## Metadata - Author: [[Jaron Lanier]] - Full Title: Who Owns the Future? - Category: #books ## Highlights - Occasionally the rich embrace a new token and drive up its value. The fine art market is a great example. Expensive art is essentially a private form of currency traded among the very rich. The better an artist is at making art that can function this way, the more valuable the art will become. Andy Warhol is often associated with this trick, though Pablo Picasso and others were certainly playing the same game earlier. The art has to be stylistically distinct and available in suitable small runs. It becomes a private form of money, as instantly recognizable as a hundred-dollar bill. ([Location 1825](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B008J2AEY8&location=1825)) - In the world of business, big data often works whether it’s true or not. People pay for dating services even though, on examination, the algorithms purporting to pair perfect mates probably don’t work. It doesn’t matter if the science is right so long as customers will pay for it, and they do. Therefore, there is no need to distinguish whether statistics were valid in an a priori scientific sense, or if they were made valid because of social engineering. An example of social engineering is when two people meet through a dating site because they both expect the algorithms to be valid. People adapt to the presence of information systems, whether the adaptation is conscious or not, and whether the information system is functioning as expected or not. ([Location 1910](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B008J2AEY8&location=1910)) - it’s empirically difficult to distinguish an artificial-intelligence success from people adjusting themselves to make a program look smart. ([Location 1922](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B008J2AEY8&location=1922)) - In that moment of fervor when you launch a Siren Server, you can practically taste the luscious swell of power. You will have information superiority because of your listening post on the ’net. This is one of the great illusions of our times: that you can game without being gamed. ([Location 1929](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B008J2AEY8&location=1929)) - data concerning people is best thought of as people in disguise, and they’re usually up to something. ([Location 2043](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B008J2AEY8&location=2043)) - No adult really knows what was lost in the process of growing up, because the adult brain cannot quite realize the mentality in which childhood memories are fully meaningful. ([Location 2194](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B008J2AEY8&location=2194)) - Every little genetic feature of you, from the crook of the corner of your eye to much of the way your body moves when you listen to music, was framed and formed by the negative spaces carved out by the pre-reproductive deaths of your would-be ancestors over hundreds of millions of years. You are the reverse image of inconceivable epochs of heartbreak and cruelty. ([Location 2205](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B008J2AEY8&location=2205)) - Computation is the demarcation of a little part of the universe, called a computer, which is engineered to be very well understood and controllable, so that it closely approximates a deterministic, non-entropic process. But in order for a computer to run, the surrounding parts of the universe must take on the waste heat, the randomness. You can create a local shield against entropy, but your neighbors will always pay for it. ([Location 2268](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B008J2AEY8&location=2268)) - People are and will always be needed. The question is whether we’ll engage in complete enough accounting so that people are honestly valued. If there’s ever an illusion that humans are becoming obsolete, it will in reality be a case of massive accounting fraud. ([Location 2277](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B008J2AEY8&location=2277)) - Computation is the demarcation of a little part of the universe, called a computer, which is engineered to be very well understood and controllable, so that it closely approximates a deterministic, non-entropic process. But in order for a computer to run, the surrounding parts of the universe must take on the waste heat, the randomness. You can create a local shield against entropy, but your neighbors will always pay for it.* ([Location 2366](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B008J2AEY8&location=2366)) - Google might eventually become an ouroboros, a snake eating its own tail, unless something changes. This would happen when so many goods and services become software-centric, and so much information is “free,” that there is nothing left to advertise on Google that attracts actual money. Today a guitar manufacturer might advertise through Google. But when guitars are someday spun out of 3D printers, there will be no one to buy an ad if guitar design files are “free.” Yet Google’s lifeblood is information put online for free. That is what Google’s servers organize. Thus Google’s current business model is a trap in the long term. ([Location 2524](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B008J2AEY8&location=2524)) - The conceit of optimizing the world is self-serving and self-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. For someone who has scaled a peak, that peak becomes the known world. It becomes hard to remember that there might be other peaks. ([Location 2537](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B008J2AEY8&location=2537)) - If we succumb to the illusion that there can be only one peak, or a single equilibrium, then we might believe that any deviation from the top of this foothill would be a rejection of efficiency and rationality. But that would be a display of the same kind of mathematical illiteracy that has already poisoned our politics. Whatever it is we want the mechanism of a marketplace to achieve for us, we will not find the highest peaks if we organize markets to radiate risk and become deterministic accumulators of power around a small number of dominant computing nodes. ([Location 2551](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B008J2AEY8&location=2551)) - Conlon didn’t share my sense of moment. He was unassuming, even taciturn. An elegant man from an era when it was expected for men to have well-developed egos, he conveyed a regal stature quietly, declining to construct a romantic life story. He worked, he enjoyed his family, music, and life, and that was it. ([Location 2631](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B008J2AEY8&location=2631)) - The big game is the race to create ascendant Siren Servers, or, much more often, to get close to those that are taking off and ascending in ways that no one predicted. ([Location 2802](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B008J2AEY8&location=2802)) - Here’s typical advice I’d give to someone who wants to try the Silicon Valley startup game: Obviously you have to get someone else to do something on your server. This can start out as a petty activity. eBay started out as a trading site for people who collected Pez candy dispensers. The key is that it’s your server. If you’re getting a lot of traffic through someone else’s server, then you’re not really playing the game. If you get a lot of hits on a Facebook page, or for your pieces on the Huffington Post, then you are playing a little game, not the big game. ([Location 2875](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B008J2AEY8&location=2875)) - The ideal Siren Server is one for which you make no specific decisions. You should do everything possible to not do anything consequential. Don’t play favorites; don’t have taste. You are to be the neutral facilitator, the connector, the hub, but never an agent who could be blamed for a decision. Reduce the number of decisions that can be pinned on you to an absolute minimum. ([Location 2947](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B008J2AEY8&location=2947)) - Individual Siren Servers can die and yet the Siren Server pattern perseveres, and it is that pattern that is the real problem. The systematic decoupling of risk from reward in the rising information economy is the problem, not any particular server. ([Location 3003](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B008J2AEY8&location=3003)) - The endgames of contests between Siren Servers are not meaningless. Siren Servers are not interchangeable. While they all share certain traits (narcissism, hyperamplified risk aversion, and extreme information asymmetry), they also represent particular, more specialized philosophies. The requirements of being a Siren Server leave enough room for variation that contests between them can also be collisions of contrasting ideas. ([Location 3007](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B008J2AEY8&location=3007)) - The designs of these sites are embodiments of philosophies about what a person is, where meaning comes from, the nature of freedom, and the nature of an ideal society. ([Location 3016](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B008J2AEY8&location=3016)) - Seeing movies and listening to music suggested to us by algorithms is relatively harmless, I suppose. But I hope that once in a while the users of those services resist the recommendations; our exposure to art shouldn’t be hemmed in by an algorithm that we merely want to believe predicts our tastes accurately. These algorithms do not represent emotion or meaning, only statistics and correlations. ([Location 3077](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B008J2AEY8&location=3077)) - The problem with optimizing the world to the benefit of an electoral Siren Server is the same as it is for the other species of such servers. It’s not that it doesn’t work in the short term, because it does, but that it becomes increasingly divorced from reality. Just as networked services that choose music for you don’t have real taste, a cloud-computing engine that effectively chooses your politicians doesn’t have political wisdom. ([Location 3222](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B008J2AEY8&location=3222)) - You might further object that it’s all based on individual choice, and that if Facebook wants to offer us a preferable free service, and the offer is accepted, that’s just the market making a decision. That argument ignores network effects. 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. After that point we effectively have less choice. It’s no longer commerce, but soft blackmail. ([Location 3279](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B008J2AEY8&location=3279)) - We in Silicon Valley undermined copyright to make commerce become more about services instead of content: more about our code instead of their files. The inevitable endgame was always that we would lose control of our own personal content, our own files. ([Location 3288](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B008J2AEY8&location=3288)) - A core technical difference between a Nelsonian network and what we have become familiar with online is that Ted’s network links were two-way instead of one-way. In a network with two-way links, each node knows what other nodes are linked to it. That would mean you’d know all the websites that point to yours. It would mean you’d know all the financiers who had leveraged your mortgage. It would mean you’d know all the videos that used your music. Two-way linking would preserve context. It’s a small, simple change in how online information should be stored that couldn’t have vaster implications for culture and the economy. Two-way links are a bit of a technical hassle. You have to keep them up to date. If someone else stops linking to you, you have to make sure you don’t maintain an out-of-date indication that they still are linked. That hassle means there is some initial difficulty in getting a two-way system going as compared to a one-way system. This is part of why HTML spread so fast. But it is one of those cases where getting something easy up front just makes the price worse later on. If everything on the Web were two-way linked, it would be an easy matter to sort out which nodes were the most important for a given topic. You’d just see where most of the links led. Since that information wasn’t present, Google was needed to scrape the entire Web all the time to recalculate all the links that should have existed anyway, keep them in a dungeon, and present the results in order to lure so-called advertisers. Similarly, if two-way links had existed, you’d immediately be able to see who was linking to your website or online creations. It wouldn’t be a mystery. You’d meet people who shared your interests as a matter of course. A business would naturally become acquainted with potential customers. “Social networks” like Facebook were brought into existence in part to recapture those kinds of connections that were jettisoned when they need not have been, when the Web was born. ([Location 3566](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B008J2AEY8&location=3566)) - Ted was very fond of cyber-, which originally related to navigation, and which Norbert Wiener adopted into cybernetics because navigation was a great example of the core process of feedback in an information system. ([Location 3621](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B008J2AEY8&location=3621)) - Another problem with existing chunky levees is that they tend to have zero-sum gotchas. If everyone gets a taxi medallion, then medallions become worthless. That also means speculators can buy up medallions and corner the market, undoing the original purpose. What we should seek instead is a system where value increases as more and more people participate in it. So, a way to conceive the project at hand is to imagine how computer networks could help create a fluid, incremental kind of wealth creation that thrives at a middle-class level and is not zero-sum. ([Location 3725](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B008J2AEY8&location=3725)) - 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. The primary distinguishing feature of humanistic computing is therefore two-way linking, just as networking and hypermedia might have possessed anyway, had the original ideas from Ted Nelson and other early pioneers prevailed. If two-way linking had been in place, a homeowner would have known who had leveraged the mortgage, and a musician would have known who had copied his music. ([Location 3773](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B008J2AEY8&location=3773)) - In humanistic information economics, provenance is treated as a basic right, similar to the way civil rights and property rights were given a universal stature in order to make democracy and market capitalism viable. ([Location 3784](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B008J2AEY8&location=3784)) - If the information economy is to evolve on its present track, so that each player is either running a Siren Server or is an ordinary person ricocheting between two extremes of noncapitalism, between fake free and fake ownership, then markets will eventually shrink and capitalism will collapse. So a primary task in imagining a sustainable information economy must be to imagine a sustainable model for transactions. A key idea that makes a transaction model sustainable is a kind of symmetry between buyer and seller, so that transactions harmonize with a social contract. When a social contract works, you recognize that what’s good for others is ultimately good for you, too, even if it might not seem so at a particular moment. In a particular moment, having to pay for something might not seem so good for you. Ultimately, being paid by other people as part of the deal more than makes up for the initial sacrifice. That also means you empathize with the needs of those who sell to you, because you sometimes play the role of seller. Right now it might seem draconian to charge for access to information we have come to expect for free, but it would feel very different if you knew that other people were also paying you at the same time for information services you have fractionally contributed to in the course of your life. This is the only way that democracy and capitalism can be in alignment. The current online commerce models create a new kind of class division between full economic participants and partial economic participants. That means that there isn’t enough shared economic interest to support long-term democracy. ([Location 3805](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B008J2AEY8&location=3805)) - Commercial symmetry suggests a radical difference between what I am proposing here and the world we currently know. Everyone will need to have a unique commercial identity in a universal public market information system. That contrasts with the way things work currently, where machines have unique identities, like IP addresses, but people don’t. Human identity is currently handled on an ad hoc basis, and most people have multiple identities that are owned by remote companies like Facebook. This way of doing things might seem to favor the private sector over the public sector, but in the long term it actually hurts the private sector. The most basic foundation of the way people connect to networks has to be the public sphere if the competition between private offerings is to be symmetrical, fair, and dynamic. When the very connection of people to each other or their own data is owned by remote concerns, then it’s impossible to outrun impedances and stagnation. The Internet might have started out making better use of the public sphere, but in the 1970s and 1980s the mostly young men building what would turn into the Internet were often either pot-smoking liberals or CB-radio-using, police-evading conservatives who were violating speed limits. (That’s a bit of an exaggeration, but not much.) Both camps thought anonymity was the essence of coolness, and that it was wrong for the government to have a list of citizens, or for people to need government IDs. In retrospect I think we were all confusing the government with our parents. (This despite the fact that during the early stages, digital networking was a government-funded research endeavor.) How times change. As I write this, one of the common ideas on the conservative side of American politics is that people should have to have government IDs on them if they want to vote, or even if they want to avoid arrest if the police want to talk to them and they don’t look proper. Meanwhile, many liberals favor a universal health care system that would build on a universal ID. ([Location 3823](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B008J2AEY8&location=3823)) - Any society that is composed of real biological people has to succeed at providing a balance to the frustrations of biological reality. There must be economic dignity, defined here as knowing you won’t fall off a cliff into abject poverty if you get sick, become a parent, or grow old. ([Location 3880](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B008J2AEY8&location=3880)) - The employment picture is increasingly “hollowed out” in physicality. People increasingly find their sustenance in dead-end jobs at the bottom, or in elite jobs at the top. To me that means our economy is obsolete and needs to be reformed to keep up with technological progress. But to others it means that people are becoming obsolete. ([Location 3939](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B008J2AEY8&location=3939)) - As I complained earlier, I hear this infuriating comment all the time: “If a lot of ordinary people aren’t earning much in today’s markets, that means they have little of value to offer. You can’t intervene to create the illusion that they’re valuable. It’s up to people to make themselves valuable.” Well yes, I agree. I don’t advocate making up fake jobs to create the illusion that people are employed. That would be demeaning and a magnet for fraud and corruption. But network-oriented companies routinely raise huge amounts of money based precisely on placing a value on what ordinary people do online. It’s not that the market is saying ordinary people aren’t valuable online; it’s that most people have been repositioned out of the loop of their own commercial value. ([Location 3941](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B008J2AEY8&location=3941)) - Whenever one sort of task can be automated, others that can’t be automated come into view. The economic question is who gets paid for what people at ground level do beyond the horizon of automation in a given historical phase. ([Location 3965](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B008J2AEY8&location=3965)) - When home robots make other home robots that sew dresses from designs found online, then either the fashion business will be demonetized or not, depending on whether the accounting is complete. In a humanistic information economy, accounting will be complete, and people will continue to make their livings as fashion designers, fashion photographers, and fashion models, and will achieve dignity. In a humanistic digital economy, the economy will be more ambient, and designers will still make a living, even when a dress is sewn in a home by a robot. Someone who wears the dress well might also make a little money inadvertently by popularizing it. ([Location 3984](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B008J2AEY8&location=3984)) - Whatever may come, if the control of it can be transmitted on a network as information, then there will be a choice about whether to monetize that information. Even if the idea of money becomes obsolete, the choice will remain of whether the distribution of clout and influence will be centralized or proximate to the people who are the origin of value. That choice will remain the same no matter which science fiction technologies come about. ([Location 3991](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B008J2AEY8&location=3991)) - A primary advantage of a more generally monetized information economy is that levees are built up gradually instead of in all-or-nothing, career-making quantum leaps. That means that we needn’t import the old limitations from eras that were hobbled by cruder information technologies. The levees can be eroded after death as smoothly as they were built up, instead of being breached in an instant. The dues to the dead can be rolled off according to a smooth function. At first, some money can flow to descendants, but the amount can taper off, so that the grandchildren will have to learn to earn their keep more and more as they grow up. ([Location 4035](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B008J2AEY8&location=4035)) - The most basic attribute of a digital network is what is remembered and what is forgotten. In other words, what is entropic about the network? The second most important attribute concerns risk pools—specifically the granularity of risk pools. The easiest way to clarify the idea of a risk pool is by recalling a conversation I’ve had many times. I’ll ask, “How much do you think it should properly cost to watch, say, an online video, even though it could be easily copied?” Most people feel it is proper to pay something, but don’t think it should be very much. What feels fair? The usual answer is “I’d add up how much it cost to make it and then divide that by the number of people who watch it, so we all support it. That would be fair.” The better answer would be for the people who enjoy the video to expect to pay enough to cover the risk pool that financed a batch of videos, some of which were more or less successful. Capitalism and the survival of liberty both depend on people deciding it is proper to pay this higher amount. ([Location 4216](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B008J2AEY8&location=4216)) - If the risk pool is the size of the whole society, then it isn’t really a risk pool at all. ([Location 4270](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B008J2AEY8&location=4270)) - Note: why? - “Network neutrality” is the term1 used to describe the idea that a business that transports bits should not play favorites with those bits for financial gain. An Internet access company that also offers a video streaming service should not be able to slow down videos from a competing source to make its own video streaming look better, for instance. ([Location 4345](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B008J2AEY8&location=4345)) - Economic network neutrality is simply a generalization of that idea and recognizes that as information technology becomes central, the economy becomes a form of bit transport. ([Location 4349](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B008J2AEY8&location=4349)) - In isolation, economic symmetry might pose a risk of a race to the bottom. Wouldn’t everyone initially want stuff for free, and then never be able to compete with the expectation of free stuff from others in order to start charging? This is approximately what happens when a traditional economy stalls and falls into a depression. Recall, though, the “legacy” portion of the calculation of price described earlier. The “instant” portion of a price is vulnerable to the same old Keynesian catastrophes that have always plagued markets, but the legacy portion is something new, only possible in an information economy run by large computers enabled by Moore’s Law. The accumulated payments due to past contributions will provide a momentum to prevent stalls. ([Location 4367](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B008J2AEY8&location=4367)) - Taxes, whether that is the term used or not, will inevitably be taken as part of the respiratory cycle of an advanced network credit system, as it inhales and exhales money to balance gaps between credit and cash, billions of times a second. ([Location 4390](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B008J2AEY8&location=4390)) - Despite the uncertainty of the timing of tech fixes for the biggest core problems we face, it is bizarre that they are only funded in token ways, and in scattershot, weird situations. If we were for a moment to forget the mirror maze of economics, and the circular firing squad of politics, and only think about the fundamentals, then a rational response to global climate change would be to supercharge all large-scale curative climate research, at least at the scale of the Manhattan and Apollo projects combined. There would also be massive social engineering experiments in order to reduce the carbon footprint of humanity in case the tech fixes don’t work as soon as we’d like. ([Location 4463](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B008J2AEY8&location=4463)) - People are clannish, and politics among humans is therefore by nature about tribal inclusion and confrontations between tribes. We can have conferences about global climate change, but the outcomes don’t really stick. The very idea of global politics can make sense to the human mind but is usually nonsense to the human heart. ([Location 4473](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B008J2AEY8&location=4473)) - It’s worse than foolish to imagine that technologists will be able to fix the world if economics 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. But the world is not converging on sanity. For evidence, look no further than the lack of action on the matter of global climate change. ([Location 4476](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B008J2AEY8&location=4476)) - 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. ([Location 4520](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B008J2AEY8&location=4520)) - if we come to be utterly unconcerned about privacy, identity theft risks will be mooted. If everyone were under constant surveillance, each person would present a single, consistent, imperturbable continuity of identity and there would be no possibility of identity theft. A person whose identity was stolen would seem to suddenly split in two, or leap at the speed of light to a different location. ([Location 4744](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B008J2AEY8&location=4744)) - The best way to reduce temptation to act abusively is to distribute value, power, and clout less centrally. The best way to do that is to enable a more comprehensive commercial sphere than the one in place today. ([Location 4762](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B008J2AEY8&location=4762)) - Getting away from extreme outcomes is crucial if we are to find our way to a high-tech but humane future. We can’t turn into zero or one bits. We can’t be expected to either give up privacy entirely or hoard it insanely. ([Location 4871](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B008J2AEY8&location=4871)) - The best ideas are ones that can be pursued fanatically, as digital innovators like to pursue things, but which inherently lead to moderate outcomes. Modern democracies and markets occasionally display this quality when functioning at their best. Ideally the architecture of digital networks, which are so able to enact sudden large-scale social change, will evolve to mediate instead of divide. ([Location 4873](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B008J2AEY8&location=4873)) - The reason to believe in human agency over technological determinism is that you can then have an economy where people earn their own way and invent their own lives. If you structure a society on not emphasizing individual human agency, it’s the same thing operationally as denying people clout, dignity, and self-determination. ([Location 4930](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B008J2AEY8&location=4930)) - When money is no object, the quest for ultimate health and fitness becomes an often bizarre tour of the world’s visionaries and charlatans, and no amount of money can distinguish them perfectly. ([Location 4949](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B008J2AEY8&location=4949)) - A social contract must take hold for any orderly economy to be possible. Any functioning, authentic economy has to by definition be sustained more by voluntary participation than by enforcement. In the physical world it’s not all that hard to break into someone’s house or car, or to shoplift, and there aren’t all that many police. The police have a crucial role, but the main reason people don’t go around stealing in the physical world is that they want to live in a world where stealing isn’t commonplace. ([Location 4992](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B008J2AEY8&location=4992)) - Real freedom has to be based on most people choosing to give each other latitude most of the time. ([Location 5002](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B008J2AEY8&location=5002)) - History records many instances of workable social contracts breaking down. States fail and murderous spasms overtake whole populations. But history also records “miracles,” instances of decent social contracts being initiated. The American experiment was one instance, but so is the initiation of any inclusive democracy. The early rise of the World Wide Web, before Siren Servers overtook it, was another miracle. ([Location 5003](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B008J2AEY8&location=5003)) - Note: Burning Man is also a miraculous social contract. - The instantiation of a social contract “miracle” is a big jump over a valley in an energy landscape. It might take a political figure of rare genius, or the right lucky confluence of events, but it is ridiculous to think that a beneficial social contract could not take hold for the majority of people in their online lives. ([Location 5006](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B008J2AEY8&location=5006)) - it only makes sense to talk about enforcement when only a small minority of a population are offenders. Civilization will remain by definition a mostly voluntary project, a miracle. ([Location 5008](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B008J2AEY8&location=5008)) - One of the hardest questions about a humanistic economic scenario is how to get there from where we are. Who will step up and take risks in order to learn if this new world will come about? It’s not only a political challenge, but an economic one, since a present economy of a certain size must somehow fund a quantum leap to a new, larger economy despite a gigantic accounting vacuum. ([Location 5011](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B008J2AEY8&location=5011)) - The notion that bottom-up change is the only kind of change tends to feed into the problems a humanistic economy would hopefully correct. The reason why is that it’s dishonest. It is never true that there is no top-down component to power and influence. Those who cling to the hope that power can be made simple only blind themselves to the latest forms of top-down power. ([Location 5091](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B008J2AEY8&location=5091)) - Every attempt to create a pure bottom-up, emergent network to coordinate human affairs also facilitates some new hub that inevitably becomes a center of power, even if that was not the intent. In the old days, that might have been a communist party. These days, if everything is open, anonymous, and copyable, then a search/analysis company with a bigger computer than normal people have access to will come along to measure and model everything that takes place, and then sell the resulting ability to influence events to third parties. The whole supposedly open system will contort itself to that Siren Server, creating a new form of centralized power. Mere openness doesn’t work. A Linux always makes a Google. ([Location 5093](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B008J2AEY8&location=5093)) - The only way to create a distribution of clout on a digital network that isn’t overly centralized, so that middle classes and a maximally competitive marketplace can exist, is to be honest about the existence of top-down dynamics from the start. Putting oneself into a childlike position is only an invitation to someone else to play the parent. ([Location 5098](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B008J2AEY8&location=5098)) - while accounting can happen locally between individuals, finance relies on some rather boring agreements about conventions on a global, top-down basis. ([Location 5108](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B008J2AEY8&location=5108)) - A good world is one where there’s meaning outside of sabotage. Surely it isn’t overly utopian to seek that modest virtue in our future. ([Location 5124](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B008J2AEY8&location=5124)) - My primary plea to future technocrats is, please be experimental, patient, nonideological, and slow-moving enough to learn lessons. Find your excitement somewhere other than in manipulating the nature of the economy. The economy is one of those things, like health, that should usually be reliable, constant, and boring. ([Location 5131](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B008J2AEY8&location=5131)) - Individuals can always form into groups to create risk and investment pools, but economic designs based primarily on supporting nonpersons will tend to create gaps that people fall through. Making the individual human the bearer of economic rights both preserves the most options and avoids the most pitfalls. ([Location 5149](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B008J2AEY8&location=5149)) - Why would big players cooperate? To kick the economy to the next peak in the energy landscape, great scale is needed, more scale than any one company or financial player can provide. The Apple Store and the Amazon store can’t grow as much, and as fast separately as they could together in a universal market. To understand why, recall some basic algebra. Start with Metcalf’s Law, which states that the value of a network is proportional to the square of the number of nodes. The square of the number of Apple users plus the square of the number of Amazon users is far less than the square of the combined user base. ([Location 5191](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B008J2AEY8&location=5191)) - A book isn’t an artifact, but a synthesis of fully realized individual personhood with human continuity. ([Location 5310](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B008J2AEY8&location=5310)) - Economics used to be about the patterns of results that emerged from rules that influenced human social behavior. It focused on the ways that policy engendered outcomes. But with every passing year economics must become more and more about the design of the machines that mediate human social behavior. A networked information system guides people in a more direct, detailed, and literal way than does policy. Another way to put it is that economics must turn into a large-scale, systemic version of user interface design.* ([Location 5364](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B008J2AEY8&location=5364)) - Economics used to be about the patterns of results that emerged from rules that influenced human social behavior. It focused on the ways that policy engendered outcomes. But with every passing year economics must become more and more about the design of the machines that mediate human social behavior. A networked information system guides people in a more direct, detailed, and literal way than does policy. Another way to put it is that economics must turn into a large-scale, systemic version of user interface design. ([Location 5377](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B008J2AEY8&location=5377)) - The human mind is particularly susceptible to engagement by rapid-fire feedback that taunts on the edge of granting treats. Semi-random feedback is a more intense dominator of attention than consistent feedback. Before the arrival of digital computation, pastimes that embodied this pattern of seduction were the obsessions of the global human experience. Sports and gambling provide fine examples. Computation can offer precisely this kind of feedback all too easily. Watch a child playing games on a tablet and then watch someone keeping up with social media, or trading stocks online. We become obsessively engaged in interactions with approximately, but not fully predictable, results. ([Location 5386](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B008J2AEY8&location=5386))