by
Jaron Lanier
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I wish I didn't have to use mortgages as a point of reference since as I'm writing this, the world is still suffering from financial troubles that radiated from stupidly securitized mortgages. Mortgages were a reliable, clean mechanism for many years. What happened in the early 21st century was exceptional, and caused by the poor use of digital networks. It's exactly the kind of failure all these ideas are intended to prevent.
it was caused by financialisation which is just the latest stage of the capitalism you hold so dear
Trying to create an overly flattened society inevitably and unintentionally creates new centers of power. A revolution might dethrone the old rich, but only at the expense of empaneling an unchallenged communist party, along with a politburo and legions of clever schemers and ass kissers who turn into a new privileged class. The right way to deal with concentrations of power is not to try to vaporize them, but to balance them.
um ... not necessarily? this in fact sounds more like capitalism to me
It's worse than foolish to imagine that technologists will be able to fix the world if economists and politics have gone insane. We can't function alone. What we do is empower people. The world needs to be approximately sane for us to make any positive difference.
agreed
If homeowners with mortgages had been owed something resembling royalties whenever a mortgage was leveraged, then there would not have been overleveraging. The cost of risk would have been built in from the start, and would have been paid for by the investor creating the risk. Benefits would have been shared with those who were creating the fundamental value: homeowners who promised to pay the mortgages. Economic symmetry would have prevented investors from taking risks on other people's uninformed behavior, using yet other people's money.
I mean, if financial institutions were not allowed to extract surplus value then we wouldn't have had the financial crisis ... but this is akin to not having capitalism ... for this solution to work, the main problem would have to have already been solved (see note 1556)
This is basically a way of saying that the better your computer skills are, the more right you have to be a genuine individual in control of your own digital life. But we technologists ought to be serving mankind, not turning ourselves into a privileged class.
(on the hacker attitude of just encrypting whatever you can) agreed
No, what we have to look at is economic incentives. There can never be enough police to shut down activities that align with economic motives. This is why prohibitions don't work. No amount of regulation can keep up with perverse incentives, given the pace of innovation. This is also why almost no one was prosecuted for financial fraud connected with the Great Recession.
The only effective point to intervene, to fight creepiness, is in the fundamental economic model. If the economic model tends to bring out noncreepy developments, then only true creeps will want to be creepy. [...]
I agree with his point on economic incentives but just wish he would extend that to all the problems he talks about (re: Siren Servers) and not just "creepiness"
Suppose, though, that any cloud computer operator, whether it is a social network, an eclectic Wall Street scheme, or even a government agency, is required to pay you for useful data that is derived from you. Any Siren Server will then have a full-fledged commercial relationship with you. You will have intrinsic, inalienable commercial rights to data that wouldn't exist without you.
This means, for instance, that Facebook would be sending you little payments when data derived automatically from you helped some business successfully pitch a friend of yours to buy something. If your face shows up in an ad, you get paid. If you are tracked while you walk around town, and that helps a government become aware that pedestrian safety could be improved with better signage, you'd get a micropayment for having contributed valuable data.
1) how much are they supposed to pay me and how on earth can we enforce that they pay me a "fair" or "decent" amount when their whole goal is to maximise profit
2) i don't want a commercial relationship with every Siren Server D:
Once the data measured off a person creates a debt to that person, a number of systemic benefits will accrue. For just one example, for the first time there will be accurate accounting of who has gathered what information about whom. No amount of privacy and disclosure law will accomplish what accounting will do when money is at stake.
HOW IS THIS ENFORCED??????
no analysis of power at all, jesus
Extending the commercial sphere genuinely into the information space will lead to a more moderate, balanced world. What we've been doing instead is treating information commerce as a glaring exception to the equity that underlies democracy.
noooooooo it will not, it will just keep propping up capitalism and all its inherent tendencies towards inequality
[...] Are you still keeping people in the center? Is it still all about the people? Are you really avoiding the lazy trapdoor of falling back into thinking of people as components and a central server as being the only point of view for defining efficiency or testing efficacy?
in a way, he kind of writes like me, and im not sure how to feel about that