Who Owns the Future?

Jaron Lanier

Simon and Schuster, Mar 4, 2014 - Business & Economics - 396 pages

The “brilliant” and “daringly original” (The New York Times) critique of digital networks from the “David Foster Wallace of tech” (London Evening Standard)—asserting that to fix our economy, we must fix our information economy.

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.

What people are saying

LibraryThing Review

User Review  - Paul_S - LibraryThing

I'm sympathetic to the author's complaints but the central idea of a utopian future that runs on microtransations paid to everyone based on the fact the they are alive and generate data is full of ...

LibraryThing Review

User Review  - dcunning11235 - LibraryThing

This book is a little hard to judge. It does not really break new ground (promoting micro-payments, ownership of your own data; pointing out the true bargain we make when we "get" things for "free ...

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
• Siren Servers: 53
• The Specter of the Perfect Investment: 59
• 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
• 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
• How Will We Earn and Spend?: 269
• Risk: 277
• Financial Identity: 283
• Inclusion: 291
• Creepy: 305
• A Stab at Mitigating Creepiness: 317
• liMits Are For MortAls: 325
• Transition: 335
• Leadership: 341
• the FAte oF books: 352
• What Is It About a Book That Is Worth Saving?: 358
• Afterword to the Paperback Edition: 369
• First Appearances of Key Terms: 381
• Index: 391

About the author

Jaron Lanier is a scientist and musician best known for his work in Virtual Reality research, a term he coined and popularized. Time named him one of the “Time 100” in 2010. He lives in Berkeley, California.

Bibliographic information

• Title: Who Owns the Future?
• Author: Jaron Lanier
• Edition: illustrated, reprint
• Publisher: Simon and Schuster, 2014
• ISBN: 1451654979, 9781451654974
• Length: 396 pages
• Subjects: Business & Economics / E-Commerce / General; Computers / Internet / General; Social Science / Future Studies