Who Owns the Future? by Jaron Lanier Read Free Book Online

deadly, at times approaching a form of war. Generations of labor activists took great risks and suffered so that weekends, retirement, and general calm and security could become imaginable for ordinary people. The labor movement has never been perfect, but I respect it and am grateful for the improvements it has brought to our world.
    Despite my favorable regard for organized labor, for the purposes of this book I have to focus somewhat on certain failings. The problems of interest to me are not really with the labor movement, but with the nature of levees. What might be called “upper-class levees,” like exclusive investment funds, have been known to blur into Ponzi schemes or other criminal enterprises, and the same pattern exists for levees at all levels.
    Levees are more human than algorithmic, and that is not an entirely good thing. Whether for the rich or the middle class, levees are inevitably a little conspiratorial, and conspiracy naturally attracts corruption. Criminals easily exploited certain classic middle-class levees; the mob famously infiltrated unions and repurposed music royalties as a money-laundering scheme.
    Levees are a rejection of unbridled algorithm and an insertion of human will into the flow of capital. Inevitably, human oversight brings with it all the flaws of humans. And yet despite their rough and troubled nature, antenimbosian levees worked well enough to preserve middle classes despite the floods, storms, twisters, and droughts of a world contoured by finance. Without our system of levees, rising like a glimmering bell-curved mountain of rice paddies, capitalism would probably have decayed into Marx’s “attractor nightmare” in which markets decay into plutocracy.
Drove My Chevy to the Levee but the Levee Was Dry
    The levees weathered all manner of storms over many decades. Before the networking of everything, there was a balance of powers between levees and capital, between labor and management. The legitimizing of the levees of the middle classes reinforced the legitimacy of the levees of the rich. A symmetrical social contract between nonequals made modernity possible.
    However, the storms of capital became super-energized when computers got cheap enough to network finance in the last two decades of the 20th century. That story will be told shortly. For now it’s enough to say that with Enron, Long-Term Capital Management, and their descendants in the new century, the fluid of capital became a superfluid. Just as with the real climate, the financial climate was amplified by modern technology, and extremes became more extreme.
    Finally the middle-class levees were breached. One by one, they fell under the surging pressures of superflows of information and capital. Musicians lost many of the practical benefits of protections like copyrights and mechanicals. Unions were unable to stop manufacturing jobs from moving about the world as fast as the tides of capital would carry them. Mortgages were overleveraged, value was leached out of savings, and governments were forced into austerity.
    The old adversaries of levees were gratified. The Wall Street mogul and the young Pirate Party voter sang the same song. All must be made fluid. Even victims often cheered at the misfortunes of people who were similar to them.
    Because so many people, from above and below, never liked levees anyway, there was a triumphalist cheer whenever a levee was breached. We cheered when musicians were freed from the old system so that now they could earn their livings from gig to gig. To this day we still dance on the grave of the music industry and speak of “unshackling musicians from labels.” 1 We cheered when public worker unions were weakened by austerity so that taxpayers were no longer responsible for the retirements of strangers.
    Homeowners were no longer the primary players in the fates of their own mortgages, now that any investment could be unendingly leveraged from above. The cheer in that case went