by
Jaron Lanier
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Even the most successful players of the game are gradually undermining the core of their own wealth. Capitalism only works if there are enough successful people to be the customers. A market system can only be sustainable when the accounting is through enough to reflect where value comes from, which, I'll demonstrate, is another way of saying that an information age middle class must come into being.
at least he does recognise this fact! and he does address UBI proposals later on (though skeptically). the only problem is his teleological approach of capitalism no matter what the cost ...
In the event that something a person says or does contributes even minutely to a database that allows, say, a machine language translation algorithm, or a market prediction algorithm, to perform a task, then a nanopayment, proportional both to the degree of contribution and the resultant value, will be due to the person.
this is literally impossible to do well (by any measure) and i feel like i'm having a stroke just thinking about this. i don't even know how to express the degree to which this proposal makes no sense
The recent breakdowns of finance can be understood as the symptoms of a fallacious hope that information technology can make promises on its own, without people.
that's one way of looking at it, but i think his POV is way too mediated by technological considerations ... there are more fundamental political/economic elements at play, which he glosses over (he never mentions the geopolitical reasons behind the ascent of financialisation in the first place)
Marx wanted something that most people, including me, don't want: a committee to make sure everyone gets what's best for them. Let's reject the Marxist ideal and instead consider the question of whether markets can be counted on to create middle classes as a matter of course.
if by committee he means central state that's accountable to the demos, then why not???? how is this worse than having what you get in life determined mostly by your conditions of birth????
and this neoliberal focus on middle classes is driving me mad. you can probably sense my exasperation by how much less effort i'm putting into these comments over the course of the book
The prominence of middle classes in the last century actually made the rich richer than would have a quest to concentrate wealth absolutely. Broad economic expansion is more lucrative than the winner taking all. Some of the very rich occasionally express doubts, but even from the most elite perspective, widespread affluence is best nurtured, rather than sapped into oblivion. Henry Ford, for instance, made a point of pricing his earliest mass-produced cars so that his own factory workers could afford to buy them. It is that balance that creates economic growth, and thus opportunity for more wealth.
Even the ultrarich are best served by a bell curve distribution of wealth in a society with a healthy middle class.
this passage is basically a plea to rich people to convince them that middle classes are good for them. this is such an obvious economic fact that it's hilarious he even has to include it at all (not a joke at his expense; he is absolutely right to include this, because a lot of fiscal conservatives don't seem to realise it)
it's just funny for someone like me to read this, because my immediate conclusion is not "ah yes, cool, let's keep the middle class then" but rather "abolish classes"
Markets are an information technology. A technology is useless if it can't be tweaked. If market technology can't be fully automatic and needs some "buttons", then there's no use in trying to pretend otherwise. You don't stay attached to poorly performing quests for perfection. You fix bugs.
And there are bugs! We just went through taxpayer-funded bailouts of networked finance in much of the world, and no amount of austerity seems enough to fully pay for that. So the technology needs to be tweaked. Wanting to tweak a technology shows a commitment to it, not a rejection of it.
So, let us continue with the project at hand, which is to see if network technology can make capitalism better instead of worse. Please don't pretend there's some "pure" form of capitalism we should be faithful to. There isnt.
at least he does accept that markets need regulation and that austerity is bad, props for that
Copying a musician's music ruins economic dignity. It doesn't necessarily deny the musician any form of income, but it does mean that the musician is restricted to a real-time economic life. That means one gets paid to perform, perhaps, but not paid for music one has recorded in the past. It is one thing to sing for your supper occasionally, but to have to do so for every meal forces you into a peasant's dilemma.
how can you see a phrase like "economic dignity" and not roll your eyes? what does it even mean? what does its usage say about capitalism realism and the extent to which this author has bought into it?
the main problem here is that he foresees musicians not getting paid (enough) for their music in the future, but is apparently incapable of imagining a world where you don't need to "get paid" in order to survive ... his projections for tech are spot-on, but his projections for the political sphere are extremely reactionary and naive
[...] If network technology is supposed to be so good for everyone, why has the developed world suffered so much just as the technology has become widespread? Why was there so much economic pain at once all over the developed world just as computer networking dug in to every aspect of human activity, in the early 21st century? Was it a coincidence?
ohhhhh boy, someone needs to give this guy a book on neoliberalism
[...] a Siren Server might allow only those who would be cheap to insure through doorway (to become insured) in order to make a supernaturally ideal, low-risk insurance company. Such a scheme would let high-risk people pass one way, and low-risk ones pass the other way, in order to implement a phony perpetual motion machine out of a human society. However, the uninsured would not cease to exist; rather, they would instead add to the cost of the whole system, which includes the people who run the Siren Server. A short-term illusion of risk reduction would actually lead to increased risk in the longer term.
this is actually a good analogy. he explains that the reason this wouldn't work is because of entropy
This is documented in Martin Ford's book The Lights in the Tunnel (2009). He sees jobs going away, and proposes that people in the future be paid only for consuming wisely, since they eventually won't be needed for producing anything. I find that idea inadequately human-centric and overly dismal, but it is an interesting contrast to my proposal.
in a footnote. this is literally how i feel about Lanier's proposal