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

fewer jobs, but people are getting so much stuff for free. You can now find strangers’ couches to crash on when you travel instead of dealing with traditional hotels!” The claim is as wrong today as it was back then. No amount of cost lowering can foster economic dignity when it also means that there are fewer good jobs.
    All Siren Servers deliver dual messages similar to the pair pioneered by Wal-Mart. On the one hand, “Good news! Treats await! Information systems have made the world more efficient for you.”
    On the other hand, a little later: “It turns out you, your needs, and your expectations are not maximally efficient from the lofty point of view of our server. Therefore, we are reshaping the world so that in the long term, your prospects are being reduced.”
    The initial benefits don’t remotely balance the long-term degradations. Initially you made some money day trading or getting an insanely easy loan, or saved some money couch-surfing or by using coupons from an Internet site, but then came the pink slip, the eviction notice, and the halving of your savings when the market drooped. Or you loved getting music for free, but then realized that you couldn’t pursue a music career yourself because there were hardly any middle-class, secure jobs left in what was once the music industry. Maybe you loved the supercheap prices at your favorite store, but then noticed that the factory you might have worked for closed up for good.
Financial Siren Servers
    The world of financial servers and quants is even more secretive than the corporate empires like Wal-Mart or Google. I have also had a window into this world, though it’s hard to get a sense of how much of it I have seen relative to all that goes on.
    There was an initial phase, which I mostly missed, when digital networking first amplified ambitions at what had been the margins of the world of finance. Starting in the 1980s, but really blossoming in the 1990s, finance got networked, and schemes were for the first time able to exceed the pre-digital limitations of human deception.
    The networking of finance occurred independently and in advance of the rise of the familiar Internet. There were different technical protocols over different infrastructure, though similar principles applied.
    Some of the early, dimly remembered steps toward digitally networked finance included: 1987’s Black Monday (a market anomaly caused by automated trading systems), Long-Term Capital, and Enron. I will not recount these stories here, but those readers who are not familiar with them would do well to read up on these rehearsals of our current global troubles.
    In all these cases there was a high-tech network scheme at play that seemed to concentrate wealth while at the same time causingvolatility and trauma for ordinary people, particularly taxpayers who often ended up paying for a bailout.
    In addition, a loosening of regulation was often involved. There’s a legitimate argument about whether the weakening of regulation was the cause of the failures, or if the regulations were weakened because the temptations of overcoming them became so great because of new technologies, that financiers put more effort into political influence than previously.
    In either case, it is interesting that the lost regulations dated from market failures of old, particularly the Great Depression. That should not be taken to mean that the hazards that arose once finance was networked are precisely what they were before finance was regulated. I worry that regulators might be inclined to look only backward.
    I knew a few people involved with Long-Term Capital, and I fielded calls from Enron when it wanted to buy a startup that ultimately went to Google. Mostly I got to know what I believe were second- and third-generation financial Siren Servers.
    I have had many friends who worked as quants, and have also gotten to know a few very successful financiers at the helms of some of the more hermetic ventures.