Who Owns the Future? (47 page)

But this is a book of hypotheticals, speculation, advocacy, and the invocation of hope, so why not imagine a thousand top engineers deciding to work together to preserve middle classes and democracy in information economies?

Maybe we’d have one of our typically weird meetings at a quirky, neutral location. There would be popcorn and robots.

We would come up with something along the lines of what was proposed in the “space elevator pitch.” We would just do this, without waiting for approval. The management at the various companies would just have to deal with it.

We’d congratulate ourselves for saving the world again, and then order a truckload of espresso and pizza and program something like a tattoo-creating robot overnight. We’d go to bed the next morning, perhaps sore from our fresh robot-applied tattoos, but also ready to sleep very well, knowing that we had not put tattoo artists out of work.

Startups

It happens almost every day. I get a pitch from someone with a startup that hopes to create a humanistic economy out of a little seed. A tiny website with no financing, but just the right design at just the right time, just might grow the way Facebook did, changing the world. It might be something like a social network where people are encouraged to pay each other for contributions from the start.

I don’t read these, because I’m not in the startup game these days, and am doing research within the labs of one of the big companies, so it would really not be appropriate. But also, while it’s perhaps not an impossible way to make progress, it is probably the hardest way.

A humanistic-economy startup would have to become a Siren Server in order to gain the clout to curb what Siren Servers do. If someone can pull it off, I’ll cheer, but it’s an intrinsically self-contradictory plan.

That’s not to say there’s no role for startups that are compatible with humanistic computing ideals. Kickstarter is an example brought up earlier. Maybe a startup can introduce a new template for personal activity that can evolve to have the key benefits of a job even though it isn’t called a job. Kickstarter, Etsy, ancient eBay, and similar efforts are legitimate baby steps in that direction. (For that matter, so was Second Life, the now-somewhat-stale virtual world service in which people created, bought, and sold virtual stuff.) Such efforts are in harmony with the principles of humanistic computing.

Even if Kickstarter becomes superhuge, however, even big like an Apple, it probably wouldn’t become big enough to compensate for the jobs to be lost to self-driving vehicles and automated manufacturing and resource extraction. It might be one of those paths that could work out well if only we had more time than we do. There has to be a phase change in the whole economy.

The notion that bottom-up change is the only kind of change tends to feed into the problems a humanistic economy would hopefully
correct. The reason why is that it’s dishonest. It is never true that there is no top-down component to power and influence. Those who cling to the hope that power can be made simple only blind themselves to the latest forms of top-down power.

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. In the old days, that might have been a communist party. 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. A Linux always makes a Google.

The only way to create a distribution of clout on a digital network that isn’t overly centralized, so that middle classes and a maximally competitive marketplace can exist, is to be honest about the existence of top-down dynamics from the start. Putting oneself into a childlike position is only an invitation to someone else to play the parent.

That said, a startup-driven scenario is not absolutely impossible. A new startup could conceivably gain more clout than Facebook, and then stay true to its original intent, goading a critical mass of other, older Siren Servers into a new, humanistic phase of activity.

The startup experience is wonderful. I am grateful that I have been able to start companies, and I wish everyone could. If you have a passion to try the startup game, go for it, especially if you don’t have children yet. You might get rich, but probably not. You’ll learn a great deal, including how hard you can push yourself.

So if you have a startup idea that might help, don’t let me discourage you—but also don’t send me your business plan.

We should, however, be thinking at least partially in a top-down way about making sure that the information that should be monetized is monetized. This might rub a lot of people the wrong way; bottom-up, self-organizing dynamics are so trendy. But while
accounting
can happen locally between individuals,
finance
relies
on some rather boring agreements about conventions on a global, top-down basis. If you repudiate that way of thinking, you make it a lot harder to build up the replacements for the failing levees of the middle class.

Traditional Governments, Central Banks, etc.

It’s hard not to be trapped in one’s historical moment. The moment during which I’m writing is one in which central banks are not universally trusted, to say the least, and the very idea of government has become a burden to be tolerated but mostly scorned. And yet in my parents’ generation, government in the United States created Social Security, went to the moon, and built the Interstate Highway System. It’s highly unlikely the unity of systems we call the Internet would have come into existence without government leadership. Governments lately seem timid, beleaguered, and incompetent to keep up with the times. The very thought of regulators keeping up with Silicon Valley or the latest schemes in networked finance! Good luck with that.

Maybe someday government will come back. If and when that happens, then ideas related to those I am sketching here might be expressed in petitions to government, and those petitions might elicit effective action.

Maybe government will never come back. Maybe the power of digital networks is so great that traditional politics can no longer retain its former status. Maybe network tech and finance companies will from here on out be too international, too sophisticated, and too engrained in the affairs of everyone for governments to be able to figure out how to regulate them.

So maybe government gets left behind. Maybe from here on out, the race for Siren Servers might create the new history that matters, and political rights for typical people will only be won by wrestling with whoever gains control of the top servers.

There’s a romance in that future, especially for hackers, and it seems to be the future most envisioned in techie culture. It comes up in science fiction constantly: The hacker as hero, outwitting the
villain’s computer security. But what a crummy world that would be, where screwing up something online is the last chance at being human and free. A good world is one where there’s meaning outside of sabotage. Surely it isn’t overly utopian to seek that modest virtue in our future.

But then again, maybe government’s underdog days are temporary. We live in anomalous times in more than one way. Age waves are overtaking most of the developed world. Good medicine means a lot of old people, who get cranky and control a lot of wealth and votes. Good medicine yields a golden age for the crankiest pundits and politicians.

Not only that, but the immigration waves enabled by modernity have resulted in ethnic shifts in many of the same places with the fastest-growing populations of old people. That’s a recipe for universally nutty politics. The window to remake the digital world might only open as the baby boomers, and even me and my dizzy compatriots of “Generation X,” die off. Politics and economics might be reborn around the middle of this century once we, and probably also the “Facebook generation,” get out of the way.

My primary plea to future technocrats is, please be experimental, patient, nonideological, and slow-moving enough to learn lessons. Find your excitement somewhere other than in manipulating the nature of the economy. The economy is one of those things, like health, that should usually be reliable, constant, and boring.

Multiplicities of Siren Servers

How many Siren Servers are there at present? My sense is that there are many dozens of unavoidable ones, plus thousands of others that will touch your life on occasion. There are perhaps ten that an average person knowingly interacts with directly and frequently, such as Facebook. There are about twice that many in finance, “big data marketing research,” and health care that impose a direct influence on most people’s lives; many of them are almost unknown to the world at large. There are also the major national intelligence services, illicit efforts, and nonprofit hubs.

Is it possible that this number could increase vastly in the future? If there were many thousands of Siren Servers, it would not create a middle class, but it might at least create an extended persistent upper class that would create enough of a service economy to support a middle class doing things that won’t become software-mediated.

But another possibility is that there could be tens of millions of Siren Servers, or maybe even more. A sufficient number of them would create a middle class. At present, this is not how networks seem to be evolving. The big Siren Servers nurture but demonetize niches for small-scale information hubs routinely.

Small policy changes might reverse this trend and create tens of millions of micro spy agencies. For instance, it could become illegal to record information about more than one hundred people on the basis of click-through agreements without direct negotiation for financial compensation to the people whose data is stored. Intermediaries would appear to negotiate data fees.

Suddenly small players, like tiny publishers or record labels, or in the future, esoteric 3D product design houses, would become valuable. That is one imaginable way to get to a humanistic information economy. Perhaps there will be an experiment someday so we can learn whether this path is navigable.

The primary path I promote, however, is to support commercial rights for individuals, not servers. Individuals can always form into groups to create risk and investment pools, but economic designs based primarily on supporting nonpersons will tend to create gaps that people fall through. Making the individual human the bearer of economic rights both preserves the most options and avoids the most pitfalls.

Facebook or Similar

What’s Facebook going to do when it grows up? What if it prioritized peer-to-peer commerce? Maybe Facebook could become the seed of a humanistic information economy. That would certainly create the potential for more revenue than advertising by itself.

Is it not pathetic that the big consumer cloud companies have to compete for approximately the same customers with approximately the same product? All the cloud companies are chasing the same batch of potential so-called advertisers.

Facebook and Google have wildly different products and competencies. Why should they have to compete with one another directly?

If advertising is to be the dominant business that earns profits online, then our horizons are limited. As more and more activities become dominated by cloud software, there will be fewer pre-networked products left to advertise. For the moment we advertise physical computers, phones, and tablets, for instance. Someday, however, these items might be spit out of 3D home printers running off of open designs coming from the cloud. Then there would be no company left in the loop to pay for the ads.

Why must Google, Facebook, and the rest face a long-term future of fighting over the same limited—and ultimately diminishing—pie?

Facebook ought to be well motivated to find ways to grow the economy. Only a single person controls the company, so the means is present to overcome resistance from scaredy-cats on the board or among shareholders.

A big enough Siren Server might at least serve as the seed of a humanistic information economy. That’s not to say any single big company will be big enough to change the world, but it might lead the way.

Confederacies of Just a Few Giant Siren Servers

The digital world has become remarkably consolidated. While the networking plane is often portrayed as a great wilderness of teeming, mysterious activities, it is actually mostly supervised by a small number of companies. (Even the startups that get anywhere tend to be funded by the same old small club of venture capitalists, and hope to be bought eventually by one of the few big companies.)

These companies are sometimes at each other’s throats, though
not always. Despite the real tensions, all the companies also maintain friendly relationships and coordinate from time to time. Almost all the Siren Servers are dependent on each other in various ways.

Had this book been written decades ago, when digital networking was still only a theory, then this next fantasy would have called for a smoke-filled room. Today it will instead be set in a clear-aired conference room at a fancy golf resort by the sea. The CEOs of the biggest network companies will sit at the big table, with lawyers and underlings seated along the walls, furiously taking notes. The chiefs of the big Silicon Valley companies will be there, along with the heads of the biggest network-oriented finance ventures.

The CEOs will gather at the golf resort and talk about a core financial problem: In the long term the economy will start to shrink if they keep on making it “efficient” only from the point of view of central servers. At the end of that line there will eventually be too little economy to support even CEOs. How about instead growing the economy?