This is one of the best interviews by Jaron Lanier to the Publishers Weekly. Worth reading in it’s entirety but here is a highlight:
“I remember a few moments that were really dispiriting to me. I think the main thing that started to get to me was seeing my musician friends lose their careers. Since I’m a musician myself, I know quite a number of musicians, including some of the brand-name musicians, and the true numbers of what they make off of that are, with just a few exceptions, just bad, even though there’s an illusion that it’s better than it is.
I know that there are a number of responses that are very typical from the community that likes the stuff I criticize: well, it’s creative destruction, and a new world is coming about, and eventually it will create better things, and it’s their fault because they didn’t adapt. That’s what I used to say long ago. But when I looked at the individual cases, these were people who tried to adapt. They were doing something that was loved by other people and were being disenfranchised from benefiting in the society. It was almost like a new form of class warfare. Seeing the individual cases is what turned me. It wasn’t any abstraction…
The people who were hurt the most were what I call the creative middle class, people who were extremely successful—say, session musicians or record producers, songwriters. The thing about that is, as technology progresses, more and more human activity becomes similar to creative activity because the physical part gets mechanized. So what happens to musicians and journalists today is what happens to everybody at some point in the future.”