Jaron Lanier: “Who Owns The Future?”
Big Data is power.
A fascinating look at the way computing technology is shaping our society.
From the amazon.com review by Kevin Nguyen:
In Who Owns the Future?, Lanier is interested in how network technologies affect our culture, economy, and collective soul. Lanier is talking about pretty heady stuff—the monopolistic power of big tech companies (dubbed “Siren Servers”), the flattening of the middle class, the obscuring of humanity—but he has a gift for explaining sophisticated concepts with clarity. In fact, what separates Lanier from a lot of techno-futurists is his emphasis on the maintaining humanism and accessibility in technology. In the most ambitious part of the book, Lanier expresses what he believes to be the ideal version of the networked future—one that is built on two-way connections instead of one-way relationships, allowing content, media, and other innovations to be more easily attributed (including a system of micro-payments that lead back to its creator). Is the two-way networked vision of the internet proposed in Who Owns the Future quixotic? Even Lanier seems unsure, but his goal here is to establish a foundation for which we should strive. At one point, Lanier jokingly asks sci-fi author William Gibson to write something that doesn’t depict technology as so menacing. Gibson replies, “Jaron, I tried. But it’s coming out dark.” Lanier is able to conjure a future that’s much brighter, and hopefully in his imagination, we are moving closer to that.
Buy at the LGF Amazon store:
amazon.com
Jaron Lanier:
“The clamor for online attention only turns into money for a token minority of ordinary people, but there is another new, tiny class of people who always benefit. Those who keep the new ledgers,the giant computing services that model you, spy on you, and predict your actions, turn your life activities into the greatest fortunes in history. Those are concrete fortunes made of money.This book promotes a third alternative, which is that digital networking ought to promote a two-way transaction, in which you benefit, concretely, with real money, as I do. I want digital networking to cause more value from people to be on the books, rather than less. When we make our world more efficient through the use of digital networks, that should make our economy grow, not shrink.”