You Are Not a Gadget by Jaron Lanier

Author:Jaron Lanier
Language: eng
Format: azw3, epub, pdf
Tags: Science, General
ISBN: 9780307593146
Publisher: Vintage
Published: 2010-01-12T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 7

ALTERNATIVES ARE PRESENTED to doctrinaire ideas about digital economics.

The Digital Economy:

First Thought, Best Thought

A natural question to ask at this point is, Are there any alternatives, any options, that exist apart from the opposing poles of old media and open culture?

Early on, one of the signal ideas about how a culture with a digital network could—and should—work was that the need for money might be eliminated, since such a network could keep track of fractional barters between very large groups of people. Whether that idea will ever come back into the discussion I don’t know, but for the foreseeable future we seem to be committed to using money for rent, food, and medicine. So is there any way to bring money and capitalism into an era of technological abundance without impoverishing almost everyone? One smart idea came from Ted Nelson.

Nelson is perhaps the most formative figure in the development of online culture. He invented the digital media link and other core ideas of connected online media back in the 1960s. He called it “hypermedia.”

Nelson’s ambitions for the economics of linking were more profound than those in vogue today. He proposed that instead of copying digital media, we should effectively keep only one copy of each cultural expression—as with a book or a song—and pay the author of that expression a small, affordable amount whenever it is accessed. (Of course, as a matter of engineering practice, there would have to be many copies in order for the system to function efficiently, but that would be an internal detail, unrelated to a user’s experience.)

As a result, anyone might be able to get rich from creative work. The people who make a momentarily popular prank video clip might earn a lot of money in a single day, but an obscure scholar might eventually earn as much over many years as her work is repeatedly referenced. But note that this is a very different idea from the long tail, because it rewards individuals instead of cloud owners.

The popularity of amateur content today provides an answer to one of the old objections to Nelson’s ideas. It was once a common concern that most people would not want to be creative or expressive, ensuring that only a few artists would get rich and that everyone else would starve. At one event, I remember Nelson trying to speak and young American Maoists shouting him down because they worried that his system would favor the intellectual over the peasant.

I used to face this objection constantly when I talked about virtual reality (which I discuss more fully in Chapter 14). Many a lecture I gave in the 1980s would end with a skeptic in the audience pointing out loudly and confidently that only a tiny minority of people would ever write anything online for others to read. They didn’t believe a world with millions of active voices was remotely possible—but that is the world that has come to be.

If we idealists had only been able to convince those

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