• Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar
  • Skip to footer

33 Charts

  • About
    • What is 33 Charts?
    • Bryan Vartabedian MD
  • Blog
  • 33mail
  • Foci
    • Social/Public Media
    • Physicians
    • Patients
    • Hospitals
    • Information
    • Process/Flow
    • Technology
    • Digital culture
    • Future Medicine
  • The Public Physician
Digital culture

Who Owns the Future? by Jaron Lanier

June 30, 2013 By Bryan Vartabedian · Reading Time: 2 minutes

Who Owns the Future?I recently had a read Jaron Lanier’s Who Owns the Future?  This is a fascinating read that offers a critical look at today’s internet business models.

Lanier is preoccupied with the power of Big Tech and the marginalization of the middle class.  The Internet creates wealth in a very few, Lanier argues, and does so at the expense of the end user.

“The primary business of digital networking has come to be the creation of ultrasecret mega-dossiers about what others are doing, and using this information to concentrate money and power. It doesn’t matter whether the concentration is called a social network, an insurance company, a derivatives fund, a search engine, or an online store. It’s all fundamentally the same.  Whatever the intent might have been, the result is a wielding of digital technology against the future of the middle class.”

Lanier envisions a future where content and ideas are attributable to the individuals who created them.  At the root of his thesis is the belief that information is not some freestanding thing, but rather a human product deserving of attribution and cash.  At its core, this book is about futuristic economics.  Social networks see you as the product, Lanier envisions all of us ultimately as partners.

It’s around this that Lanier builds the argument and makes his case.

He envisions a sustainable system that will continue to honor and reward humans, no matter how advanced technology becomes.

“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.”

“The project at hand is to imagine leveraging network technology to create a smoother kind of path to achieving ordinary, middle-class financial security.”

The problem, it seems, are the siren servers.  This is Lanier’s term for those monopolistic entities that control our digital lives.

“Siren Servers gather data from the network, often without having to pay for it. The data is analyzed using the most powerful available computers, run by the very best available technical people. The results of the analysis are kept secret, but are used to manipulate the rest of the world to advantage.”

Ouch.

Lanier’s technosocialist view of the networked world is heady and ambitious.  Regarding the likelihood of its eventuality: I’ll eat my scrub cap on the main stage of Medicine X when Patients Like Me allocates its margins to the patients that selflessly fuel its success.

In the end, Who Owns the Future? manages to balance a realistic view of technology’s future with the need for humanistic information economy.  His style is easy.  And as one of Silicon Valley’s founding fathers of virtual reality, he knows what he’s talking about.  The first hand historical elements of Silicon Valley’s early days alone are worth the read.  In following his first book, You Are Not a Gadget, Lanier is emerging as one of our generation’s most authoritative critics of technologic advancement.

While I thoroughly enjoyed Who Owns the Future, this book is heavy and recommended only for hard core futurists.

Links to Amazon represent affiliate links.

Related Articles

  • Uncertainty by Jonathan Fields
  • The New Digital Age Book Review
  • Book Notes: Abundance

Tagged With: Book reviews, Future

Related Articles

  • Uncertainty by Jonathan Fields
  • The New Digital Age Book Review
  • Book Notes: Abundance

Primary Sidebar

Bryan Vartabedian, MD

Bryan Vartabedian, MD
Bryan Vartabedian is the Chief Pediatrics Officer at Texas Children’s Hospital North Austin and one of health care’s influential
voices on technology & medicine.
Learn More

Popular Articles

  • The Fate of Fired Cleveland Clinic Resident Lara Kollab
  • Cures Act Final Rule – How It Will Change Medicine
  • 12 Things About Doximity You Probably Didn’t Know
  • Should Physicians Give Their Cell Phone Number to Patients?
  • Doximity Dialer Video – Telemedicine’s Latest Power Player

Sign up for 33mail newsletter

Featured Articles

Context Collapse and the Public Physician

Will the Future Need Doctors?

Reactive and Creative Spaces

Doctors and social media: Damned if you engage, damned if you don’t

100,000 Connected Lemmings

  • Facebook
  • LinkedIn
  • Twitter

Footer

What is 33 Charts?

With a mashup of curated and original content that crosses the spaces of digital health, media, communication, technology, patient experience, digital culture, and the humanities, 33 charts offers unique insight and analysis on the changing face of medicine.

Founded in 2009 as a center of community and thought leadership for the issues doctors face in a digital world, 33 charts was included in the National Library of Medicine permanent web archive in 2014.
Learn More

Foci

  • Digital culture
  • Digital Health
  • EHR/Health IT
  • Future Medicine
  • Hospitals
  • Information
  • Patients
  • Physicians
  • Process/Flow
  • Quality
  • Social/Public Media
  • Technology

Copyright © 2023 · 33 Charts · Privacy Policy