[onemorepassword]

Lanier would like to make a living as a musician the old-fashioned way, by selling albums through the music industry.

Since the copyright-exploitation industry has been under threat he has cobbled together all kinds of far fetched "visionary" theories as to why we should go back to the way things were, or else there will be doom.

Never at any point has he come up with a solution, or even a direction in which to look for a solution. Or at least anything that can be taken seriously:

"But what if you were owed money for the use of information that exists because you exist? This is what accountants and lawyers are for."

That's the logic of an 8-year old. Basically his entire vision comes down to "we are doomed, and the only way to save us is to artificially re-create scarcity, but fuck if I know how".

The robotic surgery example (which has fuck all to do with free and open information) shows how sickeningly selfish that is. We may be able to live without musicians, but people are fucking dying because of shortage of surgeons. But Mr. Lanier prefers a world in which surgeons are, like himself of course, part of a well-paid and taken care of middle class, and fuck everyone else.

[josh2600]

Wow, that's not at all what Jaron is talking about, at least from my perspective.

His argument is for an aggregate middle class that outspends the elite because without a large middle class there is no Market. His conjectures are much less about building an elite plutocracy as they are about maintaining a strong middle class to support robust economic growth.

In fact, the book specifically says that what happened to musicians can, and will, happen to other sectors of society, specifically spelling out how surgeons may be replaced eventually by robotics.

The argument is not against technical evolution, but rather against a spying society. The headline, as is usual for QZ, is inflammatory, and people like to grab onto Jaron's most flamboyant statements because of how he looks, but his ideas are a lot more reasonable than your post makes them out to be.

In short, I don't agree with what Jaron says, but his points are about the growth of a middle class that he sees as an artificial construct, but one that modern society cannot function without.

TL;DR: Jaron says some crazy shit, but he's mostly arguing for a robust middle class. See his repetitive mentions of Henry Ford making cars affordable for his factory workers.

[onemorepassword]

To me, Jaron's arguing for a robust middle class seems more like an opportunistic smoke screen than the actual core of his argument.

Especially if you look at his utterings from the point where he first "turned against the internet" (he used to actually see piracy as good thing!), which initially solely consisted of ranting against piracy and anonymity. It was only later that he came up with grander social theories to justify his rants.

Yes, the man is smart enough (certainly smarter than me) to identify some actual social and economic problems caused by the free flow of information.

But he's not interested in constructive solutions, because he the solution he has in mind was his starting point: re-establish the reign of copyright, abolish anonymity and stop the free flow of information.

And of course, micropayments to make sure he gets his share. It's funny how it always comes down to that one solution: hardwire micropayments into everything.

Does that sound like something that will solve the "surgeons replaced by robots" problem, or any of the myriad of other jobs replaced by technology, or just his personal problem?

[josh2600]

But hardwiring micropayments would probably be an equitable distribution of wealth, at least more so than what we do now. And it resolves the privacy concern; if I can pay you for access to your information and I want it, I can, but if you price your information beyond what I'm willing to pay you get privacy.

That sort of system of consent for spying is one potential equitable way to distribute wealth.

The most quixotic thing about Jaron is that stance on copying, because you can tell from an engineering perspective it still vexes him. His viewpoint is that when someone "copies" something over a network, you're not actually copying as there's only one logical copy (Apps in iTunes all deploy from one master copy, there aren't 500Million individual copies of the Facebook app, there's one app and 500Million caches) but that's playing with semantics as far as I can tell. I believe Jaron still wants to enter a socialist utopia, but only if we can all go at once instead of just the rich folk.

Again, I don't necessarily agree with what he has to say BUT I do want to help clarify his arguments, because I think they're worth exploring.

[msrpotus]

But he doesn't seem to have an appreciation that these trends aren't new or any idea for how to solve it.

We've faced these problems before. Cars made horses obsolete and left many (horse) drivers, stablehands, and others without jobs. Mechanization got rid of most jobs in agriculture. Just because something eliminates jobs doesn't mean it's a bad thing (in fact, because we no longer need to spend all day in the fields, we can do things like sit in offices and develop new innovations) but if you listen to Jaron Lanier, that's what you'd think.

[josh2600]

Jaron's argument is that you should get paid for your job even if it doesn't suck. We've kind of forgotten about this idea and now we only pay people for things we think of as work. In reality, social networks would have no value without curation, and thus all of the wealth that's created on Facebook should actually belong to the individuals who created this massive information store. It is ironic that Big Data is impossible without humans, and yet, Big Data is almost invariably wielded as a weapon against humanity (particularly in the case of the ridiculous insurance positions which Jaron compares to a risk-focused version of Maxwell's demon).

Jaron says that if we're all going into a new socialist utopia, that's awesome, but if only some of us are entering a new socialist utopia, on the backs of others, that's bad.

That's a sentiment that is, at the very least, worth considering. The argument Jaron is making is definitely a long term argument, but I'm happy someone is still thinking about the future.

Again, I don't necessarily agree with him, but I think he has a lot to say of considerable value.

[ChuckMcM]

This is a much better characterization of Jaron's position AFAICT. His notions on middle class are deeply rooted in an economic theory of wealth distribution which is what we have largely today. However it is clear that technology, and information products in particular, are changing the wealth distribution significantly. Combined with observations that corporations in tech share their wealth more widely and you get a community which is distinctly biased toward the 'wealthy' end of the curve with a smaller middle class. Jaron is concerned how that plays out economically.

[gamechangr]

He is focused on the economical repercussions of the new economic models that are changing wealth distribution.

Think of the South in the civil war in the US. They were grasping to understand how industrialization would bring more economic safety than slavery.