B008J2AEY8 EBOK

by Jaron Lanier

  I see no evidence to support that dark fear.

  To the Dead Their Due

  Suppose an information society is based on individuals accruing multitudinous, diverse, tiny flows of royalties, and that these build into a new kind of more organic “middle-class levee” system. What happens when someone dies?

  Do the flows stop? Do they go to a general fund, to taxes? To charity? Would the dues to the dead eventually outpace dues to the living, and even then continue to grow until the living were squeezed out of the economy, just like the poor are today? Or might a system of cyber-inheritance lead to a new kind of plutocracy?

  A primary advantage of a more generally monetized information economy is that levees are built up gradually instead of in all-or-nothing, career-making quantum leaps. That means that we needn’t import the old limitations from eras that were hobbled by cruder information technologies. The levees can be eroded after death as smoothly as they were built up, instead of being breached in an instant.

  The dues to the dead can be rolled off according to a smooth function. At first, some money can flow to descendants, but the amount can taper off, so that the grandchildren will have to learn to earn their keep more and more as they grow up.

  On the whole, the total due to the dead would taper off, so that the ghosts of the future’s Beethovens, Edisons, and Shakespeares will not hog all wealth forever.

  Tapering addresses one of the passions of copyright reformers. By making copyright and related benefits taper off, the problem of orphaned or inaccessible works ceases to be a dilemma. The use of the work of the dead gradually becomes less and less expensive, until it’s free or virtually free. Our present all-or-nothing way of dealing with intellectual property prompts high-stakes end-of-term games that always leave someone unhappy. Tapering will make reasonable compromise predictable and normal.

  CHAPTER 23

  Big Business

  What Will Big Companies Do?

  Even stranger than the question about what ordinary people would do is the question “What would big companies do?” Some of the people who ask this question are the usual ultra-cyber-idealists. In their view, the great institutions of today, whether governments, churches, banks, or giant Internet corporations, will simply blur into nothingness. In their places there would only be spontaneous, instant outbursts of coordination as needed: the occasional Kickstarter barn-raising to initiate a Martian colony, for instance.

  There are many reasons to doubt this point of view, even though it is often presented with great purity of heart. There is often a lefty undercurrent of thinking that a utopian information economy ought to mean the end of big institutions, including corporations. I often find I am introduced at lectures as being “anticorporate,” perhaps because I have what at one time would have been countercultural hair. The truth is that I find big companies to be essential, and have enjoyed working with them. I have helped to create startups that are now parts of Oracle, Adobe, Pfizer, and Google.

  Working in Microsoft’s research labs has been great fun in part because of the Kinect project. Thousands of people were needed to bring what we once upon a time called an “avatar camera” to market for the first time and to promptly sell tens of millions of them. It was the selling of tens of millions that facilitated a spontaneous hacker community of thousands to create hacks. To pretend that a bottom-up approach by itself could have done the same is nuts.

  The future is not predictable enough to know what kinds of big, inherently top-down jobs will need to get done, but it is extremely unlikely that there will be none. Big data requires big data centers, and big companies build them. Some new niches for big companies are suggested by the notion of a humanistic digital economy, such as the commoditized decision reduction services to be described later on. Other futuristic candidates for jobs for big companies are stabilization of the climate, repositioning earthquakes,* or creating launch structures that make space access inexpensive.†

  *Gluing existing faults and using explosives to open up new ones in less destructive locations, such as in the oceans, might accomplish this. Yes, this is one of my crazy, speculative side projects.

  †In a humanistic economy, big companies would trade within the chain of commerce just as they do today. Big companies should do better in the world proposed here, not only because the economy would be expanding but because regulation in a high-tech information economy would be more readily expressed incrementally instead of in big, unpredictable, punitive chunks.

  Big companies are the flywheels and ballast of a market economy, creating a degree of stability. (To put it in geekspeak, they act as lowpass filters.) The resulting lessened turbulence will always annoy the most peripatetic and impatient young innovators, but it also makes it easier for most people in most phases in life to understand and navigate the economic environment.

  The Role of Advertising

  The dominant current business plan for consumer networking is advertising. What would the role of advertising be in a humanistic information economy?

  Advertising can be manipulative, sneaky, and a maddening source of distortions. It is also purely human, a part of us we couldn’t remove any more easily than we could sever our limbs.

  In a cab in New York City, some sweaty summer day in the 1990s, a cloying, intrusive jingle blared from the radio. “Can you turn the radio down, please?” Was I heard? Louder. “Turn the radio down, driver, please!” It was an ad for a chain of furniture stores. A percussive Pakistani accent penetrated the barrier between driver and passenger, “Mister, when you own your own cab you can turn the radio off. This is my cab, not yours. Stop shouting at me.”

  Then it hit me. That was me playing the annoying melody on the flute. My friend Mario Grigorov, a soundtrack composer, and I picked up jingle work from time to time. We had produced this one for an ad agency a year ago, and I remembered we had to go back and forth many times to please the client—to make sure the music was sufficiently piercing to ruin the precious solitude one might hope to enjoy in a cab on a sweltering day.

  Advertising was one of the main business plans of the age of mass media from well before the appearance of digital technology, and there is no reason to expect it to disappear as technology evolves. In fact, advertising ought to be celebrated for the starring role it has played—for centuries—in the onset of modernity. Ads romanticized progress. Advertising counterbalances the tendency of people to adhere to familiar habits.

  It bothers me that link placement in search engines and social networks is called “advertising” in the online world. That is at most a tactical sort of advertisement, but it’s more a form of direct micromanagement of the options in front of a person from moment to moment. Real advertising romanticizes the offerings of people to each other. This is usually called “brand advertising” these days, but romantic—or if you prefer, heroic—advertising isn’t limited to brands.

  Brand advertising is what Apple did, for instance, in huge outlays for TV, billboards, and print in order to introduce a product like the iPad. Tactical link placement of the kind pioneered by Google could not have accomplished that. Instead, such links, placed for pay in front of your eyes, might influence where you buy something like an iPad. It remains a bit of a mystery how to best transfer true brand advertising from TV, billboards, or steaming New York City taxicabs into the frenetic jumble of online experience.

  My purpose here is not to dictate what a utopia would be like, but I imagine that a romantic, stylish form of advertising will continue to be a central part of human experience in any advanced economy. I am a little less sanguine about paid link placement. Our online world should function well enough that we see the best links as a matter of course.

  CHAPTER 24

  How Will We Earn and Spend?

  When Will Decisions Be Made?

  It would be humanly impossible for a person to constantly make all the decisions needed in an advanced information economy. Say you want a cab. Today it is already possible to ca
ll a cab with a smartphone, but to do so a user has to have populated a stack of about ten interdependent decisions.*

  *A phone must be chosen, and a wireless carrier, and a payment service, and a taxi-calling app, and an email account to tether the payment and taxi apps, and a credit card to process the payments, and a bank to tether the credit card to, and possibly a PC to tether the phone to, and connectivity for home Wi-Fi, and a contacts management app or social network to keep track of the addresses of places the taxi might take you.

  Ten is a lot. Such a tangle of decisions can only be reconsidered infrequently. In some cases the decisions are forced,† which is annoying, but also a cognitive benefit in disguise.

  †Choosing a phone might force the choice of wireless carrier, for instance.

  It isn’t hard to imagine future scenarios in which the stack could grow to hundreds or thousands of decisions. That would certainly be possible when you bring an elder-care robot into your life, or operate your 3D printer.

  Any desirable alternative economic future must include an idea about a user interface that brings at least as much simplicity to people as acquiescing to a Siren Server does today. This means reducing the density of decisions people are expected to make to a level that leaves cognitive room to live life in free and creative ways.

  If Siren Servers turn out to be the only way to reduce the burden of decision making in an information economy, then we are done. That would mean there is only one possible design for high-tech society.

  However, there are almost certainly other options. Imagine a future industry of “decision reduction” that would be (gasp!) regulated so as to remain unaligned with other services. You’d choose a decision reduction service the way you choose a broker now. The decision reduction service would use its particular style and competence to create bundles of decisions you could accept or reject en masse. You could switch to other services without penalty at any time. Such services would be prohibited from having conflicts of interest. That is a proper place for regulation.

  A little basic regulation would force decision reduction services to be competitive instead of being vulnerable to the moral hazard of locking people into contracts. This idea is a generalization of many familiar ideas from antitrust and network neutrality.

  If we allow ourselves to lean into a utopian stance just a little, then we can suppose that the ideal solution would be an open market in decision reduction, which even individual entrepreneurs could enter. Just like a personal assistant, a certain sort of person might be effective and happy reducing the choice space for others. In other cases, delegation to a huge decision reduction cloud service worth hundreds of billions of dollars might be the best choice for a particular customer.

  The possibility of new kinds of personal assistants adds to the arsenal of answers to the question “What would people do?” In a world of thorough and honest accounting, whole new large classes of service professions should naturally pop up.

  In early experiments like Second Life, we’ve already seen glimmers of new paid roles, from avatar stylists to virtual performance venue promoters. Facebook and the like also generate fledging new paid roles, but they’re often defensive and dreary, like reputation protection and restoration.

  Once a humanistic economy gets going, I imagine that accounting will suddenly become an interesting job. Accountants will be called upon to expand the kinds of value that can be documented to enhance the network. They’ll not only get their clients paid, but also cause the economy to grow. They’ll be a little like politicians and a little like detectives. They will not be backroom nerds but action heroes.

  New careers as fresh as these, or beyond my imagination, should be appearing already, but the Sirenic pattern shuts down that kind of progress.

  If I try to imagine what it would be like to be an individual in a humanistic economy, I suppose that a big life choice would be how much attention to devote to one’s information transactions. One choice would be to be lazy in the quotidian sphere of life and sign up with a decision reduction service, but then double down on whatever you’re good at that generates your income and wealth. Another choice would be to become personally obsessed with the details of your information life. People with a mind to do it could optimize their information incomes and wealth creation, but might as a result not look at the big picture as much. There would be all sorts of in-between options to suit different personalities.

  Once again, as a reminder, this argument is neither anticorporate nor redistributionist. The test of success ought to be that both the big players and individuals do better in a growing economy. To put it another way, there ought to be big corporations doing big jobs without necessarily having to become Siren Servers.

  Dynamic Value

  The price of computation in a humanistic information economy ought never be set exclusively by rote, but always be determined to a significant degree by market negotiation. We will never know for sure in advance how valuable a particular datum might turn out to be. Each use of data will determine a fresh valuation of it in context.

  There will be vastly more commercial events than in the world we are used to. Every time code runs, a lot of people will be paid a tiny bit each. There is no such thing as calculation without data. Therefore, if the provenance of the data has been preserved, then calculations can generally be expanded to yield additional results about who should get credit for making them possible.

  It will be very rare, essentially impossible, for Amazon to sell a book for zero dollars, as it sometimes does today. This is because it will be almost impossible to assemble any information stream for which no component has some established value, or for which there is no potential customer. In physicality, it isn’t unusual to see puppies or large items offered for free, because it’s hard for the owner to keep them. That’s almost never the case for information. There should be far less free stuff in an information economy than in physicality.

  There will be no upper bound to a price. Sellers at every level will be able to set prices as high as their markets will bear, but competition will keep prices in check.

  The principle would apply to code as well as data. Computer code these days tends to be either proprietary or open-source. A third option would come into being in the future proposed here, and perhaps into ubiquity. Code would remember the people who coded each line, and those people would be sent nanopayments as part of code execution. A programmer who writes code everyone uses will be able to benefit directly, instead of having to leverage code into a Siren Server scheme. The Google guys would have gotten rich from the search code without having to create the private spying agency. At the same time, an open community of programmers would have been able to contribute incrementally, without any more barriers than are found in today’s open-source community.

  My current thinking, which will undoubtedly not be the last word, is to calculate prices in humanistic transactions in a mixed way, partially determined by buyers and sellers in the moment and partially determined automatically by universal policies. Each price will have two components, called “instant” and “legacy.”

  The reason for this is to account for the value that people have already brought into the world. Capitalism has suffered from a memory disorder. It’s been so glued to the moment, to the current deal on the table, that it’s possible for an economic crash to occur in the midst of wealth.

  The “instant” part of the price will arise from agreement between buyer and seller. Just as in physicality, there are varied mechanisms by which agreement can be reached. Sometimes a seller will set a retail, take-it-or-leave-it price. Or there might be an auction, or a back-and-forth negotiation. A mature information economy ought to spawn new styles of price determination. We’ll talk more about this interesting new frontier shortly.

  The “legacy” portion of the price will be composed of algorithmic adjustments to instant pricing that uphold the social contract and economic symmetry. Here are examples of the sorts of legacy adjust
ments that might be incorporated:

  • Something old: Tax.

  • Something new that might make a price go up: Calculation of the relative contributions of upstream people to the value of the transaction, so that they will be compensated. A buyer and seller can’t set a price to screw over those who came before, without whom the present transaction would be impossible. Those who came before remain first-class economic citizens, though they must contend with market forces and can’t set arbitrarily high prices. The next adjustment will prevent them from engaging in “blackmail” pricing.

  • Something new that might make a price go down: Incremental correction for examples of software lock-in or other impediments to competition, so that antitrust-like problems are avoided in advance. This would not be a matter of bureaucratic judgment, but a dispassionate mathematical calculation. The calculation would answer the question “How much would it cost the buyer if prior decisions about ‘populating the stack’ had been different?”* For instance, suppose you had chosen a different wireless service in the past and want to call a cab with your smartphone now. If that different past decision in how you populated your stack would have caused a major difference in the cost of calling the cab now, larger than some threshold, then that should be understood as an instance of unproductive lock-in. The price paid would partially, not totally, be adjusted to undo the moral hazard of lock-in. In the present system, businesses need to rely on lock-in to make a profit in the online world, but in the world foreseen here there would no longer be a proper function for it.

  * The notion of calculating “What if things had been different?” ought to alarm mathematically inclined readers. Would it always be possible to calculate counterfactual financial histories? Wouldn’t there be many chaotic situations in which petty differences would have had huge implications? This would indeed become a major area of concern in a humanistic information economy. It is beyond the scope of this book to go into the topic in detail, but the key idea is to design an economy to incentivize and otherwise foster more “linear” financial dealings that avoid chaos as much as possible. When the answer to “What if things had been different?” is chaotic and mostly meaningless, then chances are that the actual happening was also thus. The point is to make capitalism as little like a casino as possible.