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fight the future
Oct. 27th, 2014 06:11 pmSo 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.
( it's been a while since i've done a long, disconnected, thinking-aloud sort of essay, hasn't it )
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.
( it's been a while since i've done a long, disconnected, thinking-aloud sort of essay, hasn't it )
