"I'm advocating person-to-person open commerce, with everyone being a first class citizen, both a vendor and a customer in a unified way." — Jaron Lanier
When I read Jaron Lanier's book Who Owns the Future I gained awareness of a powerful criticism of online economics for the first time. Jaron had initially explored this concept in his first book You are Not a Gadget and champions the belief that silicon valley's business model is ruining the internet and the world.
In this podcast interview, Jarion has a conversation with Ezra Klein about second-class barter roles, online economics, context collapse and frames his controversal perspective for an alternative path where people are paid for the value of their contributions on the internet... sound familiar?
In this post, I've transcribed excerpts from the podcast that relate to this topic — in an effort to share his inspiring message and frame how a decentralised social economy could re-shape our humanity.
The Interview
EK: Have we lost a conceptual spiritual ambition, have we become more technocratic? Lost our idea that there can be these radical transformations in human existence? If so, is that a bad thing?
JL: Utopian thinking taken over my corporate marketing speak; something said so often it doesn’t mean anything anymore.
It’s all about balance. It's important to take much of the world as given, but seeing through utopian thinking can be beneficial when young. If you take it too far, you’ll undermine yourself.
The danger of utopian thinking is that it can turn you into a pointless vandal.
More useful is to think of betterment as a project that is a challenge, not at the world as annoying (if we can get rid of the bad people, everything will be ok).
We need homeopathic utopianism.
EK: Have we lost the ability to imagine substantially different futures, in a ways that either could keep those futures from coming or make it too hard for us to imagine things that feel outside of our experience that are happening - traumatic and tremendous things?
JL: We have suffered from a narrowing of the imagination.
Imagining how things can go wrong is an essential ability. For awhile it was forbidden in silicon valley culture — but maybe we’ve gotten it over now.
The advertising model has been so expanded and centralised that it’s turned society crazy.
Others tend to say: “There could be nothing else, it’s the only possibility, there is no other option”
Some young people feel we have no degrees of freedom in something so important.
Outgrowing it is our only options.
EK: What if computers/internet had taken a different path?
JL: The choice to demand everything be free but do it within the context of capitalism.
We didn’t have to make this choice, and it was the wrong choice.
In the 80s, there was a tremendous imperative in techy world — starting in the free software movement — that we shouldn’t be paying for things online. It should be an ultimate democracy, socialist paradise. Code should be free. People should work as volunteers. Tremendous idealism. That orthodoxy couldn’t be defied, there was no room for any dissension at that time.
Another orthodoxy, we don’t want government in the middle of our affairs, we don’t want that much socialism, we want capitalism, we want free enterprise. We revered hero tech entrepreneur that through sheer will changes the world.
We had these two idealisms that co-existed. We want everything to be free, but in a capitalist society. There is only one solution — advertising.
Google was one example of solidifying this with their business model (advertising).
As the technology improves and algorithms improves and the system optimises itself, advertising turns into behaviourism at a global scale. Feedback loops that modify people’s behaviours by algorithms and for pay, and when we go over that threshold we make society insane… which is what happened.
What would a digital world look like that had taken a different fork in the road. One based on payment or authorship…
Let’s suppose that you were asked to pay a very small or modest fee to use a service like Facebook — in the way you would pay for something like Netflix — but let’s also suppose that because you’re contributing if you’re super successful and a lot of people care about what you’re doing you’d make money from it. You’d be part of a class of people that make their living from it, from royalties from being very effective on Facebook. They would be a creative class that makes their living, instead of being displaced by robots.
That seems like a plausible economically sound future.
There will even be a session at the American Economics Association meeting on the economics of this potential future. It’s finally starting to gain some notice in the mainstream economics community.
There is problem solving still left to be done about how much people would get paid, but there is no theoretical boundaries for this future from existing.
There would be two benefits:
- there would be less people being put out of work from advancements in computer science.
- there would be an additional incentive structure from the attention grab in the online world.
EK: But what about Youtube?
JL: Youtube is more of a communism model, it’s not an open marketplace. The distribution of rewards are narrower than would be in an open marketplace; fewer people are benefiting. Creators tend to be serving the purposes of google, but not like how new purposes can emerge in the open marketplace.
If we were not doing this grab for attention, what would be build on? What are ways that we could reward creators that would push for something that isn’t just getting a lot of eyeballs.
Aside from having a stable economy, there is another benefit of having another way that creators are paid. Anyone, anywhere that gets a following online for any reason.
There are people that are either trying to get attention for themselves or there are advertisers putting money in the system and want to change the world in some way. In both cases, the motivations are emphasising negative emotions over positive ones. It’s easier to get attention if you scare people, make them jealous, annoy them, etc.
You tend to have an incentive structure that brings our the ass in people – creates a mean and hostile environment. When there is an online system where there is another incentive that coexists with the drive for attention, that diversity makes people better because it opens up other possibilities. Example of this is LinkedIn – because the other incentive is furthering their careers.
Because on Facebook it’s not clear there is something else for most people on it, so you get caught up on these infantile games of attention grabbing through negativity.
EK: There is the deep-seated human game of showing which tribe you’re in, ascending in your tribe, showing you have the right opinions… are these critiques of the UI we’re using, the platforms and how they are build / designed / financed… or critiques of human nature. What is like when people live in big communities. Like high school.
It's part of the optimism of people who grew up not liking social dynamics, with the hope that technology would solve it. But is it actually human nature and communal nature that is the problem?
JL: People have a bi-stable nature. We can function as individuals or in pack members. When people act as individuals, they tend to overall be better in society. To the degree that people become part of packs they get in conflict and people judge each other based on pack dynamic. Decency and society suffers. Systems that bring out the individual aspect of people, not pack aspect of people, create a better environment for people.
An open, creative, capitalist market can create a more decent society, even though it might seem that it would be chaotic and lead to dominance of the fittest. It’s when things turn into packs and turn into coalesce into opposing groups that the worst in people comes out.
Unfortunately because our digital world has tried to corral people to make them modifiable by the advertisers that are paying to modify their behaviours, the most efficient way of doing that is to corral them into packs and to get them upset with the alternative packs so it makes society more negative and distrusts things more and more because that’s the best business plan if that’s your fundamental incentive.
EK: What can be done on these big digital communal to help people act more like individuals?
JL: The most powerful place to address outcomes is to look at the incentives that exist. The current incentive structure is pretty terrible. It’s to maximise engagement, which is a sanitised way of talking about addiction. We’ve adopted the tricks learned over many ways of how to addict people with feedback loops. Then in order to keep them and manipulate them, we engender negative emotions because it’s the most efficient use of the tools that we have. The customers that we attract are the most unsavoury characters in the worlds – information warriors to idiots.
If the incentive structure rewarded individuals, we’d see individuals being themselves and not pack members.
That is the reason that people should be paid for what they do online; they would have a chance to be rewarded as individuals and the incentive structure would turn around. If the big tech companies earned royalties on having rewarded the individuals that contributed the most to a network then they’d have an incentive structure that encouraged individual behaviour and not pack behaviour — which is better, although not perfect – we’re still human beings.
EK: Is the way people find you changes what you feel about to do for / with them — the way they are choosing to engage with you?
JL: Part of the reason that the podcast world is in general one of the more humane and beautiful world then others online is because podcast format doesn’t lend itself to be mashed up and subsumed into a collage or mashup by one of the bigger companies / meta services.
No one has figured out how to subsume podcasts into metaform, so it still exists as a personal expression.
When context collapses, meaning changes.
Without context the meaning shifts. When there is one community of shared meaning in an online context, that body of shared meaning so that the opposite meaning comes out because it maximises profit.
Here are a series of online social movements that started out on positive and hopeful but then engendered backlashes that were disproportionate went mean spirited and tuned everything.
Here's some examples:
Arab Spring: A bunch of young people in Arab world having access to social organisation online for the first time, that later fuelled terorrist recruitment.
Gamergate: Women in the gaming world trying to improve their situation and became the prototype for the alt right.
Black Lives Matter: Started as articulate, measured and compassionate response to a server problem. But the reaction was an online organised force in response to it has normalised racism and neo-facism.
What they have in common is that you start with a body of people who are pouring emerging into an online systems like social media and puts people in second class barter roles. This fuel comes in and the companies is to maximise the benefits of this “data” from people from a narrow perspective – how can they make money from it, how can they maximise engagement.
You have Arab kids trying to improve their world, women trying to improve their world in gaming or Americans trying to not get shot at police stops.
In all of those cases you’ll come across people with negative emotions and you’ll get them all rilled up and stir the pot. Because negative emotions are the more powerful ones, this negative counterforce ends up getting more power online then the original positive force.
In history we’ve seen this arch when people agitate to improve society – even though there are counter reactions – overall things get better over time.
Since social media has emerged, every-time someone seems to make progress the backlash is much more powerful then the initial progress and is not historically typical.
Prediction, the MeToo movement will result in a similar overwhelming negatively in about a year. The algorithms and attention seeking people will make this happen.
EK: Do the most powerful forces online seem to be outrage and group threat?
JL: As a robotic affair, finding the most engaging negative emotions and addictive patterns, combining manipulation and feedback and engage people by ruining society — that is the current business model.
Simplifying and reducing people so simply, that they can be modelled in 140 characters. Your work seems to have the quality of looking for ways of designing digital interactions that encourage us to be more complex and messily human.
It’s not about adding degree of inscrutability. I wish to honestly accept the degree of inscrutability that is already there.
When you work in information technology, you tend to dismiss and disbelieve anything that can’t be represented by information technology. It’s helpful to think of people as being mystical objects, we are beyond mechanism. We experience the world and that experience of the world is different to what we can measure in the lab.
EK: Why do you have so much faith that the difference between a subscription model vs adertising model will lead to such different outcomes. Both do have the qualities of creating a world where you want to maximize people coming back to it. Why do you think that choice – rather than choices in the user interface or how things are moderated – feels so fundamental?
JL: I am not advocating the subscription model. I'm advocating person-to-person open commerce, with everyone being a first class citizen - both a vendor and a customer in a unified way.
The reason I am so confident about it is because we've experimented with it before – Second Life.
One of the things we did with it, is put an economy in it. Once there was P2P commerce available in it – a whole other revenue stream for the company – people were buying and selling and we earned a commission. This economy grew!
The thing that I liked the best about it, instead of there only being a tiny handful of people that made all the money because they were the only ones who made content that mattered, a middle class emerged. People that were pretty good at creating one type of content or another.
It was a happy economy, you can see that scaling to a global level and having a decent society.
I'm not saying there weren't problems with Second Life – bad behaviour, financial problems, tax issues – there were many things wrong with Second Life... but in my opinion the experiment succeeded!
EK: Do you worry that the experience you had in Burning Man (omited from this transcript, refer to the podcast) will be the one people have in this new economy – validating this class structure that we do have?
JL: When we started talking I was mentioning the danger of utopian mindset. I'm hoping I'm adopting a homeopathic utopian approach here, of trying to keep my eyes on how things can be better but being a realist.
I have no doubt that whatever the problems that people bring into every formulation of society will repeat in the future. I don't expect us to reform ourselves just because there is a new medium. I would expect us there to be all these problems, but it's a matter of degree.
The problem with the online world now is not that there are people who are mean, it's not that there is misinformation, it's not that there is manipulation, it's not that there is addiction – it's that the quantity of all these horrible things is so great that it overwhelms everything and is destroying society and ruining us. It's a matter of degree.
I'm not expecting us to overcome these things or for us to suddenly enter utopia... I just want us to beat back the bullshit enough that we have breathing room to at least have some element of decency in society.
Right now we are failing to do that.
I hope you've fallen as deeply into Jaron Lanier's intelligence, perspective (and laughter, if you listened to the podcast).
I'm looking forward to reading his new book “Dawn of the New Everything” next and plan to post a book summary of my learnings once absorbed and fully processed.
