You are not a Gadget: A Manifesto (15 page)

One example of success brought up again and again is Jonathan Coulton. He has nice career centered on spoofs and comedy songs, and his audience is the geeky crowd. He is certainly not becoming a millionaire, but at least he seems to have authentically reached the level of being able to reliably support a family without the assistance of the old-media model (though he does have a Hollywood agent, so he isn’t an example to please the purist). There were only a handful of other candidates. The comedy blogger Ze Frank occasionally recorded tunes on his site, for example, and made money from a liquor ad placed there.

The tiny number of success stories is worrisome. The history of the web is filled with novelty-driven success stories that can never be repeated. One young woman started a website simply asking for donations to help her pay down her credit cards, and it worked! But none of the many people who tried to replicate her trick met with success.

This is astonishing to me. By now, a decade and a half into the web era, when iTunes has become the biggest music store, in a period when companies like Google are the beacons of Wall Street, shouldn’t there at least be a few thousand initial pioneers of a new kind of musical career who can survive in our utopia? Maybe more will appear soon, but the current situation is discouraging.

Up-and-coming musicians in the open world can increasingly choose between only two options: they can try to follow the trail of mouse clicks laid down by Jonathan Coulton (and apparently almost no one can do that) or they can seek more reliable sustenance, by becoming refugees within the last dwindling pockets of the old-media world they were just assaulting a moment before.

Of course, eventually the situation might become transformed into something better. Maybe after a generation or two without professional musicians, some new habitat will emerge that will bring them back.

China’s precipitous climb into wealth has been largely based on cheap, high-quality labor. But the real possibility exists that sometime in the next two decades a vast number of jobs in China and elsewhere will be made obsolete by advances in cheap robotics so quickly that it will be a cruel shock to hundreds of millions of people.

If waves of technological change bring new kinds of employment with them, what will it be like? Thus far, all computer-related technologies built by humans are endlessly confusing, buggy, tangled, fussy, and error-ridden. As a result, the icon of employment in the age of information has been the help desk.

For many years I’ve proposed that the “help desk,” defined nobly and broadly to include such things as knowledge management, data forensics, software consulting, and so on, can provide us with a way to imagine a world in which capitalism and advanced technology can coexist with a fully employed population of human beings. This is a scenario I call “Planet of the Help Desks.”

This brings us to India. India’s economy has been soaring at the same
time as China’s, much to the amazement of observers everywhere, but on a model that is significantly different from China’s. As Esther Dyson has pointed out, the Indian economy excels in “nonroutine” services.

India, thanks to its citizens’ facility with English, hosts a huge chunk of the world’s call centers, as well as a significant amount of software development, creative production like computer animation, outsourced administrative services, and, increasingly, health care.

Meanwhile, the United States has chosen a different path entirely. While there is a lot of talk about networks and emergence from the top American capitalists and technologists, in truth most of them are hoping to thrive by controlling the network that everyone else is forced to pass through.

Everyone wants to be a lord of a computing cloud. For instance, James Surowiecki in
The Wisdom of Crowds
extols an example in which an online crowd helped find gold in a gold mine even though the crowd didn’t own the gold mine.

There are many forms of this style of yearning. The United States still has top universities and corporate labs, so we’d like the world to continue to accept intellectual property laws that send money our way based on our ideas, even when those ideas are acted on by others. We’d like to indefinitely run the world’s search engines, computing clouds, advertising placement services, and social networks, even as our old friend/demon Moore’s law makes it possible for new competitors to suddenly appear with ever greater speed and thrift.

We’d like to channel the world’s finances through our currency to the benefit of our hedge fund schemes. Some of us would like the world to pay to watch our action movies and listen to our rock music into the indefinite future, even though others of us have been promoting free media services in order to own the cloud that places ads. Both camps are hoping that one way or another they will own the central nodes of the network even as they undermine each other.

Once again, this is an oversimplification. There are American factories and help desks. But, to mash up metaphors, can America maintain
a virtual luxury yacht floating on the sea of the networks of the world? Or will our central tollbooth on all smart things sink under its own weight into an ocean of global connections? Even if we can win at the game, not many Americans will be employed keeping our yacht afloat, because it looks as though India will continue to get better at running help desks.

I’ll be an optimist and suggest that America will somehow convince the world to allow us to maintain our privileged role. The admittedly flimsy reasons are that a) we’ve done it before, so they’re used to us, and b) the alternatives are potentially less appealing to many global players, so there might be widespread grudging acceptance of at least some kinds of long-term American centrality as a least-bad option.

Corruption has always been possible without computers, but computers have made it easier for criminals to pretend even to themselves that they are not aware of their own schemes. The savings and loan scandals of the 1980s were possible without extensive computer network services. All that was required was a misuse of a government safety net. More recent examples of cataclysmic financial mismanagement, starting with Enron and Long-Term Capital Management, could have been possible only with the use of big computer networks. The wave of financial calamities that took place in 2008 were significantly cloud based.

No one in the pre-digital cloud era had the mental capacity to lie to him-or herself in the way we routinely are able to now. The limitations of organic human memory and calculation used to put a cap on the intricacies of self-delusion. In finance, the rise of computer-assisted hedge funds and similar operations has turned capitalism into a search engine. You tend the engine in the computing cloud, and it searches for money. It’s analogous to someone showing up in a casino with a supercomputer and a bunch of fancy sensors. You can certainly win at gambling with high-tech help, but to do so you must supercede the game you are pretending to play. The casino will object, and in the case of investment in the real world, society should also object.

Visiting the offices of financial cloud engines (like high-tech hedge funds) feels like visiting the Googleplex. There are software engineers all around, but few of the sorts of topical experts and analysts who usually
populate investment houses. These pioneers have brought capitalism into a new phase, and I don’t think it’s working.

In the past, an investor had to be able to understand at least something about what an investment would actually accomplish. Maybe a building would be built, or a product would be shipped somewhere, for instance. No more. There are so many layers of abstraction between the new kind of elite investor and actual events on the ground that the investor no longer has any concept of what is actually being done as a result of investments.

True believers in the hive mind seem to think that no number of layers of abstraction in a financial system can dull the efficacy of the system. According to the new ideology, which is a blending of cyber-cloud faith and neo-Milton Friedman economics, the market will not only do what’s best, it will do better the less people understand it. I disagree. The financial crisis brought about by the U.S. mortgage meltdown of 2008 was a case of too many people believing in the cloud too much.

Each layer of digital abstraction, no matter how well it is crafted, contributes some degree of error and obfuscation. No abstraction corresponds to reality perfectly. A lot of such layers become a system unto themselves, one that functions apart from the reality that is obscured far below. Making money in the cloud doesn’t necessarily bring rain to the ground.

Here we come to one way that the ideal of “free” music and the corruption of the financial world are connected.

Silicon Valley has actively proselytized Wall Street to buy into the doctrines of open/free culture and crowdsourcing. According to Chris Anderson, for instance, Bear Stearns issued a report in 2007 “to address
pushback
and other objections from media industry heavyweights who make up a big part of Bear Stearns’s client base.”

What the heavyweights were pushing back against was the Silicon
Valley assertion that “content” from identifiable humans would no longer matter, and that the chattering of the crowd with itself was a better business bet than paying people to make movies, books, and music.

Chris identified his favorite quote from the Bear Stearns report:

As Chris explains, “despite the bluster about track records and taste … it’s all a crapshoot. Better to play the big-
n
statistical game of User Generated Content, as YouTube has, than place big bets on a few horses like network TV.”

“Big-
n
” refers to
“n,”
a typical symbol for a mathematical variable. If you have a giant social network, like Facebook, perhaps some variable called
n
gains a big value. As
n
gets larger, statistics become more reliable. This might also mean, for example, that it becomes more likely that someone in the crowd will happen to provide you with a free gem of a song or video.

However, it must be pointed out that in practice, even if you believe in the big
n
as a substitute for judgment,
n
is almost never big enough to mean anything on the internet. As vast as the internet has become, it usually isn’t vast enough to generate valid statistics. The overwhelming majority of entries garnering reviews on sites like Yelp or Amazon have far too few reviewers to reach any meaningful level of statistical utility. Even when
n
is large, there’s no guarantee it’s valid.

In the old order, there were occasional smirks and groans elicited by egregious cases of incompetence. Such affronts were treated as exceptions to the rule. In general it was assumed that the studio head, the hedge fund manager, and the CEO actually did have some special skills, some reason to be in a position of great responsibility.

In the new order, there is no such presumption. The crowd works for free, and statistical algorithms supposedly take the risk out of making
bets if you are a lord of the cloud. Without risk, there is no need for skill. But who is that lord who owns the cloud that connects the crowd? Not just anybody. A lucky few (for luck is all that can possibly be involved) will own it. Entitlement has achieved its singularity and become infinite.

Unless the algorithm actually isn’t perfect. But we’re rich enough that we can delay finding out if it’s perfect or not. This is the grand unified scam of the new ideology.

It should be clear that the madness that has infected Wall Street is just another aspect of the madness that insists that if music
canbe
delivered for free, it
must
be delivered for free. The Facebook Kid and the Cloud Lord are serf and king of the new order.