Who Owns the Future?

Excerpts from Who Owns the Future?, by Jaron Lanier.

Lanier defines “Siren Servers” as

an elite computer, or coordinated collection of computers, on a network. It is characterized by narcissism, hyperamplified risk aversion, and extreme information asymmetry. It is the winner of an all-or-nothing contest, and it inflicts smaller all-or-nothing contests on those who interact with it.

Hm, I think I can count a few companies running such servers. On the formation of these servers:

Every attempt to create a pure bottom-up, emergent network to coordinate human affairs also facilitates some new hub that inevitably becomes a center of power, even if that was not the intent…. These days, if everything is open, anonymous, and copyable, then a search/analysis company with a bigger computer than normal people have access to will come along to measure and model everything that takes place, and then sell the resulting ability to influence events to third parties. The whole supposedly open system will contort itself to that Siren Server, creating a new form of centralized power. Mere openness doesn’t work.

Further:

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.

The start of his premise:

To restate the premise of this project, it’s ultimately better to have paid information in order to create a middle class.

I’ve excerpted some of the author’s more forceful passages, but I found Lanier’s take on the future of an information economy — and his alternative model to it — very smart, and very humane.