Who Owns the Future?THE DAZZLING NEW MASTERWORK FROM THE PROPHET OF SILICON VALLEY Jaron Lanier is the father of virtual reality and one of the world’s most brilliant thinkers. Who Owns the Future? is his visionary reckoning with the most urgent economic and social trend of our age: the poisonous concentration of money and power in our digital networks. Lanier has predicted how technology will transform our humanity for decades, and his insight has never been more urgently needed. He shows how Siren Servers, which exploit big data and the free sharing of information, led our economy into recession, imperiled personal privacy, and hollowed out the middle class. The networks that define our world—including social media, financial institutions, and intelligence agencies—now threaten to destroy it. But there is an alternative. In this provocative, poetic, and deeply humane book, Lanier charts a path toward a brighter future: an information economy that rewards ordinary people for what they do and share on the web. |
Contents
Prelude | 1 |
Motivation | 7 |
A Simple Idea | 19 |
Money as Seen Through One Computer Scientists Eyes | 29 |
The Ad Hoc Construction of Mass Dignity | 37 |
An Artificial Bell Curve Made of Levees | 43 |
Drove My Chevy to the Levee but the Levee Was | 49 |
The Specter of the Perfect Investment | 59 |
Clout Must Underlie Rights if Rights Are to Persist | 205 |
THE POCKET PROTECTOR IN THE SAFFRON | 211 |
Abundance Evolves | 217 |
PART EIGHT | 231 |
We Need to Do Better than Ad Hoc Levees | 239 |
Some First Principles | 245 |
Who Will Do What? | 253 |
Big Business | 265 |
Some Pioneering Siren Servers | 69 |
IF LIFE GIVES YOU EULAS | 79 |
Mass Unemployment Events | 85 |
Misusing Big Data to Become Ridiculous | 107 |
MODERNITY CONCEIVES THE FUTURE | 123 |
Meaning as Nostalgia | 129 |
Meaning in Struggle | 137 |
Markets and Energy Landscapes | 143 |
Narcissism | 153 |
Story Lost | 165 |
Obscuring the Human Element | 175 |
Complaint Is Not Enough | 199 |
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