
The Local-global Flip, Or, "the Lanier Effect" - jamesbritt
http://edge.org/conversation/the-local-global-flip
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joebadmo
Lanier is fascinating to me in that his perspective seems so far askew from my
own that the exercise of even trying to understand what he's saying is
necessarily broadening.

 _If you had talked to anyone involved in it twenty years ago, everyone would
have said that the ability for people to inexpensively have access to a
tremendous global computation and networking facility ought to create wealth.
This ought to create wellbeing; this ought to create this incredible expansion
in just people living decently, and in personal liberty. And indeed, some of
that's happened. Yet if you look at the big picture, it obviously isn't
happening enough, if it's happening at all._

Is he really questioning whether the internet has created wealth?

His whole section on automated cars is well trodden (as he notes, since
Aristotle) and his position basically seems to land on Ludditism.

 _Because in every example in which there have been very large numbers of
people who were just taken care of by a society, it eventually breaks._

But we've also never really had a society that had that much excess labor
before, have we?

I also think he misrepresents the current convservative stance. It's not
"Don't you dare support my dialysis, don't you dare support my nursing home
expenses! That reduces my liberty! I need my freedom and my options." It's
more like: "don't take my money, I'll spend however much I need to and that
will align incentives in the most efficient way to provide the optimal
outcomes." (Not that I agree with that, necessarily, I just object to the
mischaracterization.)

He also sets up a false dichotomy between liberty of expression and economic
prosperity which I don't really understand.

 _To me, a lot of the culture of youth seems to be using the Internet as a
form of denialism about their reduced prospects. They're like, "Well, sure we
can't get a job and we need to live with our parents, but we can tweet", or
something. "Let us tweet!"_

I mean, I guess I sort of recognize the phenomenon, but I don't think internet
use has a causal relationship with economic prospects. We would be using the
internet, and we would be proponents of internet freedom regardless of our job
prospects. (Note: I am employed, married, and live in my 'own' house.)

The meat of the post seems to be his ideas on people selling their
information. They're interesting, and I empathize with his desire to keep the
middle class alive, but I'm not sure how this works.

 _Google has done something that might even be more destructive of the middle
class, which is they've said, "Well, since Moore's law makes computation
really cheap, let's just give away the computation, but keep the data." And
that's a disaster.

What's happened now is that we've created this new regimen where the bigger
your computer servers are, the more smart mathematicians you have working for
you, and the more connected you are, the more powerful and rich you are.
(Unless you own an oil field, which is the old way.) II benefit from it
because I'm close to the big servers, but basically wealth is measured by how
close you are to one of the big servers, and the servers have started to act
like private spying agencies, essentially.

With Google, or with Facebook, if they can ever figure out how to steal some
of Google's business, there's this notion that you get all of this stuff for
free, except somebody else owns the data, and they use the data to sell access
to you, and the ability to manipulate you, to third parties that you don't
necessarily get to know about. The third parties tend to be kind of tawdry._

But the kind of information he's talking about, stuff about me, my interests,
and my browsing habits, are all basically worthless to me. I can't do anything
with that information. But when Google aggregates that information with
everyone else's it becomes hugely useful, and worth a ton of money. That's a
bunch of wealth they created. From nothing. And what do they do with that
wealth? They make amazing things that make the world better for everyone. It
seems obtuse not to see that.

 _It's funny to say that because I'll often get a lot of pushback and they'll
say, "No, no, no. There are all these people who are being empowered by all
this stuff on the Internet that's free", and I'll say, "Well, show me. Where's
all the wealth? Where's the new middle class of people who are doing this?"
They don't exist. They just aren't there. We're losing the middle class, and
we should be saving it. We should be strengthening it._

See above.

I agree that this seems to have a concentrative effect on power, i.e. the rich
(Google engineers, financial sector, and the like) get more, the middle class
get poorer. But I'm not sure his prescription, Ted Nelson's "marketplace of
ideas" is viable.

Don't get me wrong, I'd be the first in line to try to make a living from my
"head and heart," but I don't believe it works.

His idea for a car with a better UI instead of a driverless car sounds _a lot_
like a horseless carriage vs. a car.

 _If we enter into the kind of world that Google likes, the world that Google
wants, it's a world where information is copied so much on the Internet that
nobody knows where it came from anymore, so there can't be any rights of
authorship. However, you need a big search engine to even figure out what it
is or find it. They want a lot of chaos that they can have an ability to
undo._

I disagree with this premise. Google wants maximum idea _generation_ for this
reason, not maximum copying. I don't think people care about authorship.
People care about getting the correct idea. And Google is better when the
ideaspace is larger. Copying is irrelevant.

 _It should be pointed out that the original design of the Internet didn't
have even a copy function, because it originally just seemed stupid. If you
have a network, why would you copy something? That's just inefficiency. I'm
convinced the reason copying happened on the Internet was because Xerox PARC
was so important as an early supporter of computers, that for Alan Kay to go
to the Xerox people and say, "Oh, by the way, copying itself, even in the
abstract will become obsolete because of computer networks", would have just
blown their minds. We ended up with copying on a network.

But anyway, when you have copying on a network, you throw out information
because you lose the provenance, and then you need a search engine to figure
it out again. That's part of why Google can exist. Ah, the perversity of it
all just gets to me._

Copying is rampant on the internet because the benefits of redundancy outweigh
the drawbacks of (provenance) data loss.

I think 3d printing that can replace low-end manufacturing is still a long way
off.

 _The use of networks can turn you from a local player in a larger system into
your own global system._

I don't understand that statement. At all.

 _But Google's thing is not advertising because it's not a romanticizing
operation. It doesn't involve expression. It's a link. It's just a little tiny
minimalist link, and basically what they're selling is not advertising,
they're not selling romance, they're not selling communication, what they're
doing is selling access. What they're doing is they're saying, "You give us
money, we give you access to these people, and then what you do with them is
up to you." It's a gate keeping function. It's an arbiter of access. It's
turning connections instead of being open into being paid. That's essentially
what Google does. "We'll own the data, you'll pay for access to other people,
but we'll give a whole ton of other stuff for free." And then it leads to this
very strange schizophrenia, I'd say, where you think you're the user, but
you're the used, or you're the product, and then you end up doing all this
stuff to control your online presence, and your online reputation, and people
become obsessed with that._

This resonates as true, but I don't see how this is a distinction from
traditional advertising. They were also selling access, you were also the
product then. The difference to me is that that's not the only avenue for
access. In fact, Google embodies the other one, which is actually much bigger,
and it's a basically democratic one: search.

His main point that the means for a middle class to sustain itself are
disappearing is valid and well known, I think. His solution is to monetize
ideas. But I'm not sure how that works.

The problem with direct monetization of ideas is that it's friction, which
reduces the overall system-wide proliferation of ideas, which also hinders
more idea-generation. Bad all around. Doesn't help the middle class.

I think the thing about ideas is that you don't know how good one is until you
already have it. And that's why advertising works well with it. Not only
because you can see it with little cost (having to see an ad), but also
because it's freely shareable, which means good ones get spread more, and make
more money. In a sense, our ideas are already monetized by ads. I don't think
ads are the only way, either, though. I think kickstarter is an interesting
model that would work for ideas.

~~~
jamesbritt
_Lanier is fascinating to me in that his perspective seems so far askew from
my own that the exercise of even trying to understand what he's saying is
necessarily broadening._

Yes! Not that he's _so_ far afield of what I might think, but sufficiently
contrary to my own opinions while at the same time offering plausible reasons
for his point of view.

Even if I'm ultimately unpersuaded at least I've had reason to reconsider some
things.

