Who Owns the Future? (BOOK REVIEW)
Who Owns the Future?
by Jaron Lanier
Simon & Schuster
Hardcover, $28.00
416 pages, Illustrated
ISBN: 978-1-4516-5496-7
Book
Review by Kam Williams
“The
rise of digital networks led our economy into recession and decimated the
middle class. Now, as technology flattens more and more industries—from media
to medicine to manufacturing—we are facing even greater challenges to
employment and personal wealth.
But
there is an alternative to allowing technology to own our future. In this
ambitious and deeply humane book, [Jaron] Lanier charts the path toward a new
information economy that will stabilize the middle class and allow it to grow.”
Excerpted from the
inside dust jacket
How do you
explain the nagging, unusually-high unemployment rate in the United States?
Is it merely that millions of manufacturing and white-collar positions have
been outsourced overseas, or might there be another explanation? According to author
Jaron Lanier, automation is a big part of the problem.
He points
out, for example that Kodak, which once employed 145,000 people, went bankrupt and
has ostensibly been replaced by Instagram, a billion-dollar company with an
operating staff of just 13. He argues that “technology is making jobs
obsolete—but not replacing them,” a trend which does not bode well for
humanity’s prospects.
We would do
well to heed the words of this sage visionary, a Renaissance Man in the truest
sense of the term. For besides being a philosopher, he’s a musician, composer
and, perhaps most notably for these purposes, the computer scientist credited
with coining the term “Virtual Reality” back in the Eighties.
As an
architect of the internet, Lanier co-created start-ups now better known as
Oracle, Adobe and Google, accomplishments for which he was named one of the 100
Most Influential People in the World by Time Magazine in 2010.
But like a latter-day Dr. Frankenstein, he has come to
regret how the fruits of his and fellow innovators’ labors have been appropriated
by corporate America
in a way which is making most of us extinct.
In this groundbreaking
book, Lanier describes in detail how digital networks like Google and Facebook
are destroying the middle class while simultaneously concentrating wealth and
power in the hands of a few. Furthermore, he lays out a viable blueprint for
reversing that frightening trend, a solution revolving around the novel notion that
everyone deserves to be compensated with royalties for sharing their personal
information online.
After all,
“the value of companies like Instagram and Facebook comes… from the millions of
unpaid users who contribute their… creativity to them.” Food for thought, for the
next time you tune in to the latest Youtube sensation generating millions of
hits for nothing more than 15 minutes of fame.
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