fight the future
Oct. 27th, 2014 06:11 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
queenluaSo lately I've been reading Who Owns the Future? by Jaron Lanier—slowly. I'm having trouble reading it more than a little scrap at a time, because I find it a pretty damn depressing read. It articulates a lot of my vague uncomfortable worries—the increased dominance of algorithmic and high-speed trading in the finance industry, the staggering scope of gentrification issues in San Francisco and other mega-cities, and ever-increasing income inequality in the US—and ties them together into a pretty compelling argument of "how we got in this mess and here's where that takes us if we keep this up."
The basic outline of Lanier's argument is this: the twenty-first century is increasingly dominated by "siren servers," networks which own and generate wealth by accumulating huge stores of information: Google's huge database of user searches and data, quantitative finance firm's models which react to even the tiniest blips in real-world data, and so on. Rather than driving increased opportunity and wealth for all, these networks seem to mostly disempower people. Observe that Google employs far fewer people than, say, GM did in its heyday. This trend is skewing the nice middle-class bell curve we've enjoyed in the past, toward the "1% vs 99%" divide we're seeing now.
Such a problem seems to be outside the powers of traditional regulation to control. You can't effectively legislate limits on technology. For instance, it doesn't really matter how much you regulate the banks doing high-frequency trading—forbid banks from trading based on one thing, or at a certain pace, and they'll just find something else to trade on, hedge their bets based off a different frequency model, using their huge network of information to win. (A friend of mine at a trading desk mentioned that last Friday was an especially exciting one at work, because as soon as an ebola case was reported in New York, they started trading based on what markets that would upset. Isn't finance charming.)
So wealth gets concentrated into the class of "whoever owns the siren servers." The common wisdom to "get a job in tech" is sound short-term advice, then, but seems tenuous in the long-term, when you not only have to control a server but control the best servers to have a prayer of staying in control.
* * *
I went drinking with a few finance guys a while back, because apparently I am now the sort of person who gets to hang out with finance people at overpriced bars. And, because I get even more belligerent when I've been drinking, I brought up the topic of the Lanier book, and asked what they thought as I described the basic premise to them.
Mostly they nodded along. Sounds basically right, they said.
Seems pretty depressing, I said. You're the ones in finance; have you got any ideas on counteracting this trend? any kind of policy intervention that seems plausible to you—
Hedge fund guy was shaking his head. I frowned.
Look, you're a smart guy, surely you can think of something, I said. I mentioned Lanier's solution*. He laughed. "Sure," I ceded, "I don't think that solution is super-plausible either, but it's something—"
Hedge fund guy disagreed again. He asserted that the whole middle class thing we had after World War II was a historic blip, that mostly middle classes don't exist, and there's not much that we can do about that fact. Markets are just winner-takes-all in their natural state. I argued a bit that there's pre-WWII precedents for strong middle classes, but admittedly I didn't have the economic background to confidently argue this claim, and dropped it.
But what a depressing resolution: you just end up with "fuck you, got mine" on a global scale. Scared Ivy League grads like hedge fund guy grappling for whatever high-powered job they can handle, jobs that seem unlikely to be net positives in the world, because they well know that the number of spots at the top is only shrinking and they'd better grab a hold of that—
(I shifted the discussion a bit, there, and asked him if that's the primary reason he was in this hedge fund job—the money. "I'm not interested in money," he said. "I'd definitely take a lower-paying job for the right reasons."
"What are you interested in?" I asked.
"Power."
I then asked him to explain the difference between power and money. I can't remember if he answered or not.)
* * *
I guess the bugbear in the room is, most our infrastructure relies on various cheap sources of energy, and will continuing working well only if such supplies remain uninterrupted. Which, of course, seems a bit unlikely if the Limits to Growth folks are right. And it seems unlikely that they'll be totally wrong, at least. Lanier touches on this as well, at least in passing, by presenting a hypothetical dystopia where our technogadgets are cheap enough for basically everyone to have some—but basic necessities like clean water have become too expensive for most to afford.
This isn't very happy to think about either.
* * *
Recently, a friend of mine—a bright guy, a social sciences graduate from a good school—told me he didn't see the point in voting and had never voted.
I got angry, because sometimes I'm a Civic Duty Dork, and the idea of someone with his background not voting baffled me. He started with some vague grievances about how "well, the electoral college means my vote doesn't count anyway," which, regardless of whatever bone you have to pick with the electoral college system (and there are things worth complaining about there), seems to me a flimsy reason for not voting—you can easily make the "but my vote won't matter" argument in a pure-popular-vote context too.
After a protracted argument, he shifted his stance to something more like "it's not voting that matters; it's education that matters." His argument was that education is the only real way to encourage lasting social change, arguing that the expansion of education to a larger group of people who then got angry was the cause of, say, the French Revolution.
It's not a bad assertion. It probably is true that an educated middle class—or, at least, an educated above-middle-class-but-below-absurdly-wealthy class—increases the odds of sustained political change. Except: I pointed out all his education wound up with him simply deciding not to vote, leading to no political change. So the fuck is education worth? What is it exactly that's made him so disengaged from this aspect of society?
* * *
When I made this quip on Tumblr about the tastes of yuppies, I was just poking some good fun.
But it also reminded me of two other books I'd read (reviews and summaries of) recently: Spengler's The Decline of the West and Murray's Coming Apart.
Neither book presents a super-compelling argument for its case on its own. Historian friends whom I trust aren't offended by The Decline of the West, per se, but aren't particularly impressed by it either, pointing out flaws in its historiography. (Morrow's overview, which I've linked, is obviously quite positive, but, though Morrow is a really interesting thinker in a lot of ways, I tend to read his thoughts on topics like this with some skepticism—he seems lately to be leaning heavily on nationalistic/conservative traditions, e.g. stuff to the tune of "a nation must be culturally/ethnically/traditionally/religiously linked or else it becomes spiritually void." I don't find such leanings particularly appealing or convincing, for reasons I won't go into here).
Similarly, there's a lot in Murray's book that's patently silly—claiming that poor whites became poor just because they suddenly didn't feel like working very hard, and similar libertarian-ish claims.
And yet. I think both these analyses are compelling because they do, at least, focus on the phenomenon I've observed personally—the weird disconnect between the attitudes and beliefs of the highly-educated yuppies of the world and, well, everyone else.
The Decline of the West observes this by predicting an increased divisiveness between the ultra-cosmopolitan, ubran elite and inhabitants of less-cosmopolitan cities or rural areas. Folks in the mega-cities grow increasingly disinterested in civic life, having kids, and so on. This (anecdotally) reminds me of my friend who didn't much feel like voting. (Sure, swaths of young people not much giving a fuck about politics isn't new, precisely, but it is true that voter turnout's been declining in most western democracies over the past few decades.) Now that I'm typing this out, this doesn't feel like a very complete explanation. There are a lot of reasons a twentysomething could get disengaged from politics. Later on I'd like to think more about that, because it seems a pretty troublesome trend—if everyone decides that our present democracy is so transparently dictated by money and corporate interests, if everyone disengages from that process...
And Coming Apart focuses on just how distant the upper and lower classes have become from each other (for fun, try out his "do you live in a bubble" quiz, which talks about a lot of the cultural distinctions he's seeing).
I don't think a nation needs to be, or should be, culturally uniform. But neither should the various cultural elements be so distant from each other that there's no possible conduit for communication. And that seems to be what's going on to some extent. It's probably not a good thing, long-term.
* * *
I would like a solution to these myriad worries, or at least some hopeful potential avenue. Who Owns the Future?, to its credit, presents such a solution*. Unfortunately I don't know how feasible his solution is, and thus I am left, once again, a little hopeless.
There are brutish economists who argue that it doesn't really matter if the middle class disappears. If the standard of living is higher for everyone in the end, who cares. I don't like that argument.
I program computers because I like them and I like technology and I like programming. But what I would really love is to see those computers be a force for good.
I would conclude but, like the rest of the essay, this is all quite inconclusive.
* tl;dr, Lanier argues that we ought to implement a sort of "universal micropayments network," such that, whenever a Google or an Amazon or whoever profits off of your contributions—by helping them improve search results with your search data, or helping them refine their recommendation algorithm based on your purchases, or whatever—you have a right to be paid a small fraction of that profit. While I doubt this is a very practical response, I appreciate that Lanier at least tries to think of plausible alternatives, both because I think optimism is more productive in general, and because I'm hoping his not-so-great solution may inspire people to think of better ones.
The basic outline of Lanier's argument is this: the twenty-first century is increasingly dominated by "siren servers," networks which own and generate wealth by accumulating huge stores of information: Google's huge database of user searches and data, quantitative finance firm's models which react to even the tiniest blips in real-world data, and so on. Rather than driving increased opportunity and wealth for all, these networks seem to mostly disempower people. Observe that Google employs far fewer people than, say, GM did in its heyday. This trend is skewing the nice middle-class bell curve we've enjoyed in the past, toward the "1% vs 99%" divide we're seeing now.
Such a problem seems to be outside the powers of traditional regulation to control. You can't effectively legislate limits on technology. For instance, it doesn't really matter how much you regulate the banks doing high-frequency trading—forbid banks from trading based on one thing, or at a certain pace, and they'll just find something else to trade on, hedge their bets based off a different frequency model, using their huge network of information to win. (A friend of mine at a trading desk mentioned that last Friday was an especially exciting one at work, because as soon as an ebola case was reported in New York, they started trading based on what markets that would upset. Isn't finance charming.)
So wealth gets concentrated into the class of "whoever owns the siren servers." The common wisdom to "get a job in tech" is sound short-term advice, then, but seems tenuous in the long-term, when you not only have to control a server but control the best servers to have a prayer of staying in control.
I went drinking with a few finance guys a while back, because apparently I am now the sort of person who gets to hang out with finance people at overpriced bars. And, because I get even more belligerent when I've been drinking, I brought up the topic of the Lanier book, and asked what they thought as I described the basic premise to them.
Mostly they nodded along. Sounds basically right, they said.
Seems pretty depressing, I said. You're the ones in finance; have you got any ideas on counteracting this trend? any kind of policy intervention that seems plausible to you—
Hedge fund guy was shaking his head. I frowned.
Look, you're a smart guy, surely you can think of something, I said. I mentioned Lanier's solution*. He laughed. "Sure," I ceded, "I don't think that solution is super-plausible either, but it's something—"
Hedge fund guy disagreed again. He asserted that the whole middle class thing we had after World War II was a historic blip, that mostly middle classes don't exist, and there's not much that we can do about that fact. Markets are just winner-takes-all in their natural state. I argued a bit that there's pre-WWII precedents for strong middle classes, but admittedly I didn't have the economic background to confidently argue this claim, and dropped it.
But what a depressing resolution: you just end up with "fuck you, got mine" on a global scale. Scared Ivy League grads like hedge fund guy grappling for whatever high-powered job they can handle, jobs that seem unlikely to be net positives in the world, because they well know that the number of spots at the top is only shrinking and they'd better grab a hold of that—
(I shifted the discussion a bit, there, and asked him if that's the primary reason he was in this hedge fund job—the money. "I'm not interested in money," he said. "I'd definitely take a lower-paying job for the right reasons."
"What are you interested in?" I asked.
"Power."
I then asked him to explain the difference between power and money. I can't remember if he answered or not.)
I guess the bugbear in the room is, most our infrastructure relies on various cheap sources of energy, and will continuing working well only if such supplies remain uninterrupted. Which, of course, seems a bit unlikely if the Limits to Growth folks are right. And it seems unlikely that they'll be totally wrong, at least. Lanier touches on this as well, at least in passing, by presenting a hypothetical dystopia where our technogadgets are cheap enough for basically everyone to have some—but basic necessities like clean water have become too expensive for most to afford.
This isn't very happy to think about either.
Recently, a friend of mine—a bright guy, a social sciences graduate from a good school—told me he didn't see the point in voting and had never voted.
I got angry, because sometimes I'm a Civic Duty Dork, and the idea of someone with his background not voting baffled me. He started with some vague grievances about how "well, the electoral college means my vote doesn't count anyway," which, regardless of whatever bone you have to pick with the electoral college system (and there are things worth complaining about there), seems to me a flimsy reason for not voting—you can easily make the "but my vote won't matter" argument in a pure-popular-vote context too.
After a protracted argument, he shifted his stance to something more like "it's not voting that matters; it's education that matters." His argument was that education is the only real way to encourage lasting social change, arguing that the expansion of education to a larger group of people who then got angry was the cause of, say, the French Revolution.
It's not a bad assertion. It probably is true that an educated middle class—or, at least, an educated above-middle-class-but-below-absurdly-wealthy class—increases the odds of sustained political change. Except: I pointed out all his education wound up with him simply deciding not to vote, leading to no political change. So the fuck is education worth? What is it exactly that's made him so disengaged from this aspect of society?
When I made this quip on Tumblr about the tastes of yuppies, I was just poking some good fun.
But it also reminded me of two other books I'd read (reviews and summaries of) recently: Spengler's The Decline of the West and Murray's Coming Apart.
Neither book presents a super-compelling argument for its case on its own. Historian friends whom I trust aren't offended by The Decline of the West, per se, but aren't particularly impressed by it either, pointing out flaws in its historiography. (Morrow's overview, which I've linked, is obviously quite positive, but, though Morrow is a really interesting thinker in a lot of ways, I tend to read his thoughts on topics like this with some skepticism—he seems lately to be leaning heavily on nationalistic/conservative traditions, e.g. stuff to the tune of "a nation must be culturally/ethnically/traditionally/religiously linked or else it becomes spiritually void." I don't find such leanings particularly appealing or convincing, for reasons I won't go into here).
Similarly, there's a lot in Murray's book that's patently silly—claiming that poor whites became poor just because they suddenly didn't feel like working very hard, and similar libertarian-ish claims.
And yet. I think both these analyses are compelling because they do, at least, focus on the phenomenon I've observed personally—the weird disconnect between the attitudes and beliefs of the highly-educated yuppies of the world and, well, everyone else.
The Decline of the West observes this by predicting an increased divisiveness between the ultra-cosmopolitan, ubran elite and inhabitants of less-cosmopolitan cities or rural areas. Folks in the mega-cities grow increasingly disinterested in civic life, having kids, and so on. This (anecdotally) reminds me of my friend who didn't much feel like voting. (Sure, swaths of young people not much giving a fuck about politics isn't new, precisely, but it is true that voter turnout's been declining in most western democracies over the past few decades.) Now that I'm typing this out, this doesn't feel like a very complete explanation. There are a lot of reasons a twentysomething could get disengaged from politics. Later on I'd like to think more about that, because it seems a pretty troublesome trend—if everyone decides that our present democracy is so transparently dictated by money and corporate interests, if everyone disengages from that process...
And Coming Apart focuses on just how distant the upper and lower classes have become from each other (for fun, try out his "do you live in a bubble" quiz, which talks about a lot of the cultural distinctions he's seeing).
I don't think a nation needs to be, or should be, culturally uniform. But neither should the various cultural elements be so distant from each other that there's no possible conduit for communication. And that seems to be what's going on to some extent. It's probably not a good thing, long-term.
I would like a solution to these myriad worries, or at least some hopeful potential avenue. Who Owns the Future?, to its credit, presents such a solution*. Unfortunately I don't know how feasible his solution is, and thus I am left, once again, a little hopeless.
There are brutish economists who argue that it doesn't really matter if the middle class disappears. If the standard of living is higher for everyone in the end, who cares. I don't like that argument.
I program computers because I like them and I like technology and I like programming. But what I would really love is to see those computers be a force for good.
I would conclude but, like the rest of the essay, this is all quite inconclusive.
* tl;dr, Lanier argues that we ought to implement a sort of "universal micropayments network," such that, whenever a Google or an Amazon or whoever profits off of your contributions—by helping them improve search results with your search data, or helping them refine their recommendation algorithm based on your purchases, or whatever—you have a right to be paid a small fraction of that profit. While I doubt this is a very practical response, I appreciate that Lanier at least tries to think of plausible alternatives, both because I think optimism is more productive in general, and because I'm hoping his not-so-great solution may inspire people to think of better ones.
no subject
Date: 2014-11-02 09:34 pm (UTC)Haha. I ate quite a bit at Applebee's as a kid (their mac and cheese used to be my favorite before they changed the recipe) and we had a lot of family outings at Ryan's, and I had quite a few birthday meals at places like TJ Friday's and Ponderosa Steakhouse, and when I met back up with a friend from middle school it was at Denny's. But none of this counts because I haven't been to my hometown in years, and these restaurants weren't really a thing in Chicago. I have yet to feel enough nostalgia for crappy mac&cheese to go out of my way to find one over here in cowland.