May 2011

The Worst is Yet to Come. Photo by Steve Shapiro, New York 1966

I am going to sing along to Jaron Lanier’s (somewhat repetitive) interview in the NYT:

You’ve criticized the current shape technology is taking. How did we go wrong, so to speak?
JR: “The way I see we’ve been engaged in this long-term drama since the middle of the 19th century. Technologists provide tools that can improve people’s lives. But I want to be clear that I don’t think technology by itself improves people’s lives, since often I’m criticized for being too pro-technology. Unless there’s commensurate ethical and moral improvements to go along with it, it’s for naught”.

The “technologists” provide tools that enrich people who control them. There never been “ethical and moral improvements” to go along with a new technology. In fact the opposite is true. Karl Marx should be a good remedial start.

JR: “And so there’s been, in my view, a social contract. As technologists create disruption, the new stuff we bring in is generally better than the old. If a job is made obsolete, there will be a new job that is more dignified, more cerebral, better paying.”

Jaron Lanier is perhaps the only visible, sober and honest person in tech today and even he is dredging the utopian and the inevitable “progress.” One should look at the transition to agriculture or the transition from agriculture to the industrial age to see how much horror accompanied both.

So are we still adhering to that contract?
JR: “In my view, we forgot about that contract at the turn of the century. Now we have a different social contract. Services like Google and Facebook only exist because of the social acceptance of a mass amount of distributed volunteer labor from tons and tons of people. Google said we’ll just give you stuff for free. There’s a trade-off: you get some short-term benefits because things are cheaper, but in the long term your career prospects are diminished.”

There is no contract, no person in sound mind will voluntarily execute this so-called mythological “contract” unless under the influenced of extreme brainwashing or violence. And the transfer of wealth is the pattern we have seen in every transition. During the transition to agriculture the free hunters-gatherers were enslaved to people who grabbed the land (that’s why the land grab is the central biblical myth on the cusp of the agricultural transition). During the industrial revolution people grabbed the raw materials and the technologies that fueled the machines, hence the term “rubber barons”. Subsequently the former serfs and people who enjoyed the “traditional life” and relative freedom on the farms where huddled into factories and turned into the proverbial proletariat. The communist revolution was the completion of this tragedy. And now we have the nerds grabbing the servers to enslave the last relatively free class left standing after the Agricultural and Industrial revolutions, the creative class. The corporate nerds turned the creative output into a commodity to serve ads with.

Was it inevitable that many jobs would become less valuable as it became possible to replace them with automated processes or crowdsourcing?
JR: No. “The first concept of Internet implementation, to my knowledge, was by Ted Nelson in the 1960s. He envisioned a world in which instead of copying documents, each thing would exist only once. There’s someone who attends to it, and experiences online are built by references to these original copies. Everyone in the chain can make money off of it by a universal micropayment system”.

This is a great idea, perhaps the only solution? Commoditization of “content” is possible because there is a severed connection between an author and his art via the evil embed and the aggregation. When an author lost control of his art and had to give it away to the people who control the servers (farm land, factories) he loses his livelihood. The people who power the servers display the art at no cost to themselves. They art pays for the servers, the author gets the tiny percentage of the ad revenue in return, his humiliating enslavement and impoverishment is complete. The new lumpenproletariat in the slums of the information superhighway succumbed to the “progress”. But the agricultural revolution is still the meta tragedy.

Photo steveschapiro.com