[7] Who Owns The Future?: Jaron Lanier - 200 pages - Review

Part 2

This will likely suffice as the whole "review" given that I don't see what I have to say about it changing by chugging through the next 150 pages.

(Thighs. When your blog needs more sex.)

This book, and the way it's laid out, is a long thought experiment with many disparate and perhaps incomplete ideas. It feels like if I blogged in short form, then pushed all the blogs together, then tried to make a claim about the future of people or culture.

You can tell that Lanier is well-read and well-traveled. He gives you an insight into the conversations he's had from Silicon Valley to different U.S. intelligence agencies. He's sat in on the conversations from MIT super scientists who made all sorts of predictions about what the future of the internet and big data would mean. Unfortunately, it seems exceedingly hard to coalesce all of these experiences into an argument for an augmented and representative economy.

The book centers around the idea of "siren servers." Essentially, big data gathering engines give insight to the people running them. This insight is  often sold to advertisers or used to exploit the market. There are a whole host of ideas, often cliched and predictable, that surround what people try to claim about the data collected. Lanier tries to advocate for us petty humans who get lost in the hype.

Much time is dedicated to discussing the implications of things being "free." What we've seen happen to the arts in music or tv, Lanier thinks will happen to education. We'll slowly erode "the middle class" because we'll lose appreciation for the humans required to input, manage, and interpret information. It will just be presented for free in exchange for transparency to our information. It promises to be thought provoking, but it's hard to grasp how strong the argument is with how it's structured.

Arguably, the book could be half the length or perhaps split between examples in one half and abstract informal theory in the other. I'm a little let down because it's a topic and world with ever-changing and challenging ideas to explore, but maybe so much so that even it's pioneers and insiders have a really hard time trying to talk about.