The digital age brings new twists to the age old human challenge of living together harmoniously. My particular interest is in how digitality affects the balance between politics and economics in our age compared to earlier ages—and how we might best use this information to plot a productive future. When our news today is filled with stories of hollowed out industries following automation and new concentrations of power and money in a small upper class because of access to superior networking, Jaron Lanier, computer scientist and pioneer of virtual reality, proposes an alternate, sustainable social contract. His ideas are particularly interesting to me because he sees the common human disposition at work over time—a connection I always find fascinating. In this, he echoes John Durham Peters, an American communications and media expert, who also notes how the most basic problems of civilization seem to repeat themselves in different masks: “they revive the most basic problems of conjoined living in complex societies and cast the oldest troubles into relief [and] suggest, from a more distant point of view, the relative stability of the human circus” (Peters 4). My paper will examine historical, current, and potential future states of our economic and political circus, with primary guidance from Jaron Lanier and supporting viewpoints from scholars I read in my recent digital culture course.
For Lanier, economic history is important to understand as a building block for our future. He points out that money in the form of ancient coins, or more modern currency backed by gold, were rooted in cultures with finite economies used for payment of past debt or current trade. Not until the arrival of modern economics and capitalism, post gold-standard, did the world enter an age of open-ended economic growth, concerned not only with past and current transactions, but with a future expanding economy. Mortgages provide an example, where home buyers make an offer with a cash downpayment and a good-faith promise to pay the remainder —abstract cash—in the future. This is only possible in an expanding economy, where some central bank keeps an accounting of this abstract money and formally admits it into use. But, with the digital age has come some disturbing byproducts: a dwindling middle class, growing surveillance, and data insecurity to name a few.
So in what specific ways are politics and economics operating to create this pattern, and how have these patterns looked in earlier eras, and more importantly, can we learn from them to build a more harmonious future? Lanier organizes this unruly challenge by suggesting that if we want a healthy democracy, we must possess two basic attributes: (1) a strong middle class and (2) long-term thinking. We have seen an erosion of the first because of insufficient attention to the second; therefore, I intend first to investigate the causes of the middle class erosion, then to describe Lanier’s creative long-term proposal for a healthier future.
Starting with our current struggling middle class, Lanier caught my attention by debunking a current widespread habit of mind, one that I have blithely embraced: the idea that ordinary Internet users have a right to free information—music, news, etc.! We invoke the indisputable American tenet of free speech as witness. But, Lanier points out the speciousness of this rationale. By not paying musicians or newspapers for their products, we participate in the general impoverishment of these industries and perpetuate a model that will eventually impoverish us all. There are economic winners, of course; they are the political and economic cartels who exploit anything that is not quite free—if music is free, wireless bills get expensive, if news is free, media owners will grow fat on big advertising by selling our information. But, the small players will lose economic ground—musicians will travel extensively to sing for their suppers, newspaper writers will work free-lance, part-time, or even full time without benefits. And we ordinary citizens? Maybe it is not a coincidence that our salaries have stalled, that college tuition has skyrocketed, that markets are still crawling out of a Great Recession, and good jobs with benefits are more and more scarce (Lanier 49).
History reveals similar patterns. Marx wrote about the embedded exploitation of the Prussian economy due to a dual value of goods: a “use-value” and an “exchange-value” (Spark Notes; ch. 1). Capitalists would pay employees for the value of their efforts in making products, but would turn around and sell the products at a higher price—for profit (Spark Notes; ch. 1). As the cycle repeated itself, workers could not afford the goods they produced. Not only did Marx see the economic damage to workers in this model, he saw psychological damage, as well: workers became little more than machines (Lanier 137)!
Lanier, see a similar pattern in Amazon’s machine-like “Mechanical Turk,” a term for the legions of low-paid workers of non-elite service jobs—like customer service. The original Mechanical Turk was an 18th century automaton that played chess, and while it played the part of robot convincingly, there was a human inside the costume making the moves. In a similar way, today’s Mechanical Turks are tasked with acting like software to the extent that interactions with customers seem almost automatic, seamless, and easy. But, again, what seems easy and free, comes at a price—to someone! These are low-paid, mentally deadening jobs.
Before we can impede the spread of low-paying jobs, Lanier feels that we must first understand how the winners thrive. He introduces the term “Siren Server,” an elite network optimized to collect and crunch big data. These Siren Servers gather massive amounts of free data (ours!), analyze it with the most powerful computers and the most highly skilled computer engineers, then use the results to manipulate the world. These Siren Servers place themselves at those unregulated spots—often where law has not caught up with technology—to opportunistically skim off riches before the middle class can grab their portion (Lanier 54). Examples are high-frequency trading, ultra risk-averse insuring, perfectly timed banking transaction where the same money can collect interest in two time zones simultaneously, or scrutinizing of financial data for micro-patterns that tap trickles of money (many trickles make large pools)!
The hegemony of these Siren Servers has strengthened as the middle-class social safety nets—union protection, academic tenure, licensing of trades, copyrights, patents, taxi medallions—have frayed (44). These safety nets had provided multiple paths to success, but the rich fought them as impediments to massive wealth and the poor, who had not benefited from them, joined the fight out of resentment.
Lanier pointedly explains the goal of a Siren Servers: To privatize gain and democratize risk (278). In the insurance field, the goal is to optimize low-risk pools; the economic drag of high-risk people inevitably radiates out to the general population and taxpayers pick up the bill. In finance, high-frequency schemes siphon off the riches leaving ordinary person holding riskier instruments. The wealthy aim to figure out how little the middle class can be made to accept in return for their information. A slightly different example: we purchase access to an eBook, not the actual book, but if we change platforms we forfeit that access. The asymmetrical aspect of this economic exchange is very clear! With all these examples, Lanier exhorts that low prices do not compensate for a solid job or career.
There is yet another, more subtle, reason for concern. Lanier points out that big-business data can be flawed. He blames the “hive mind” (116) and its uncritical acceptance of data results. Big business’ computer algorithms are abstruse math and the correlations made by them are not self-evident. If we need a good example, think of the Great Recession where correlations created poorly understood investment packages which managed to hide bad assets in so complex a manner that untangling them has defied courts, SEC, and sundry experts; although, the players nearest the Siren Server managed to skim off great wealth before the system crashed. Siva Vaidhyanathan, a media scholar and cultural historian, sees similarly opaque algorithms in Google’s search rankings. He warns that they may seem like a “proxy for quality” (Vaidhyanathan 3), but this is not so. Google is a publicly-traded company with obligations to its shareholders first, and we are not Google’s customers, but its products—for it is our personal information that is sold to advertisers, the true customers (3). In fact, I have an example of this myself! The day after launching this blog, a Google representative called to say she could guarantee front page placement of my product! I was flattered, though I admit to being too humble to believe I am ready for the front page. Still, that was fast! Back to Vaidhyanathan, who makes a much broader and overarching point by warning that Google ranking choices can actually affect our world view in ways we don’t understand (7), an issue also addressed by Abby Smith Rumsey, an historian with specialization in cultural records and digital impacts, who warns of the importance for all users to become “digitally literate” (Rumsey Chapter 9), that is, to recognize when the trade-off between convenience and choice is being made.(Chapter 9).
So, before turning to a potential alternate economic model, the importance of addressing the threat of this Siren-Server economy can not overstated—and cannot be described quite as poetically as either John Durham Peters or Harold Innes. Peters, reminds us that digital media are focused less on meaning than on power and organization and that
endless tagging, tracking, and tracing of our doings
reminds us that data management for power, profit, and prayer is
both ancient and modern [and] computation, broadly speaking, runs
from ancient priests watching the stars to modern ones mining the
“clouds” (Peters 23)
Again, I love Peters’ thread that connects us to the past. Innes, a Canadian political economist, sees civilization over times employing “fulcrums,” on whose points rest the levers that shift power (Lanier 20). He holds that one type of fulcrum is documentation and that those who control documentation “earn fortunes and make and break empires” (21). Everything old is new again. One final thought before I transition from our current troubled state to Lanier’s proposed future state. A class reading of Dave Eggers’The Circle, has whispered to me throughout my reading of Lanier. Perhaps the narrative quality of his work has made it more difficult for me to interweave it into Lanier’s self described “non-narrative science fiction” or “speculative advocacy” (Lanier 9), but I do want to include my murmuring impressions. First, the idea of “boundedness” versus “unboundedness,” which was so important in The Circle—where a Siren-Server company with the goal of encircling (bounding?)—the globe in a culture of transparency (full surveillance)–was a key theme. The more visible the world’s population, the more vulnerable they were for manipulation. The climactic metaphorical aquarium scene made a grim prediction for where that encircled, delimited, transparent life would lead as a shark was admitted to the aquarium to make immediate work of devouring all the lesser creatures within the glass walls (Eggers 467-77). The relevance for our current state could not be more chilling.
With that dystopian image lingering in mind, it’s time to looking ahead to Lanier alternate economic-political path. It is deeply bound up with another historical voice, Ted Nelson, a pioneer (ca., 1960s) of digital media—one of the first people to see the potential of digital technology to carry media. Of key importance in Nelson’s framework is two-way communication from node-to-node in computer networks. Later, in Tim Berners-Lee’s World Wide Web, the more convenient choice of one-way communication was made, and that has made all the difference (for the worse) in the estimation of Jaron Lanier. A digital age with two-way communication would ensure that information used was linked back to its source. So, while current big-business can invisibly bundle and monetize everyone’s information for the benefit of a few, a two-way link would be traceable back to the owner—and this would enable micro payments or royalties to be paid and to accumulated over time for anyone whose information was used. To those who might not think their Web surfing is worth anything, Lanier points out that it is highly valuable to those Siren Servers. And, for Lanier, only when we have economic symmetry can the mix of democracy and politics truly be viable (246). And, in addition to correcting the imbalance of today’s riches, a two-way Internet would inherently improve the governance of Intellectual property rights and copyright credits and would seamlessly advance cyber security and diminish stalking.
Siva Vaidhyanathan might point out here that we were, once again, guilty of not planning—as when big auto and big airlines lobbied for business advantage, which left us open to global warming, global terrorism, and pandemics (Vaidhyanathan 5). The encouraging news, however, is that Lanier feels we can turn our massive economic ship of state into a new healthier direction.
The most provocative part of Lanier’s proposal is that although it would be a massive undertaking, he insists that it could be fun! Here, I am sure Jane McGonigal, game designer, who is convinced that gaming is the ideal way to harness the collaborative power of populations for solving global problems (McGonigal 18:50), would agree. Lanier, foresees solving our economic problem by assigning economic avatars to everyone so that they can explore a variety of transaction styles in the new regime. In the current economy sellers set a price and buyers have to pay it. In the new economy, a seller would still set a price, but a buyer might use his avatar to enter into a variety of transaction types–all invisible to the seller through the magic of algorithms and two-way tracking. If the buyer is a young person starting out, he might opt to enter into a “try before buying” situation, or he might join a risk pool with other young people to “buy on faith,” or he might issue a bond. The reason this wouldn’t devolve into a “race to the bottom” with everyone using the “try before buying” choice, is that in a two-directional economy algorithms are always keeping the books and everyone will be receiving those micro-payments from the use of their information on line. These micro payments would have both an “instant” and a “legacy” portion—the “instant” portion might certainly be vulnerable to the old Keynesian economic swings, but the “legacy” portion would provide the market momentum to soften the swings and prevent market stalls (Lanier 288). If the algorithms enabling such transactions seem too complicated, Lanier reminds readers that they are no more complicated than the current Google, eBay, and Facebook algorithms of today, but in the more humanistic economy, these algorithms would serve both the middle class as well as the upper class.
Projecting into the future is always problematic. Details are impossible to pin down. But the benefits seem certain. And even if familiar stigmatized concepts must accompany the transition, like taxes, a central bank, or assignment of a personal commercial identification, Lanier believes they will be needed. There is no expectation that the government should or will “run” the economy, but it will be necessary to have an overarching body that can ground a long-term system and provide security to members if a bank fails. The government may also be where the overarching algorithms are stored, where the poor or prostrate (we can all fall on hard times) might become “surrogate customers,” if they cannot afford to be customers themselves. As for taxes, Lanier emphatically legitimizes them as the necessary price of a mature humanistic economy to pay for infrastructure and to act as a fail-safe to stave off asymmetrical tendencies and moral hazard. Good things do not come free. And a central bank, in concert with the right-sized government, permits that future-facing, faith-in-the-economy type of currency to enter the system somewhere. There is no way to manage complexity without it. But, in the new two-way digital system, Lanier sees our best chance of balancing democracy and capitalism.
I have thought about what sort of critical response I might make to Lanier’s ideas, which I find impressively thought out; and as he himself says, there is only so much detail that can be front-loaded into a future plan like this. But, I do have one thought that might be a fitting companion to his offerings, and that concerns our current tendency to promote the importance of science and technology curriculums (STEM) to the near exclusion of humanities. I strongly believe that school curriculums and societies that are immersed in humanities would more naturally support the very heart of Lanier’s humanistic economy.
Jesse Stommel, self-described pedagogue, technologist, and open educator, in a web entry for Hybrid Pedagog, has closely evaluated some future-thinking guidelines for education that would capitalize on digital architecture while preserving the humanistic side of our culture. For him, pedagogy is centrally “political, subjective, and humane” (Stommel web no page). Interestingly, he emphasizes that teaching must be more two-way than one-way (reminiscent of Ted Nelson vs Tim Berners-Lee), where teachers and students collaborate in learning endeavors. Stommel decries the one-sided model, where teachers parrot lessons and students passively absorb them; he sees the students in this model as being “positioned as sub-human”—again, the similarity to Lanier’s concern for “Mechanical Turk” models is notable. Stommel quotes John Dewey, “Unless the mass of workers are to be blind cogs and pinions in the apparatus they employ, they must have some understanding of the physical and social facts behind and ahead of the material and appliances with which they are dealing” (Stommel web no page). I agree, and only then can a critically thinking population self-monitor a fair economic outcome and refuse to become Mechanical Turks.
In closing, I must disclose that I am not very proficient with much of the technology of the day. I am not yet on Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, etc. But, I do think the convenience of libraries on line, information of all kinds available at our fingertips, and the awesome opportunity offered by MOOCs, is worth whatever growing pains we may have on the road to righting this wayward cultural ship of state, and I am an optimist; I think the middle class will manage to reclaim control of this economic-political ship, then sail off to one of those Hawaiian islands for a well deserved retreat.
Works Cited
Eggers, Dave. The Circle. San Francisco:McSweeney’s Books, 2013.
Lanier, Jaron. Who Owns the Future? New York:Simon and Schuster, 2013.
McGonigal, Jane. “Gaming Can Make a Better World.” TED.com. TED Conferences, LLC, Feb
2010. Web. 16 May 2016.
Peters, John Durham. Marvelous Clouds, Chicago:University of Chicago Press, 2015.
Rumsey, Abby Smith. When We Are No More. New York:Bloomsbury Press, 2016. Class handout.
SparkNotes Editors. “SparkNote on Karl Marx (1818–1883).” SparkNotes.com.
SparkNotes LLC. 2005. Web. 16 May 2016.
http://www.sparknotes.com/philosophy/daskapital/section1.rhtml
Stommel, Jesse. “Critical Digital Pedagogy: A Definition.” Hybrid Pedagogy lab.com.
18 Nov 2014. Web. 16 May 2016.
Vaidhyanathan, Siva. The Googlization of Everything. Berkeley:University of
California Press, 2011. Class handout.
