

Jaron Lanier: Free information, as great as it sounds, will enslave us all - gamechangr
http://qz.com/87795/free-information-as-great-as-it-sounds-will-enslave-us-all/

======
onemorepassword
Lanier would like to make a living as a musician the old-fashioned way, by
selling albums through the music industry.

Since the copyright-exploitation industry has been under threat he has cobbled
together all kinds of far fetched "visionary" theories as to why we should go
back to the way things were, or else there will be doom.

Never at any point has he come up with a solution, or even a direction in
which to look for a solution. Or at least anything that can be taken
seriously:

 _"But what if you were owed money for the use of information that exists
because you exist? This is what accountants and lawyers are for."_

That's the logic of an 8-year old. Basically his entire vision comes down to
"we are doomed, and the only way to save us is to artificially re-create
scarcity, but fuck if I know how".

The robotic surgery example (which has fuck all to do with free and open
information) shows how sickeningly selfish that is. We may be able to live
without musicians, but people are fucking dying because of shortage of
surgeons. But Mr. Lanier prefers a world in which surgeons are, like himself
of course, part of a well-paid and taken care of middle class, and fuck
everyone else.

~~~
josh2600
Wow, that's not at all what Jaron is talking about, at least from my
perspective.

His argument is for an aggregate middle class that outspends the elite because
without a large middle class there is no Market. His conjectures are much less
about building an elite plutocracy as they are about maintaining a strong
middle class to support robust economic growth.

In fact, the book specifically says that what happened to musicians can, and
will, happen to other sectors of society, specifically spelling out how
surgeons may be replaced eventually by robotics.

The argument is not against technical evolution, but rather against a spying
society. The headline, as is usual for QZ, is inflammatory, and people like to
grab onto Jaron's most flamboyant statements because of how he looks, but his
ideas are a lot more reasonable than your post makes them out to be.

In short, I don't agree with what Jaron says, but his points are about the
growth of a middle class that he sees as an artificial construct, but one that
modern society cannot function without.

TL;DR: Jaron says some crazy shit, but he's mostly arguing for a robust middle
class. See his repetitive mentions of Henry Ford making cars affordable for
his factory workers.

~~~
onemorepassword
To me, Jaron's arguing for a robust middle class seems more like an
opportunistic smoke screen than the actual core of his argument.

Especially if you look at his utterings from the point where he first "turned
against the internet" (he used to actually see piracy as good thing!), which
initially solely consisted of ranting against piracy and anonymity. It was
only later that he came up with grander social theories to justify his rants.

Yes, the man is smart enough (certainly smarter than me) to identify some
actual social and economic problems caused by the free flow of information.

But he's not interested in constructive solutions, because he the solution he
has in mind was his starting point: re-establish the reign of copyright,
abolish anonymity and stop the free flow of information.

And of course, micropayments to make sure he gets his share. It's funny how it
always comes down to that one solution: hardwire micropayments into
everything.

Does that sound like something that will solve the "surgeons replaced by
robots" problem, or any of the myriad of other jobs replaced by technology, or
just _his_ personal problem?

~~~
josh2600
But hardwiring micropayments would probably be an equitable distribution of
wealth, at least more so than what we do now. And it resolves the privacy
concern; if I can pay you for access to your information and I want it, I can,
but if you price your information beyond what I'm willing to pay you get
privacy.

That sort of system of consent for spying is one potential equitable way to
distribute wealth.

The most quixotic thing about Jaron is that stance on copying, because you can
tell from an engineering perspective it still vexes him. His viewpoint is that
when someone "copies" something over a network, you're not actually copying as
there's only one logical copy (Apps in iTunes all deploy from one master copy,
there aren't 500Million individual copies of the Facebook app, there's one app
and 500Million caches) but that's playing with semantics as far as I can tell.
I believe Jaron still wants to enter a socialist utopia, but only if we can
all go at once instead of just the rich folk.

Again, I don't necessarily agree with what he has to say BUT I do want to help
clarify his arguments, because I think they're worth exploring.

------
stephengillie
This article starts with the wrong question:

 _Who will earn wealth?_

This goes back to PG's Wealth essay[1] -- his _daddy view of wealth_ , where
wealth is something finite, and we as a society must share it. This is
incorrect, for wealth isn't a _thing_ , it's a _large amount of something
else_.

Wealth is what we create when we build and improve things. Your house is a
wealth of shelter, and the improvements you've made to it (such as fresh
paint, landscaping, and heat), relative to other houses, show your wealth
relative to other houseowners.

Money is just an exchanger of wealth -- something we trade with others to
facilitate the transfer of wealth from others to ourselves. We earn money by
transferring some of our wealth to others, and usually we draw from our
_wealth of time_.

Humans don't need money to survive, so long as they grow their own food and
build their own shelters, or have robots do this for them. And humans don't
need to buy robots if we can 3d print them. And have solar or other personal
power generation facilities on our own land.

 _Who will create wealth?_

Those are the big winners who strike gold on Kickstarter and Youtube. They
didn't win because they were "luckier" than us, they won because they were
literally _better than the rest of us_ at what they do.

We'll download and print new clothes each day. Who will design them? Who will
design new buildings for the robots to build? Who gives robots purpose? For
now, humans.

I'm more concerned about the Butlerian Jihad[2] than I am concerned with
farming companies hoarding food away from us, which is essentially what the
concern here is about -- if we don't have money, how will we buy food?

[1]<http://www.paulgraham.com/wealth.html>

[2]<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Butlerian_Jihad>

~~~
amouat
> they won because they were literally better than the rest of us at what they
> do

Only if "more popular = better".

~~~
thwarted
Unfortunately, the grandparent didn't emphasize the "at what they do". They
are literally _better at being more popular and figuring out how to get people
to give them money than the rest of us_. This may not be "better" in the
engineering sense, and it may be undesirable in the abstract or ethical sense,
but it is the differentiator that separates them from "the rest of us".

~~~
_greim_
There's a strong chaotic component to mass popularity, so arguably there isn't
even a meritocracy of people who are good at becoming popular, among popular
people.

------
josh2600
I saw Jaron speak last week. My biggest takeaway from his talk was his thought
on asymmetric information relationships.

When you buy something through amazon, you are exposed to the price they think
you should pay (there's some truth to the idea that Amazon varies their price
depending on how much money they think you have to spend). This is an example
of an asymmetrical information relationship.

Amazon has global pricing information and a big data system that they can
leverage to push all of the risk onto local bookstores, but while you can
remove risk from a particular part of a system, that risk is always offloaded
elsewhere. Companies with these big data systems have the ability to push risk
onto the other companies in the system.

The example Jaron uses that is easiest to understand is healthcare,
particularly insurance. Essentially, with enough data, insurance providers can
insure people right to the point of predictable illness and then cut care,
thereby transitioning risk to the public sector. If you look at this situation
from the perspective of the shareholder, that's fucking awesome, but if you
look at it in a larger societal context, the public is paying for the
insurance companies profits.

In short, there's a lot of information asymmetry in the world. This asymmetry
is the new definition of power. Even if you think Jaron is an idiot, this is a
profound point.

------
macavity23
He talks about technology eliminating (some) jobs at the start, which is true
enough, but then there's a strange handwavy bit where people ponying up their
information to bigdata providers makes wealth more concentrated and rots
social mobility.

 _As long as we keep doing things the way we are, every big computer will hide
a crowd of disenfranchised people. In the case of translation, the people are
translators, and in the case of surgery, someday they will be surgeons._

Eh? The tech that's driving surgeon automation is NOT big data, but robotics.
Nothing whatsoever to do with free information, mostly about extremely
expensive information, in fact. And then it gets even more strange as he
starts pushing micropayments as a remedy for this:

 _Just because things have a cost, that does not mean they can’t be
affordable. To demand that things be free is to embrace an eternal place for
poverty. The problem is not cost, but poverty._

Erm, ok. Let's play this through. Let's say that the self-driving car is built
upon the bigdata analysis of lots of publically-gathered location and
environment data from phones. Which it isn't really, but play along. The self-
driving car puts cabbies and truckers out of business and puts them in
poverty.

Now, with this micropayments scheme, the self-driving car company has to pay
the phone users $0.001 each for the use of their data. And this remedies the
situation... how? These itsy bitsy micropayments are going to be spread out
across everyone with a phone, i.e. everyone. They wouldn't be enough to live
on, or probably even buy a sandwich with. Facebook, which seems to me to get
much more valuable data from folks than anyone else, has an ARPU of $4. Four
bucks a month, per user. Let's be generous, say we can get folks ten times
that. What exactly is $40 a month going to fix? Barely covers your broadband
bill!

~~~
iSnow
>What exactly is $40 a month going to fix? Just for the sake of the argument,
lets say:

\- Facebook

\- Google

\- Microsoft

\- YouTube

\- Twitter

\- Pinterest

\- Good old Gov't

\- Medical insurance

\- Pension funds

=> 9 * 40 = $360 Still not a wage, but nothing to sneeze at.

Not that I believe this is feasible, but it's not just FB collecting massive
data and translating it into revenues.

------
pfortuny
Mine is a short reflection but I crave for the day in which all human beings
will be able to work for free, not for money. And then, they will rediscover
the interest of art, handcraft, music, conversation, philosophy.

The world described by Lanier is very much one in which people can live
without caring about _earning money to survive_ : "subsistence" will be dealt
with by robots.

I see that as a liberation.

Of course there are other problems but solving the 'earn money or otherwise
live as a pariah/die' seems to me interesting.

Work is much more important for man than a mere means of making money, as I
see it. If it is _just_ that (emphasis), then the feeling of slavery must be
great.

Which is probably what a lot of people _nowadays_ feel, sadly.

EDIT: [Just not to look too 'asinine']. Obviously I am aware this is utopian.
Please bear with me. However, the _abstract_ reflection stands as it is.

And, by the way: it is important to realize that what is 'dirty' for some is
'beautiful' for others. Even law enforcement and (I've lived with one) even
'Administrative Law'. Yes, even pig-herding and trash-cleaning can be seen as
'liberating' works.

It is not what you do: it is what you aim to.

~~~
ScottWhigham
_Mine is a short reflection but I crave for the day in which all human beings
will be able to work for free, not for money._

That's just never, ever going to happen. Never. No one would do the "dirty
jobs" if there was no reward for doing so. Take law enforcement for example.
Sure, everyone would "play detective" for free, or everyone would be the
captain. But who would be the guys who ride in the motorcade to protect a
child rapist while he rides to prison? No one would do it "for free". There's
too much risk. Who would be a prison guard "for free"? It's absolutely asinine
to think that "technology" will progress to a point at which humans are not
needed for any menial/dirty/dangerous jobs ever.

~~~
pfortuny
Danger is not a deterrent (think of climbers).

Dealing with dirt and feeling it as humiliating is subjective (there are
plenty of satisfied janitors and trash-cleaners out there).

Menial does not necessarily mean 'hideous'. There are plenty of happy nurses
and people working at hospices.

Serving others can be a real motivator.

I edited my post above just to clarify I am no fool on this.

~~~
ScottWhigham
I get it - you're being all "What if..." It's cool. If you keep going and
really think it through, it just breaks down. It breaks down, to pick one of
many situations, at the training point for any job that requires study. Take
boat captains for example. There are millions of "boat captains" who play at
captain on their little 25 foot boat on the weekend. However, to captain a
boat containing 500 cargo containers from Asia to San Franscico - that
requires months or even years of training. Who would go through such training
if the "payoff" only was "I get a free trip to San Franscisco"? Oh sure, maybe
you'd find someone who would do it once a year, twice a year but then what?
Cargo would stop - if you have 10,000 ships laden with 500 cargo containers
leaving Asia every day right now (a guess), where would you find the
volunteers? Who would check their backgrounds? Who would be in charge of
recruiting new volunteers?

It's just never, ever going to be possible. Without some payoff for doing a
"job", people will not do it.

~~~
SupremumLimit
I think you're missing an important factor. Consider how many classes of jobs
can be automated away over the next 50 years. Boat captains can easily be one
of those. Pervasive automation changes the argument, and the fact is, it's
already happening across many industries.

I think it's about time to start thinking about a society where employment is
only available to a small fraction of people. It would be much better to have
a controlled, thought out transition than to deny the possibility until we end
up with mass unemployment.

~~~
dragonwriter
> I think it's about time to start thinking about a society where employment
> is only available to a small fraction of people. It would be much better to
> have a controlled, thought out transition than to deny the possibility until
> we end up with mass unemployment.

The key, as I see it, is to aggressively pursue a more broad distribution of
capital, and to move old age/disability safety net programs (and non-elite
health insurance) away from the premise that those who will need them will be
people whose income is derived largely from labor.

In a sense, this is the "ownership society" that Republicans liked to talk
about around the first term of the second Bush Administration, but the actual
policies that they pushed (which rewarded _current_ holders of capital and
increased the burden on current laborers) were pretty much the exact opposite
of what is needed to get there.

------
scotch_drinker
When I read an article like this, I try to think of any analogous situations
in history and I can't help but think this is similar to a time when,
especially in the South, labor was essentially free. Wealth and land were
largely concentrated in the elite and until the labor was no longer free,
concentrations of wealth continued to increase.

As with all analogies, it's not perfect. No one is forcing us to give up our
information, we're willingly giving it up for free. However, I can see a
future where our data is used in ways we had no intention of allowing and the
people in charge of the "big computers" will exploit that data.

~~~
hga
This must be some new definition of the word free I wasn't previous acquainted
with.

Slaves had a capital cost, and for a healthy young male I've read it wasn't
small. They then had to be provided with food and shelter, and armed
"management". Not sure if it's relevant or not if they got what went for
medical care back then, the Civil War is around when antiseptics were getting
experimented upon and later accepted. But again note the capital cost.

Which ... Paul Johnson? ... pointed out was unique about the American
experience. The 19th century was when slavery and serfdom was technically
abolished in much of the world, but the US was the only place where that loss
of wealth was not compensated, and the country as a whole suffered from the
impoverishment of the South. Then again, a failure to get that right is partly
credited with establishing the conditions that lead to the Russian revolution,
which was done so badly the Bolsheviks were able to coop that and....

So, substitute "cheap" for "free" labor. One step up from that, but a huge one
in principle, was indentured servitude, and today's H-1B visa holders are with
some justice often compared to the indentured servants of old.

As you note coercion is not implicated today, but I'd note the vast majority
of people don't even realize how much information they're "giving up for
free".

~~~
smacktoward
_Slaves had a capital cost, and for a healthy young male I've read it wasn't
small._

True, but you also got new ones for free when your existing slaves had
children.

 _They then had to be provided with food and shelter_

... which was provided at the absolute minimum level required to keep them
alive. Clapboard shacks and gruel are not exactly expensive.

 _Not sure if it's relevant or not if they got what went for medical care back
then_

Medical care? For serious? Slaves cared for each other more than their owners
cared for them.

 _The 19th century was when slavery and serfdom was technically abolished in
much of the world, but the US was the only place where that loss of wealth was
not compensated, and the country as a whole suffered from the impoverishment
of the South._

Blame the slaveholders for that one. Proposals for compensated emancipation
were routine in the years leading up to the Civil War. But the slaveholders
weren't interested in compromise; they took a hard line against any proposal
that involved emancipation, compensated or no. And when it looked like they
couldn't hold that line any more, they seceded.

~~~
hga
Ask any parent if babies are "free".

Ugly to discuss this in purely economic terms, but there is an obvious
opportunity cost of having a slave woman bear and raise a child to the age
where the latter can start working vs. her just working.

And your argument that they got "the absolute minimum level required to keep
them alive" is in tension with them getting enough to work productively. As I
mentioned in a previous discussion, one of the reasons the Nazis invaded the
Soviet Union was that they couldn't provide enough food to e.g. the coal
miners of the occupied Lowlands:
<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5733372>

------
jedbrown
Technology has been putting people out of work for millennia. In the process,
sometimes it makes new industries (new, but different, jobs), other times it
just makes existing industries leaner and more efficient (fewer jobs, but all
involved have to optimize to compete, and the resources are freed up to create
something new elsewhere). Market forces are never purely to "create jobs",
they are to create new or better products more efficiently. The task of
"creating jobs", regardless of efficiency, falls to politicians.

~~~
kruhft
That's the first time I've seen the top comment on a story starting to 'gray
out' from downvotes.

~~~
kruhft
Looks like I caught it just before the fall :)

------
jerrya
1995, Jeremy Rifkin, The End of Work
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_End_of_Work>

_The End of Work: The Decline of the Global Labor Force and the Dawn of the
Post-Market Era is a non-fiction book by American economist Jeremy Rifkin,
published in 1995 by Putnam Publishing Group.[1]_

 _In 1995, Rifkin contended that worldwide unemployment would increase as
information technology eliminated tens of millions of jobs in the
manufacturing, agricultural and service sectors. He predicted devastating
impact of automation on blue-collar, retail and wholesale employees. While a
small elite of corporate managers and knowledge workers would reap the
benefits of the high-tech world economy, the American middle class would
continue to shrink and the workplace become ever more stressful._

 _As the market economy and public sector decline, Rifkin predicted the growth
of a third sector—voluntary and community-based service organizations—that
would create new jobs with government support to rebuild decaying
neighborhoods and provide social services. To finance this enterprise, he
advocated scaling down the military budget, enacting a value added tax on
nonessential goods and services and redirecting federal and state funds to
provide a "social wage" in lieu of welfare payments to third-sector workers_

------
desireco42
I am reading his book at the moment. While he brings a lot of good points, I
don't think he is correct. His criticism is spot on, there will be a lot of
turbulence and not everyone will be able to get a job. But I don't think
solution would be what he is suggesting that we get paid for information.

Here is why I think that: when you are required to licence and pay for every
little piece of info, it is like licensing pics on site, it makes it extra
work just to get everything right, make sure you read all the licences etc. I
think this creates barrier and business tends to flow where there are less
barriers, and freer flow of information would be more likely to became a norm.

------
ideonexus
I appreciate what Lanier is trying to communicate here, but I think he's
confusing the issue by trying to tie "free information" into it instead of
focusing on what the real concern should be, automation. As programmers, we
make it our job to automate people out of employment, replace doctors with
Watsons, lawyers with search algorithms, and various clerks and cashiers with
ATMs, automated checkouts, and online shopping.

There is nothing villainous in automation. Automation is of great benefit to
civilization and makes our lives easier, but it's also moving us into a "post-
scarcity" society. We live in an economy that is a mix of capitalism and
socialism, with the capitalism driving growth and the socialism providing a
safety net, but the capitalism side demands scarcity to thrive. If automation
increases unemployment without generating new jobs, our economy and cultural
norms will need to undergo a paradigm shift, or wealth and power will be
concentrated to the detriment of the majority of people without it.

A much better book on these realities is "Race Against the Machine," which
focuses just on the issue of automation without bringing these spurious claims
that "free information" is the culprit:

<http://mxplx.com/reference/547/>

~~~
betterunix
"As programmers, we make it our job to automate people out of employment"

This is a Luddite view: you are focusing on the particular form of employment
that is made obsolete, while ignoring the bigger picture. Automation puts
_some_ people out of work. It also creates jobs for others.

This will not change until we create machines that can not only repair
themselves, but also design better versions of themselves. We still need
people just to keep software systems running -- if even our software, which is
supposedly automating people out of work, needs constant attention from people
to keep it in a sane state, what sort of automation do you think is putting us
into a post-scarcity society (rather than simply shifting the scarcity
around)?

~~~
ideonexus
"This is a Luddite view"

No it isn't. I finely articulated my argument and you chose to focus on one
sentence of my post out of context to make my position appear extreme. I agree
that automation tends to create jobs, but that is not a law of nature. The
combustion engine didn't create more jobs for horses, it dramatically cut
their populations. In 1915 there were 21 million domestic horses in America,
by 1960 there were 3 million because they were automated out of existence and
only remain for recreational use.

<http://answers.google.com/answers/threadview?id=144565>

Now let's take one of Lanier's examples:

"Here’s a current example of the challenge we face... At the height of its
power, the photography company Kodak employed more than 140,000 people and was
worth $28 billion. They even invented the first digital camera. But today
Kodak is bankrupt, and the new face of digital photography has become
Instagram. When Instagram was sold to Facebook for a billion dollars in 2012,
it employed only 13 people. Where did all those jobs disappear? And what
happened to the wealth that all those middle-class jobs created?"

So my honest question is this: How did digital photography, which put 140,000
people out of work and, as Yahoo's CEO correctly notes, eliminated the
business of professional photography, create more jobs than it eliminated? How
does an ATM machine, which replaces a dozen bank tellers, create more jobs
than it eliminates? How does a shopping website, which eliminates a dozen
local small businesses, create more jobs than it eliminates?

I want to believe this is all going to turn out okay, but I'm also watching
private companies making record profits and the stock market shooting for the
moon while unemployment numbers remain unchanged. I don't know how we are
going to correct this or if our worldviews will allow us to even consider it a
problem. We can't just dismiss anyone who points out these market shifts as a
"luddite" and move on.

~~~
betterunix
"How did digital photography, which put 140,000 people out of work and, as
Yahoo's CEO correctly notes, eliminated the business of professional
photography, create more jobs than it eliminated?"

It put 140k _involved in the film photography industry_ out of work. We
_still_ have professional photographers (now using digital cameras), and the
demand for CCDs and technologies related to digital photography created jobs
in the semiconductor industry. The uses of digital photographs for online
businesses (like Facebook) has helped to create jobs in that industry. Many
people switched to GMail because of the large amount of mail storage it
offers, in part because of the space that high-resolution digital images
require -- and thus many jobs at Google have resulted. Think of all the people
who had to work to expand network capacities, expand storage capacities, and
the various services involved with that, to meet the demand of people who send
and receive digital photos and videos. A text-only Internet, or an Internet
where the only graphics were cartoons, would not have required nearly as much
capacity as today's Internet requires, nor would a cell phone network that
only carries voice calls or sends text messages.

Digital cameras are not just film camera replacements. A digital camera
enables ways of using photos and videos that were substantially harder (or
even impossible) with film. You cannot truly believe that something like
Youtube would have become popular if people did not have an easy way to record
and upload videos. You cannot believe that Facebook would have been a hit if
people did not have an easy way to take their own picture.

"How does a shopping website, which eliminates a dozen local small businesses,
create more jobs than it eliminates?"

Who packs the site's shipments into boxes and onto trucks? Who builds the
site's computers? Who mines the silicon and rare earths used to make those
computers? Who maintains the communications systems that enable you to buy
things online?

This argument is no different from stage coach drivers who complained about
how railroads were killing their business. It is the argument the Luddites
made when they smashed industrial equipment.

"I want to believe this is all going to turn out okay, but I'm also watching
private companies making record profits and the stock market shooting for the
moon while unemployment numbers remain unchanged."

Much like the unemployment of blacksmiths. If people lack the skills needed
for this day and age -- if they do not know how to use computers effectively
or competitively -- then of course they are going to be unemployed. The
unemployment rate for programmers and computer scientists is about one-fifth
that of the general population. People need computer programmers, not film
photographers or local shop keepers.

Look, I am all for criticizing capitalism, but your criticisms are all wrong.
You are complaining about the progress of technology. You are complaining
about the fact that I can record a video of the local cops beating up a black
guy and within minutes have the rest of the world seeing what I see. Why not
instead ask this: why, when new technology doubles the productivity of a
single person, do we double our expectations of what that person can do? If
one person can do as much as two people, why do we fire half the work force,
instead of halving the number of hours we expect people to work? I am not
saying this is necessarily a solution, but it is a better question to ask
than, "Where did all those Kodak jobs go?"

------
wheaties
In the industrial age people argued the same thing about factories and all the
factory workers. This is the dawn of the information age, look what we're
arguing about and look how history has shown us this isn't the problem we
think it is.

~~~
JamesArgo
Don't draw lines through one data point. We have no idea which features of
economic disruptions of this scale are general and which are incidental. What
we do know is a large, prosperous middle class is a historical aberration. It
also seems that automation has little in common with mechanization, because
automation replaces mental labor. It is not obvious that new industries will
create more employees than they replace. Perhaps new industries will advance
in lock-step with new automation systems. Gregory Clark compares the modern
worker not to farmers before the industrial revolution, but to horses before
the widespread adoption of the car. The 'wages' of the workhorses fell below
subsistence level. Perhaps the wages of people will, too.

------
philhippus
The free market is running its course. If someone were to create a facebook
that pays its users for every bit of info that they upload about themselves,
would it reach the same level of popularity? That would depend on social
factors and how much a user can earn. I do know that "paid to post" online
forums are soulless places with very little actual engagement between users,
which is not the case with the facebooks of the world. There does seem to be a
perceived trade-off in the social networks; you receive information about your
peers for free in return for the information you give up about yourself.

------
physicslover
Lanier sounds like the anti-Kurzweil. Like others, I find his vision of the
future too pessimistic and his proposed solution not workable.

He rightly raises concerns about how our roles/jobs/lives will change in the
future.

But, I am much more bullish with developments like decentralized currencies,
micro loans and other new banking models, advances in clean energy technology,
and possibly even remote space colonies in the not too far distant future.

In this future, I imagine more opportunities for individuals.

------
clavalle
>A monetized information economy will create a strong middle class out of
information sharing

That is quite a thesis. In reality, however, if everyone starts charging
companies in currency to collect information, only the Big Companies will be
able to afford it, exacerbating the problem Lanier rails against.

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gamechangr
Great point, hopefully there can be some sort of combination or limited way to
start to pay for "likes" using FB as an example

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Clotho
Most of the information is voluntarily given and money is worthless in the
hands of a very few. In the foreseable future someone will draw users with
some kind of financial compensation and things will swing back the other way.

I really dislike it when 'visionaries' declare doom at a period's inception.

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yarrel
Buy his album, people.

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dsr_
This. Lanier is making provocative statements in order to get attention for
his book. Whether or not these positions are sincere, I have no idea. It
smells like advertising.

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toretore
He's got a book. Not it all makes sense, the weird things he's writing. I
couldn't understand it before, because none of it made any sense on its own.

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websitescenes
I thought this was a provocative read. I like looking at big picture concepts
and theories. I have had similar concerns but am still a firm believer in free
information. But I am reconsidering the parameters of this relationship.

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gamechangr
I posted this article. You echoed how I feel. Karma point to u!

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base698
Free information is mentioned by title all over, but he describes only the
most constrained examples. There is no mention of p2p networks that could
provide alternatives to the behemoths of today.

