The subtitle of Jaron Lanier’s previous book, You Are Not a Gadget, declared it a manifesto. His latest book, Who Owns the Future?, is something of a utopia. But like More’s original, its projections are entwined with a satirical-prophetic critique of existing conditions. As such, the position developed here is a slippery one: avowedly part Swiftian ‘modest proposal’, part diagnosis of a world in technical trouble, part plan of action for saving capitalism and its essential ‘middle class’. In these pages Fredric Jameson has pondered upon the fate of utopianism in a global society dissociated into extremes of wealth and scientific miracle at one pole, and generalized misery at the other. A survey of the output of the ‘merry band’ of hippy pioneers who have been so influential in the shape and reception of American technology over recent decades probably ought to quell any concerns that utopia has left us entirely, even if a moment of its encounter with a historical agent capable of articulating it in terms of the ‘social question’ has passed. The present utopian horizon is lent most of its shape by the tech overlords and their courtiers: either the techno-eschatology of such ‘singularity’ faithful as Google’s director of engineering, Ray Kurzweil—recalling the cosmism of early 20th-century Russia—or the more prosaic forecasts of a ‘maker’ future in which production will become ultra-cheap, ultra-flexible and ultra-distributed, opening the door to an infinite play of creative entrepreneurialism.
Though a fully paid-up member of the merry band in question, Lanier is troubled by the implications of such projections, and by the world that produces them. In place of the blasé anti-humanism predominant in tech circles, he would like to enshrine a humanistic technological culture. And—given the growing centrality of technological mediations—he thinks that nothing less than the fate of capitalism may be at stake.
Born in 1960 to a concert pianist and a sci-fi author, Lanier grew up in the New Mexico desert in a ‘new communalist’-style geodesic dome. It seems he was something of a prodigy, taking classes at New Mexico State University in his early teens, where he forged connections with luminaries of science and technology such as ai pioneer Marvin Minsky. As a teenager he hitchhiked to Mexico City to visit the avant-garde composer Conlon Nancarrow who had—after fighting in the Spanish Civil War—elected to live there in effective exile, rather than renounce his communist past in exchange for renewal of his American passport. Nancarrow’s player-piano-based charting of unexplored rhythmic territories apparently primed Lanier’s young mind for analogous adventures, and he began speculating about transcendence of the limits of mathematical notation and text-based computer code. After an attempt at starting a music career in New York, he ended up in the Bay Area in the early eighties, where he was quickly ensconced in the residual counterculture of the moment—which had traded psychedelic mind-expansion and socio-cultural revolution for ‘spirituality’ and technological experimentalism. Lanier’s attempt to create a graphical computer language, swapping the straight-laced commands of conventional programs for kangaroos, icecubes and birds, made the cover of Scientific American in September 1984. And from the mid eighties he became identified with Virtual Reality—the simulation of environments to be experienced immersively, often via a combination of goggles and wired ‘data gloves’—as its preeminent evangelist. The vr hype definitively exceeded reality in the early nineties when his French creditors lost patience and called time on his loans, scooping up a raft of Lanier’s patents in the process and leaving him railing against French ‘socialism’ and ‘bureaucracy’ in favour of a more freewheeling, American approach.
But he weathered those storms to remain a key tech-industry mover-and-shaker, ‘blue-sky thinker’ and regular contributor to Wired magazine. Lanier-related start-ups have changed hands for fairly sizeable sums: Eyematic, for example, where he was chief scientist, was sold on to Google in 2006 with one of Lanier’s patents for an estimated $40 million. And consultancy gigs have given him an insider’s angle not just on his Silicon Valley home turf, but also on some more tech-oriented Wall Street ventures. These days he works in research for Microsoft, but maintains a high-profile sideline in the distilling of idiosyncratic and often perceptive interventions, based on ideas developed over decades of techno-scientific speculation. And, as he likes to remind his readers, he’s still a musician: perhaps more in the lineage of La Monte Young—and more ‘world music’—than a literal follower of Conlon Nancarrow’s austere modernism, Lanier has turned out film scores and classical compositions, as well as performing with such figures as Terry Riley, Philip Glass and Yoko Ono. After three decades of media buzz it has become something of a cliché to refer to Lanier as a ‘renaissance man’ or ‘visionary’.
You Are Not a Gadget (2010) wove together enduring Lanier themes—the fate of music and the musician in a digital world; scientific possibilities for a ‘post-symbolic’ communication; the disjunction between the banality of the technological mainstream and the open horizon of sci-fi possibilities we could be exploring—with an attack on various tenets of standard Silicon Valley thinking. Narcotized by ideologies of free/open source software and free culture, which were supposed to bring about a generalized hi-tech gift economy, America had sleepwalked into a situation in which the jobs and incomes of the ‘middle class’ in general, and creative/intellectual professionals in particular, were under threat while the lords of the computing clouds accumulated stratospheric fortunes from their ‘meta’ positions on these developments. These processes should not be understood deterministically, as unavoidable outcomes of technological progress, because software more than any other technology expresses its designer’s worldview and decisions. Thus, while the ‘lock-in’ that comes with large systems is a real problem, it ought to be possible to rethink our technology—and the worldview it expresses—from the ground up. And a superior alternative to Silicon Valley machine-worship would be a romantic, humanistic orientation, attentive and open to the irreducibility of experience, promoting the place of the creative, productive individual, rather than consigning this figure to technological redundancy.
Who Owns the Future? is an extension of these arguments, going into greater detail in both its critique of the socio-technological present and its speculative vision of an alternative. Roughly the first two-thirds of the book are concerned with the former, while the final third focuses on sketching the latter, though Lanier eschews any straightforward structure of argument, cycling through a set of interrelated thoughts and often only fleshing out an idea several chapters after it has first entered the discussion. He also injects various playful digressions via a series of ‘interludes’, on subjects ranging through Aristotle and the ancient polis; the need for public ownership of basic infrastructure; a taxonomy of the ‘humours’ by which we conceive future relations of technology, people and politics; philosophical meditations on consciousness and the nature of the universal; humorous critical sketches of the freakishness and religiosity of Silicon Valley’s latter-day Saint-Simonians; a defence of the book as expression of the integral individual. Given the anarchic quality of Lanier’s construction, it would be trying to follow it in detail, but I will attempt to reconstruct the argument here in terms of its two broader phases: critique and alternative.
The central concern of this book is that, with the ocean of free information unleashed by the Web, more and more of the value created by real people is effectively moving ‘off the books’—going unremunerated, unaccounted for, unmediated by any economic transaction. This is perversely leading to the shrinkage of one area of the economy after another, while wealth in information and computing power expands at an accelerating clip. These developments have already taken their toll on ‘creative industries’—the music industry is Lanier’s favourite example—and will threaten broader swathes of the economy as existing technologies ripen. Three-dimensional printing, driverless cars, mass online courses and robotization may between them transform manufacturing, transport, education and healthcare. Unchecked, such tendencies will lead to a future of hyper-unemployment, confronting us with a question: