Quotes from Who Owns the Future?

“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 thirteen people. Where did all those jobs disappear to? And what happened to the wealth that those middle-class jobs created? This book is built to answer questions like these, which will only become more common as digital networking hollows out every industry, from media to medicine to manufacturing.”
― Jaron Lanier, quote from Who Owns the Future?

“Wouldn’t it be easier just to treat the information space as a public resource and tax or charge companies somehow for the benefit of using it?”
― Jaron Lanier, quote from Who Owns the Future?

“Distributions can only be based on measurements, but as in the case of measuring intelligence, the nature of measurement is often complicated and troubled by ambiguities. Consider the problem of noise, or what is known as luck in human affairs. Since the rise of the new digital economy, around the turn of the century, there has been a distinct heightening of obsessions with contests like American Idol, or other rituals in which an anointed individual will suddenly become rich and famous. When it comes to winner-take-all contests, onlookers are inevitably fascinated by the role of luck. Yes, the winner of a singing contest is good enough to be the winner, but even the slightest flickering of fate might have changed circumstances to make someone else the winner. Maybe a different shade of makeup would have turned the tables. And yet the rewards of winning and losing are vastly different. While some critics might have aesthetic or ethical objections to winner-take-all outcomes, a mathematical problem with them is that noise is amplified. Therefore, if a societal system depends too much on winner-take-all contests, then the acuity of that system will suffer. It will become less reality-based.”
― Jaron Lanier, quote from Who Owns the Future?

“It is exactly when others insist that it’s a sign of being free, fresh, and radical to do what everybody’s doing that you might want to take notice and think for yourself. Don’t be surprised if this is really hard to do.”
― Jaron Lanier, quote from Who Owns the Future?

“With an eBook, however, you are not a first-class commercial citizen. Instead, you have only purchased tenuous rights within someone else’s company store. You cannot resell, nor can you do anything else to treat your purchase as an investment.”
― Jaron Lanier, quote from Who Owns the Future?

“We must learn to see the full picture, and not just the treats before our eyes. Our trendy gadgets, such as smartphones and tablets, have given us new access to the world. We regularly communicate with people we would never even have been aware of before the networked age. We can find information about almost anything at any time. But we have learned how much our gadgets and out idealistically motivated digital networks are being used to spy on us by ultrapowerful, remote organizations. We are being dissected more than we dissect.”
― Jaron Lanier, quote from Who Owns the Future?

“Don’t worry: It’s not excessively expensive or a threat to the efficiency of the Internet to keep track of where information came from. It will actually make the Internet faster and more efficient.”
― Jaron Lanier, quote from Who Owns the Future?

“The salespeople trumpet their system’s ability to minutely model and target consumers as if they were Taliban in the crosshairs of a military drone. And yet, the same service, when it must simply detect if a user is underage, will turn out to be unable to counter the deceptions of children.”
― Jaron Lanier, quote from Who Owns the Future?

“Networks need a great number of people to participate in them to generate significant value. But when they do, only a small number of people get paid. That has the net effect of centralizing wealth and limiting overall economic growth.”
― Jaron Lanier, quote from Who Owns the Future?

“Ideally, earning full-on wealth, not just cash, will become more like what spending is like already. There will be a multitude of incremental wealth creation events instead of a few big game-changing leaps in one’s status.”
― Jaron Lanier, quote from Who Owns the Future?

“A market economy cannot thrive absent the well-being of average people, even in a gilded age.”
― Jaron Lanier, quote from Who Owns the Future?

“If someone reuses your video snippet, and that person’s work incorporating yours is reused by yet a third party, you still get a micropayment from that third party.”
― Jaron Lanier, quote from Who Owns the Future?

“Unfortunately, by forcing more and more value off the books as the world economy turns into an information economy, the ideal of “free” information could erode economic interdependencies between nations.”
― Jaron Lanier, quote from Who Owns the Future?

“At the end of the day, even the magic of machine translation is like Facebook, a way of taking free contributions from people and regurgitating them as bait for advertisers or others who hope to take advantage of being close to a top server.”
― Jaron Lanier, quote from Who Owns the Future?

“In a more incremental world, attributions and rewards will still be contested, no doubt, but particular outcomes will no longer make or break lives.”
― Jaron Lanier, quote from Who Owns the Future?

“A Nelsonian solution provides a simple, predictable way to share without limit or hassle over digital networks, and yet doesn’t destroy middle classes in the long term.”
― Jaron Lanier, quote from Who Owns the Future?

“Siren Servers are narcissists; blind to where value comes from, including the web of global interdependence that is at the core of their own value.”
― Jaron Lanier, quote from Who Owns the Future?

“Here is yet another statement of the core idea of this book, that data concerning people is best thought of as people in disguise, and they’re usually up to something.”
― Jaron Lanier, quote from Who Owns the Future?

“one might ask why big business data is still so often used on faith, even after it has failed spectacularly. The answer is of course that big business data happens to facilitate superquick and vast near-term accumulations of wealth and influence.”
― Jaron Lanier, quote from Who Owns the Future?

“The reason [James Clerk] Maxwell's Demon cannot exist is that it does take resources to perform an act of discrimination. We imagine computation is free, but it never is. The very act of choosing which particle is cold or hot itself becomes an energy drain and a source of waste heat. The principle is also known as "no free lunch."
We do our best to implement Maxwell's Demon whenever we manipulate reality with our technologies, but we can never do so perfectly; we certainly can't get ahead of the game, which is known as entropy. All the air conditioners in a city emit heat that makes the city hotter overall. While you can implement what seems to be a Maxwell's Demon if you don't look too far or too closely, in the big picture you always lose more than you gain.
Every bit in a computer is a wannabe Maxwell's Demon, separating the state of "one" from the state of "zero" for a while, at a cost. A computer on a network can also act like a wannabe demon if it tries to sort data from networked people into one or the other side of some imaginary door, while pretending there is no cost or risk involved.”
― Jaron Lanier, quote from Who Owns the Future?

“Every power-seeking entity in the world, whether it’s a government, a business, or an informal group, has gotten wise to the idea that if you can assemble information about other people, that information makes you powerful.”
― Jaron Lanier, quote from Who Owns the Future?

“When machines get incredibly cheap to run, people seem correspondingly expensive.”
― Jaron Lanier, quote from Who Owns the Future?

“The decision reduction service would use its particular style and competence to create bundles of decisions you could accept or reject en masse.”
― Jaron Lanier, quote from Who Owns the Future?

“Around the turn of the century Amazon was caught up in a controversy about “differential pricing.” Essentially this means that an online site might charge you more for given items than it charges other people, like your neighbors.2 Amazon stated at the time that it was not really discrimination, but experimentation. It was offering different prices to different people to see what they would pay. There is nothing special about Amazon in this regard. Another example is the travel site Orbitz, which was found to be directing users of more expensive computers to more expensive travel options.3 Who could be surprised? It is natural for a business to take”
― Jaron Lanier, quote from Who Owns the Future?

“Once a critical mass of conversation is on Facebook, then it’s hard to get conversation going elsewhere. What might have started out as a choice is no longer a choice after a network effect causes a phase change.”
― Jaron Lanier, quote from Who Owns the Future?

“What did you think would happen? We in Silicon Valley undermined copyright to make commerce become more about services instead of content: more about our code instead of their files.”
― Jaron Lanier, quote from Who Owns the Future?

“As the familiar quote usually attributed to Supreme Court justice Louis D. Brandeis goes, “We can have democracy in this country, or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can’t have both.”
― Jaron Lanier, quote from Who Owns the Future?

“It is impossible for us to completely enter the experiential world of the hunter-gatherer. It's almost impossible to conceive of the subjective texture of life before electricity. We can't quite fully know what we have lost as we become more technological, so we are in constant doubt of our own authenticity and vitality. This is a necessary side effect of our own survival.”
― Jaron Lanier, quote from Who Owns the Future?

“The foundational idea of humanistic computing is that provenance is valuable. Information is people in disguise, and people ought to be paid for value they contribute that can be sent or stored on a digital network.”
― Jaron Lanier, quote from Who Owns the Future?

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Popular quotes

“–Levántate y date una ducha, cabrón.
–¿Qué pasa?
–A mí no me vengas con qué pasa. Anoche fumaste marihuana.
–Pero no era nada buena, de todos modos –dije, y me fui al baño.”
― William S. Burroughs, quote from And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks

“A film, The Lost Continent, throws a clear light on the current myth of exoticism. It is a big documentary on 'the East', the pretext of which is some undefined ethnographic expedition, evidently false, incidentally, led by three or four Italians into the Malay archipelago. The film is euphoric, everything in it is easy, innocent. Our explorers are good fellows, who fill up their leisure time with child-like amusements: they play with their mascot, a little bear (a mascot is indispensable in all expeditions: no film about the polar region is without its tame seal, no documentary on the tropics is without its monkey), or they comically upset a dish of spaghetti on the deck. Which means that these good people, anthropologists though they are, don't bother much with historical or sociological problems. Penetrating the Orient never means more for them than a little trip in a boat, on an azure sea, in an essentially sunny country. And this same Orient which has today become the political centre of the world we see here all flattened, made smooth and gaudily coloured like an old-fashioned postcard.
The device which produces irresponsibility is clear: colouring the world is always a means of denying it (and perhaps one should at this point begin an inquiry into the use of colour in the cinema). Deprived of all substance, driven back into colour, disembodied through the very glamour of the 'images', the Orient is ready for the spiriting away which the film has in store for it. What with the bear as a mascot and the droll spaghetti, our studio anthropologists will have no trouble in postulating an Orient which is exotic in form, while being in reality profoundly similar to the Occident, at least the Occident of spiritualist thought. Orientals have religions of their own? Never mind, these variations matter very little compared to the basic unity of idealism. Every rite is thus made at once specific and eternal, promoted at one stroke into a piquant spectacle and a quasi-Christian symbol.
...If we are concerned with fisherman, it is not the type of fishing which is whown; but rather, drowned in a garish sunset and eternalized, a romantic essense of the fisherman, presented not as a workman dependent by his technique and his gains on a definite society, but rather as the theme of an eternal condition, in which man is far away and exposed to the perils of the sea, and woman weeping and praying at home. The same applies to refugees, a long procession of which is shown at the beginning, coming down a mountain: to identify them is of course unnecessary: they are eternal essences of refugees, which it is in the nature of the East to produce.”
― Roland Barthes, quote from Mythologies

“Our one employee came warily out of the back. He was always skittish with me, and if Lizzy wasn't around, h made a point of keeping his distance. I think he was expecting me to make a pass at him. He was seventeen, had stringy black hair,bad skin, and probably weighed a buck five soaked wet. I didn't have the heart to tell him he wasn't my type.”
― Marie Sexton, quote from Promises

“One day,' Orest said, looking at him comically, 'you will say something that is less than practical and sensible, something that is driven by no forethought and nothing but passion, and I will probably collapse with shock.”
― Mercedes Lackey, quote from Alta

“got a kick in the ass from one of our clients. He’d lost his sight in an accident—hard enough, but he was a surgeon. His career, in his mind, was over.” “Was it?” “Of course not. He couldn’t do surgery, but he could other things. Over time, and with a lot of nagging, he began to accept that. He restarted his life, reinvented himself.” “You saved him.” She shook her head, embarrassed. “No. I was just his friend.”
― Karen Rose, quote from I Can See You

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