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

owner’s promise to repay the loan is copied, like the musicians’ music file, many times.
    So many copies of the wealth-creating promise specific to the homeowner are created that the value of the homeowner’s originalcopy is reduced. The copying reduces the homeowner’s long-term access to wealth.
    To put it another way, the promise of the homeowner to repay the loan can only be made once, but that promise, and the risk that the loan will not be repaid, can be received innumerable times. Therefore the homeowner will end up paying for that amplified risk, somehow. It will eventually turn into higher taxes (to bail out a financial concern that is “too big to fail”), reduced property values in a neighborhood burdened by stupid mortgages, and reduced access to credit.
    Access to credit becomes scarce for all but those with the absolute tip-top credit ratings once all the remote recipients of the promise to repay have amplified risk. Even the wealthiest nations can have trouble holding on to top ratings. The world of real people, as opposed to the fantasy of the “sure thing,” becomes disreputable to the point that lenders don’t want to lend anymore.
    Once you see it, it’s so clear. A mortgage is similar to a music file. A securitized mortgage is similar to a pirated music file.
    In either case, no immediate harm was done to the person who once upon a time stood to gain a levee benefit. After all, what has happened is just a setting of bits in someone else’s computer. Nothing but an abstract copy has been created; a silent, small change, far away. In the long term, the real people at the source are harmed, however.

CHAPTER 5
“Siren Servers”
There Can’t Be Complexity Without Ambiguity
    We are aware of emergent, complex problems like global climate change only because of how much data there is. But there are special challenges in assessing problems that come into our awareness because of big data. It’s hard to confirm that such broad problems definitely exist. Then, even if a consensus emerges about existence, it is hard to test remedies. One truism has emerged in the networked age. The mere existence of big data doesn’t mean that people will agree about what it means.
    The problem I am acting on is that a particular way of digitizing economic and cultural activity will ultimately shrink the economy while concentrating wealth and power in new ways that are not sustainable. That mistake is setting us up for avoidable traumas, as machines get much better in this century.
    Some will say that the problem I worry about does not even exist. There is a legitimate claim of ambiguity on this point, and that ambiguity is completely typical of how problems present themselves in our modern world of networked big data. For instance, one might argue that some of the hundred-thousand-plus jobs that seem to have been lost in the transition from Kodak to Instagram will be made up for because people will be able to use photo sharing to sell their handicrafts more efficiently. While this might turn out to be true in one instance or another, I argue it is false in the big picture.
    My initial interest was motivated by a simple question: If network technology is supposed to be so good for everyone, why has the developedworld suffered so much just as the technology has become widespread? Why was there so much economic pain at once all over the developed world just as computer networking dug in to every aspect of human activity, in the early 21st century? Was it a coincidence?
    There are a number of different explanations for the Great Recession that can be helpful. Brushing up against fundamental limits to growth is part of it, as is the rise of new powers of India, China, and Brazil, so that suddenly there are more customers with means bidding for the same resource base. There are also a lot more old people in most parts of the developed world, and more ways to spend money on their medical care than ever before.
    But