Who Owns the Future?
Read Who Owns the Future? Online
Authors: Jaron Lanier
Tags: #Future Studies, #Social Science, #Computers, #General, #E-Commerce, #Internet, #Business & Economics
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Contents
Hello, Hero
Terms
First Round
1. Motivation
The Problem in Brief
Put Up or Shut Up
Moore’s Law Changes the Way People Are Valued
Essential but Worthless
The Beach at the Edge of Moore’s Law
The Price of Heaven
The Problem Is Not the Technology, but the Way We Think About the Technology
Saving the Winners from Themselves
Progress Is Compulsory
Progress Is Never Free of Politics
Back to the Beach
2. A Simple Idea
Just Blurt the Idea Out
A Simple Example
Big Talk, I Know . . .
FIRST INTERLUDE: ANCIENT ANTICIPATION OF THE SINGULARITY
Aristotle Frets
Do People Deserve to Be Paid if They Aren’t Miserable?
The Plot
The Cybernetic Tempest
3. Money as Seen Through One Computer Scientist’s Eyes
Money, God, and the Old Technology of Forgetting
The Information Technology of Optimism
4. The Ad Hoc Construction of Mass Dignity
Are Middle Classes Natural?
Two Familiar Distributions
Tweaks to Network Design Can Change Distributions of Outcomes
Letting Bell Curves Be Bell Curves
Star Systems Starve Themselves; Bell Curves Renew Themselves
An Artificial Bell Curve Made of Levees
The Senseless Ideal of a Perfectly Pure Market
Income Is Different from Wealth
The Taste of Politics
Drove My Chevy to the Levee but the Levee Was Dry
How Is Music like a Mortgage?
5. “Siren Servers”
There Can’t Be Complexity Without Ambiguity
A First Pass at a Definition
Where Sirens Beckon
6. The Specter of the Perfect Investment
Our Free Lunch
Candy
Radiant Risk
You Can’t See as Much of the Server as It Can See of You
Waiting for Robin Hood
From Autocollate to Autocollude
Rupture
7. Some Pioneering Siren Servers
My Little Window
Wal-Mart Considered as Software
From the Supply Chain’s Point of View
From the Customer’s Point of View
Financial Siren Servers
SECOND INTERLUDE (A PARODY): IF LIFE GIVES YOU EULAS, MAKE LEMONADE
How This Century Might Unfold, from Two Points of View
8. From Below: Mass Unemployment Events
Will There Be Manufacturing Jobs?
Napsterizing the Teamsters
Flattening the City on a Hill
Factoring the City on a Hill
Education in the Abstract Is Not Enough
The Robotic Bedpan
A Pharma Fable That Might Unfold Later in This Century
9. From Above: Misusing Big Data to Become Ridiculous
Three Nerds Walk into a Bar . . .
Your Lack of Privacy Is Someone Else’s Wealth
Big Data in Science
A Method in Waiting
Wise or Feared?
The Nature of Big Data Defies Intuition
The Problem with Magic
Game On
The Kicker
The Nature of Our Confusion
The Most Elite Naïveté
THIRD INTERLUDE: MODERNITY CONCEIVES THE FUTURE
Mapping Out Where the Conversation Can Go
Nine Dismal Humors of Futurism, and a Hopeful One
Meaning as Nostalgia
Can We Handle Our Own Power?
The First High-Tech Writer
Meaning in Struggle
Practical Optimism
Markets, Energy Landscapes, and Narcissism
10. Markets and Energy Landscapes
The Technology of Ambient Cheating
Imaginary Landscapes in the Clouds
Markets as Landscapes
Experimentalism and Popular Perception
Keynes Considered as a Big Data Pioneer
11. Narcissism
The Insanity of the Local/Global Flip
Siren Servers Think the World Is All About Them
FOURTH INTERLUDE: LIMITS ARE FOR MUGGLES
The Endless Conversation About the Heart Cartel
The Deadly Risk of Not Being a Shapeshifter
The First Musical “Any”
Climb Any “Any”
The Contest to Be Most Meta
12. Story Lost
Not All Is Chaos
The Conservation of Free Will
13. Coercion on Autopilot: Specialized Network Effects
Rewarding and Punishing Network Effects
For Every Carrot a Stick
Denial of Service
Arm’s-Length Blackmail
Who’s the Customer and Who Are All Those Other People?
14. Obscuring the Human Element
Noticing the New Order
Who Orders the Data?
The Human Shell Game
15. Story Found
The First Act Is Autocatalytic
Since You Asked
Why the Networked World Seems Chaotic
When Are Siren Servers Monopolies?
Free Rise
Make Others Pay for Entropy
Bills Are Boring
Coattails
The Closing Act
Stories Are Nothing Without Ideas
FIFTH INTERLUDE: THE WISE OLD MAN IN THE CLOUDS
The Limits of Emergence as an Explanation
The Global Triumph of Turing’s Humor
Digital and Pre-digital Theocracy
What Is Experience?
Democracy
16. Complaint Is Not Enough
Governments Are Learning the Tricks of Siren Servers
Alienating the Global Village
Electoral Siren Servers
Maybe the Way We Complain Is Part of the Problem
17. Clout Must Underlie Rights, if Rights Are to Persist
Melodramas Are Tenacious
Emphasizing the Middle Class Is in the Interests of Everyone
A Better Peak Waiting to Be Discovered
SIXTH INTERLUDE: THE POCKET PROTECTOR IN THE SAFFRON ROBE
The Most Ancient Marketing
Monks and Nerds (or, Chip Monks)
It’s All About I
“Abundance” Evolves
Childhood and Apocalypse
Ted Nelson
18. First Thought, Best Thought
First Thought
Best Thought
The Right to Mash-up Is Not the Same as the Right to Copy
Two-Way Links
Why Isn’t Ted Better Known?
The Dirty Pictures (or, Nuts and Bolts: What a Humanistic Alternative Might Be Like)
19. The Project
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