Who Owns the Future? (34 page)

An argument from the left is equally important. If you have to pay to use information in general, then experiments like Wikipedia would never get off the ground, because they’d first have to argue that they deserve an exceptional license to get free access. The granting of those exceptional licenses would become a political choke hold on expression. Even though I have criticized Wikipedia, I would abhor any system that regulates experiments of that kind.

Going “all the way” and treating information as genuinely valuable, from the moment it first originates from a person, is the path around these depressing bureaucratic failure modes.

Information systems can create problems, obviously, but they can also create new options. The existence of advanced networking creates the option of directly compensating people for the value they bring to the information space instead of having a giant bureaucracy in the middle, which could only implement an extremely crude and distorting approximation of fairness.

The path proposed here can’t be taken easily, because we have already gone far down a different one. A difficult transition would need to be endured. Even at its best this new path would ultimately still present serious annoyances.

Yet despite the titanic “friction” of a transition, and the inevitable imperfection of the result, the path proposed here is still the better alternative.

A Sustainable Information Economy

A humanistic approach to future digital economies might, on first sniff, smell redistributionist, but it is nothing of the kind. Some people would contribute and earn more than others. The point is not to create a fake contest where everybody is guaranteed to win, but rather to be honest about who contributed to successes, so as not to foster fake incentives.

The most powerful arguments for a humanistic approach to high-tech economics don’t rely at all on a liberal concept of fairness. Instead they rely on more accurately marrying risk and achievement to reward.

I described the biggest long-term advantage to business earlier, which is an expanding economy as digital efficiencies become more pronounced. Valuing
all
the information on networks (instead of mostly valuing the information in the “most meta,” or most dominant network nodes) will create an economy that can continue to grow as more and more activity becomes software-mediated.

Right now, because we aren’t accounting for the value of most information on the ’net, efficiencies based on technology can seem to cause a market to shrink instead of grow, even though a few new fortunes are created along the way. This is ultra-stupid.

Some other benefits to business from humanistic information economics will include:

• an expanded range of long-term business models;

• addressing intellectual property rights incrementally and gracefully instead of as an exception or affront;

• more predictable liabilities and obligations related to privacy and other potentially creepy digital-settings policies;

• and, as I already argued, enabling an economic model that can continue into the future even as bits gradually expand their influence over physicality.

Furthermore, these benefits will accrue to both the individual and the large corporation, creating a shared interest between small and large players.

A Better Beach

The silly beach fantasy that opened this book would unfold differently in a humanistic economy. It’s a sunny day, and you are making a sand castle. Is it possible to make a stable bridge over the moat? You ask the seagull. “No, I can’t find any record of that having been
done over such a large moat,” it replies. “Sand bridges collapse at that scale. Of course we could infuse robotic grains into the sand.”

“No,” you say to the seagull. “That would be cheating.” Besides, you don’t feel like spending money on nanobots to play with the sand.

You carefully shape a hill of sand and start to carve away a space within it. It is looking a little like the giant natural arch of Kashgar. “Seagull, set up a simulated twin of this arch.” Through your mixed-reality glasses, you experiment with shaping the simulation. Ah, a solution!

You call your friends over. They’re delighted.

“Seagull, quick! Post this thing before it collapses.” A little later, the seagull says, “Your arch has been replicated fifty-eight times around the world. Check out this giant version from a beach in Rio.” Through the mixed-reality glasses, you and your friends find yourselves sharing a beach with revelers in Rio.

Wow, a nice day’s earnings for you. “Seagull, that casino nearby has an excellent restaurant, doesn’t it? Let’s splurge.” You call out to your friends, “Who’s hungry?”

CHAPTER 20

We Need to Do Better than Ad Hoc Levees

Keep It Smooth

One problem with traditional middle-class aspiration is that the quest for security tends to have an all-or-nothing quality. The traditional journey to middle-class dignity has often been comprised of big, chunky thresholds. You won the big job, or the big promotion, or not. You got the mortgage, owned your own taxi medallion, got into the union, got the record deal—or not. Those who didn’t make it over such thresholds could still find means to success, but with greater risks and less security.

What felt like the attainment of economic dignity (through a levee) to one person inevitably felt to another, less successful aspirant like the insertion of an artificial barrier. This was a mad way to run a society, and one that often made middle-class people who only wanted to create stable family situations, or plan for their old ages, seem like the bad guys. There was a tremendous amount of vitriol hurled at union members, for instance.

The inherent tension was exacerbated with the arrival of the Internet, since young people became especially impatient. “Who is a musician to tell me not to use her music for free in my video just because it’s copyrighted?”

The project at hand is to imagine leveraging network technology to create a smoother kind of path to achieving ordinary, middle-class financial security.

Such security would no longer come in quantum blocks, but
would build up gradually. It would not be absolutely assured, but would be accessible to a preponderance of people who seek it. Security would not be administered by bureaucrats, but would emerge in the marketplace.

A more incremental path to security would not answer the hard philosophical questions about such concepts as copyright, but it would make them less contentious. In a world in which a person starts to earn royalties on tens of thousands of little contributions made over a lifetime of active participation on the ’net, it will matter a little less if there is a conflict about attribution in some minority of those cases.

The creation of a much more general and ambient kind of intellectual property would happen in a routine, small-scale way. This new incremental form of accumulated financial dignity might supplement traditional systems like copyright, unions, or tenure during a transitional era, and eventually replace them. Or maybe both systems would coexist indefinitely. I cannot fill in all the details in this early sketch.

Ideally,
earning
full-on wealth, not just cash, will become more like what
spending
is like already. There will be a multitude of incremental wealth creation events instead of a few big game-changing leaps in one’s status.

In a more incremental world, attributions and rewards will still be contested, no doubt, but particular outcomes will no longer make or break lives. The consequences of losing a particular battle for attribution will become analogous to missing out on a good sale. There will be plenty of other occasions to make up for it.

Another problem with existing chunky levees is that they tend to have zero-sum gotchas. If everyone gets a taxi medallion, then medallions become worthless. That also means speculators can buy up medallions and corner the market, undoing the original purpose. What we should seek instead is a system where value
increases
as more and more people participate in it.

So, a way to conceive the project at hand is to imagine how computer networks could help create a fluid, incremental kind of wealth creation that thrives at a middle-class level and is not zero-sum.

Not Enough Money Grows on Trees

One of the most central qualities of a network is its “topology.” That means the way things are connected. Some networks are formed as “trees.” In a tree-shaped network, you can identify a top node, and none of the connections form loops. For instance, Apple is the top or “root” node
*
in its app store network, and your Apple device is an ordinary “leaf” node in that network. You can’t start your own app store and directly sell an app to another customer. If you could, you’d form a loop of connections, but you can’t.

*
This gets confusing, since
top
and
root
mean the same thing when it comes to networks, even though they mean approximately opposite things in living trees. Other terms that are sometimes used to express the same concept are
source
and
center
. We must use the physically inspired vocabulary we have inherited in order to describe abstract ideas. Getting used to this awkwardness is a big part of becoming conversant in digital technology.

A less constrained topology is a “graph,” which can include loops. In a graph-shaped network, you could sell to someone else, who could sell to someone else, who could eventually sell something else back to you, without involving the top node. Everyone’s used to graphs. That’s how social networking is structured, for instance. You can link to someone who links to someone who links to you, forming a loop. That type of graph is not where online commerce is happening, however, which is a big problem.

So far, the networks where ordinary people can make some money online have tended to be trees. For instance, you can make money on eBay, but eBay is the root node. It’s a violation of the terms to make a sale on the side, one that evades eBay’s root node.

However, information age commerce would become more beneficial to middle classes if it took place on a more general graph with loops. The reason is that the distribution of interest and connections gets “thicker” or “bushier” on a general graph than on a tree. More nodes become connected to a typical node.

The biggest shift since the publication of my previous book has been the rise of the app economy, pioneered by Apple. This is generating
some serious cash flow, and I take that as a sign that a better, more useful information economy is possible.

However, the current information economy is simply not doing enough. If there were a universal app economy, it might be big enough to support a middle class. As it is, the app economy is confined to proprietary tree-shaped company stores. Even so, this sub-economy is getting bigger, but not big enough fast enough to save the middle class.

In speaking with a wide variety of app developers, what I find is that there is indeed an upper stratum of successful app entrepreneurship that is supporting not only individuals, but in fact significant companies. This is really a wonderful development, recalling the growth of the software industry during the rise of the PC.

The app economy is, however, a new kind of star system, even worse than old Hollywood. At least Hollywood funded a range of hopefuls. Hollywood paid for its own risk pools, while app stores expect hopefuls to self-fund. The game Angry Birds is a big hit, but there isn’t a thick trunk in the curve of distribution of other games that do less well. Instead there is a steep drop-off to miserable numbers.

The pattern repeats in most of the cases where people are starting to find careers in the new information economy. A small number of people make some money from YouTube videos, for instance, because Google has started to share ad revenue with top stars. This is a great development, but the number is inherently small, and the tiny numbers of video producers who are making a living for the moment are not necessarily doing well enough to build wealth for their futures.

This tree-like distribution pattern isn’t surprising, but it contrasts with the graph-like distribution of interest found in the social networking world. There one finds a thus far unmonetized middle-class distribution of interest, meaning a very thick tail of outcomes. Instead of finding either stardom or abject obscurity, a great many people enjoy outcomes in the middle of the spectrum.

Proprietors of social networks are quick to point out research that distinguishes their lushly connected graph networks from more constrained tree networks. For instance, Facebook funded
research showing that Facebook users are exposed to a great diversity of information from a great diversity of origins.
¹
(This does not address my complaints that Facebook’s design still rewards acquiescence to someone else’s categories. It just shows that information flows in thickly connected graphs really are thicker in character.)

In social networks we see a pattern in which lots of people are able to get each other’s attention, which contrasts with the star system that emerges in tree-shaped company stores.

Taken together, this is evidence that a graph-shaped information economy can support a middle class—as opposed to the winner-take-all outcome that emerges in tree-shaped economies. A monetized version of a many-to-many network could create an organic path to middle-class wealth that would be
better
than the ad hoc mountain of levees that sustained middle classes in pre-digital capitalism.

CHAPTER 21

Some First Principles