by
Jaron Lanier
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"Disruption" by the use of digital network technology undermines the very idea of markets and capitalism. Instead of economics being about a bunch of players with unique positions in a market, we devolve toward a small number of spying operations in omniscient positions, which means that eventually markets of all kinds will shrink.
YES AND WHY CAN'T YOU JUST ACCEPT THAT AND TAKE THAT PREMISE TO ITS FULL CONCLUSION WHY
WHY
It's certainly reasonable to expect that making economic activities more efficient ought to increase opportunity for everyone in the longer term. However, you can't really compare the two sides of the equation, of lower prices and lowered job prospects.
This is so obviously the case that it seems strange to point it out, but I have found that it is a hard truth to convey to people who have not experienced anything other than affluence. So: If you already have enough to live on, saving some money on a purchase is a nice perk. But if you haven't reached that threshold, or if you had been there but lost your perch, then saving is not the equivalent of making; it instead becomes part of a day-to-day calculus of just getting by. You can never save enough to get ahead if you don't have adequate career prospects.
very true and also very sad that he has to devote space to something so obvious
[...] Undoing the Siren Server pattern is the only way back to a truer form of capitalism.
Let's unpack (or maybe deconstruct this) because it's a really fascinating point. What does he mean by a truer form of capitalism? One in which workers are still exploited and corporations still make gigantic profits, but we expand the definition of "workers" to include basically anyone who generates data?
To me, it sounds like he wants to go back to the Golden Ages (which he didn't live through) or maybe the pre-crash years. But what if there is no truer form of capitalism to go back to? What if the capitalism he thinks of as "good" only exists in his head, an as idyllic paradise whose real costs are borne by outsiders he never has to think about?
Like him, I'm also very much against high-frequency trading and other manifestations of financialisation in this era of late-stage capitalism. Unlike him, I recognise that there are factors other than this "Siren Server" pattern: there are structural forces endogenous to capitalism that will prevent us moving toward the better, more human-driven world he takes as his telos. We can't simply "undo" this pattern. We have to understand how this pattern came to be, and what that tells us about the existence of a "truer" form of capitalism. After all, perhaps the "Siren Server" is the logical consequence of developing particular technologies within our current economic system. And if that's the case, how can we undo it without completely changing the way we perceive the economy?
[...] self-driving cars will depend on cloud data about streets, pedestrians, and everything else that can affect a trip. That information will be renewed constantly, with every single ride. Will the rider be compensated beyond a free ride for helping to generate this information? To do otherwise would be considered accounting fraud in a humanistic information economy.
the entire economy has been built on accounting fraud, buddy
[...] If everything will be free, why are we trying to corner anything? Are our fortunes only temporary? Will they become moot when we're done?
indeed, buddy ... money doesn't go with you when you die
I'm no Marxist. I love competing in the market, and the last thing I'd want is to live under communism. My wife grew up with it in Minsk, Belarus, and I am absolutely, thoroughly convinced of the misery. But if you select the right passages, Marx can be read as being incredibly current.
right after his anecdote about accidentally listening to Das Kapital on the radio (he thought it was a story about a startup)
he loves competing in the market because it has worked out for him, not because it's universally better >_> his dislike for communism, mediated by his vicarious dislike for the Soviet Union, completely neglects 1) the extent to which any instance of Actually Existing Socialism is embedded in a larger world system; and 2) the level of technology present at the time (obviously we live in a very different technological landscape today)
Keynes was an unapologetic financial elitist and had no interest in a quest for income equality or a planned economy. He simply sought a mechanism to get stuck markets unstuck. No one has proposed an alternative to his idea of a stimulus. The enduring nuisance is that someone has to guess about exactly how and when to aim a stimulus kick; this is just another way of saying you can't have science without scientists.
I ... don't know if I would agree, from having read Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren + various secondary sources on Keynes, but maybe Lanier's just trying to make him more palatable for the conservatives in his audience?
this passage is situated in a larger musing on local maximums and the complicated, risky ways we can get out of them and on to higher equilibrium points (which is relevant)
[...] A successful Siren Server no longer acts only as a player within a larger system. Instead it becomes a central planner. This makes it stupid, like a central planner in a communist regime.
ok buddy we get it
also, central planners can be good, actually
Facebook's mission statement commits the company "to make the world more open and connected." Google's official mission is to "organize the world's information." No high-frequency trading server has issued a public mission statement that I know of, but when I speak to the proprietors, they claim they are optimizing what is spent where in "the world." The conceit of optimizing the world is self-serving and deceptive. The optimizations approximated in the real world as a result of Siren Servers are optimal only from the points of view of those servers.
this is an extremely good point
[...] In this approach, the contents of books would be atomized into bits of information to be aggregated, and the authors themselves, the feeling of their voices, their differing perspectives, would be lost. Needless to say, this approach would hide its tracks so that it would be hard to send a nanopayment to an author who had been aggregated.
on Google's book-scanning project
he completely misses the point that this is exactly what he is proposing re: other algorithms T_T