproved apps.

  Talk about lawsuits. All the pharmas and medical device companies ganged up on VitaBop.

  VitaBop argued before the U.S. Supreme Court that it had done nothing wrong. It was only a neutral channel that its users acted within, and furthermore, it had absolutely no jurisdiction over the bodies of Boppers. For it to even attempt to eavesdrop on or influence what Boppers were up to would put it in violation of medical privacy laws.

  VitaBop was for the most part able to survive legal scrutiny. People liked having the ability to control more about what went on in their own bodies. But at the same time, the economy was shrinking. Amazingly, fresh graduates in medicine and chemistry sometimes had to rely on their parents for even basic support, like getting the latest VitaBop.

  Bops were still cheap or free, but the overall cost to use them seemed to be going up and up. You could try using aftermarket antecedent chemicals, but somehow they never quite worked. Something fishy was going on with the pricing of official antecedents; they gradually became more expensive for no good reason. Antitrust regulators had a hard time tackling VitaBop. After all, traditional pills were still available. VitaBop argued it existed in a competitive, dynamic environment. Plus, the company pointed out, what the government really should be worried about is the illegal trade in rooted Bops.

  If you rooted a Bop, something strange happened. A gigantic firm called Booty arose based on building a proprietary database of what was going on in the bodies of people with rooted Bops. How did Booty get the data? Millions of people used pirate bopper sites that Booty could “scrape.” Millions more voluntarily accepted contracts they had never read on a social chemical networking site in order to get access to free formulas. In doing so, they opened their bodies to Booty’s competitor Bodybook.

  Booty usually made money not by directly charging Boppers money, but instead by taking money from third parties in exchange for being able to influence what a Bopper would be exposed to online. For instance, a Bopper in excellent physical health might get an offer for a free fill-up at an army recruiting station. It turned out that this form of indirect manipulation worked well enough to earn Booty many billions of dollars.

  Booty, Bodybook, and VitaBop coexisted awkwardly. Each collected a vast dossier on the metabolisms of everyone, but none could peer into the others’ data vaults. Booty hoarded the treasure of the rooted, open world, while VitaBop did the same for the world of subscribers, and Bodybook for a world of “sharers.” Booty accused VitaBop of being closed and not supporting the public good of bio-openness. VitaBop accused Booty of violating people’s privacy and dignity. Pundits would say that VitaBop was a little like Apple, while Booty was a little more like Google or a hedge fund, and Bodybook was like, well, guess.

  What they had in common was that each was shrinking the economy and the job prospects of everyone.

  CHAPTER 9

  From Above

  Misusing Big Data to Become Ridiculous

  Three Nerds Walk into a Bar . . .

  Your always-amused author once served on a panel at UC Berkeley judging mock business plans submitted by engineering graduate students who had enrolled in an entrepreneurship program. Three students presented the following scheme:

  Suppose you’re darting around San Francisco bars and hot spots on a Saturday night. You land in a bar and there are a bounteous number of seemingly accessible, lovely, and unattached young women hanging out looking for attention in this particular place. Well, you whip out your mobile phone and alert the network. “Here’s where the girls are!” All those other young men like you will know where to go. The service will make money with advertising, probably from bars and liquor concerns.

  I looked at this geeky, sincere trio, and asked the obvious question: Will there ever, ever, ever be even the slightest chance that this service will provide even one bit of correct data? There was a tense pause. Was this yet another Asperger’s syndrome–like example of incredible technical intelligence coupled with appalling naïveté about people?

  Their answer: No, of course not. There will never be good data. The whole scheme will run on hope.

  I gave them the most favorable possible evaluation, not because I wanted to encourage them to apply their hard-won skills to such an unproductive plan, but because they demonstrated an understanding of how networked information really works, when it comes to people.*

  *Silicon Valley comes through like clockwork. A year after this passage was written, a “where the babes are” app debuted at San Francisco bars. “SceneTap” used cameras and machine vision instead of volunteered information. No, I did not look into whether this startup was founded by the same students.

  Your Lack of Privacy Is Someone Else’s Wealth

  Occasionally the rich embrace a new token and drive up its value. The fine art market is a great example. Expensive art is essentially a private form of currency traded among the very rich. The better an artist is at making art that can function this way, the more valuable the art will become. Andy Warhol is often associated with this trick, though Pablo Picasso and others were certainly playing the same game earlier. The art has to be stylistically distinct and available in suitable small runs. It becomes a private form of money, as instantly recognizable as a hundred-dollar bill.

  A related trend of our times is that troves of dossiers on the private lives and inner beings of ordinary people, collected over digital networks, are packaged into a new private form of elite money. The actual data in these troves need not be valid. In fact, it might be better that it is not valid, for actual knowledge brings liabilities.

  But the pretense that we have a bundle of other people’s secrets is functioning like fine modern art. It is a new kind of security that the rich trade in, and the value is naturally driven up. It becomes a giant-scale levee inaccessible to ordinary people.

  Few people realize the degree to which they are being tracked and spied upon in order that this new form of currency can be created. There is an extensive literature1 and a sphere of activism2 already in place to address the situation, so I will present only the briefest exposition of the topic here, with plenty of footnotes to follow.

  Even an innocent visit to a legitimate major newspaper site like the New York Times invokes a competitive swarm of more than a dozen tracking services, each of which is attempting to become a dominant compiler of spy data about you. One plug-in that attempts to block spying schemes, called Ghostery, is currently blocking more than a thousand such schemes,3 though no one knows the true number.

  There is no definitive map of network spying services. The allegiances and roles are multifarious and complex.4 No one really knows the score, though a common opinion is that Google5 has historically been at the top of the heap for collecting spy data about you on the open Internet,6 while Facebook has mastered a way to corral people under an exclusive microscope.7 That said, other companies you’ve probably never heard of, like Acxiom8 and eBureau,9 are also deeply determined to create dossiers on you.

  Because spying on you is, for the moment, the official primary business of the information economy, any attempt to avoid being spied on, such as the use of Ghostery,10 can seem like an assault on the very idea of the Internet.11

  Big Data in Science

  The seeming magic of using data over a network has been applied differently in the worlds of science and business. The operations of both worlds are increasingly enacted using almost indistinguishable big data tools, but they play by different rules. In science, verification and accuracy are paramount. In business and the culture at large, not so much.

  Scientists are using new technologies to observe previously murky layers of nature in detail
for the first time, but there are so many details that it would be useless to even try without big computers and networks. Genomics is as much a branch of computer science as it is of biology, for instance. The same is true for the frontiers of materials science and energy.

  In the sciences, the arrival of a fresh source of big data means a lot of hard work for researchers, no matter how much technology is made available.* It is routine for new big data in medicine to transform our previous best guess about how to treat disease. And yet, new cures take years to arrive. In science, big data is magic, but difficult magic. We struggle with it, and expect to be fooled at first. The means to be rigorous with big data are still evolving.

  *For a while it looked like there was a statistical effect hiding in a giant sea of numbers showing neutrinos traveling faster than light. The compelling illusion survived a number of challenges until it was finally shot down months later.

  No one in science thinks of big data as an automatic silver bullet. There is no shortage of common reference points to corroborate that assessment. Medicine provides the most consequential example. It is improving and yet improvement is tragically slow. Weather forecasting is better than it used to be, and is getting better. Satellites feed data we didn’t used to have into computer models that can handle the vast data volume, and the result is better guesses about next week’s weather, even next year’s overall weather. And yet, the weather still surprises. Big data gradually improves our abilities as we work with it, but it doesn’t instantly grant omniscience. Chasing a dynamic, ever-better-but-never-perfect statistic result is the very heart of modern cloud computing. Big data must be mastered in order to be valuable. It is not an automatic cornucopia, or a substitute for insight.