“To my friends in the “open” Internet movement, I have to ask: What did you think would happen? We in Silicon Valley undermined copyright to make commerce become more about services instead of content: more about our code instead of their files. The inevitable endgame was always that we would lose control of our own personal content, our own files. We haven’t just weakened old-fashioned power mongers. We’ve weakened ourselves.” (p.207) This book is a labor of love. We humans are being gifted

Interesting topic but had a hard time grasping the content and making it stick. Might been my current head space but didn't feel like the book had "sticky" information. What I mean is, those kind of facts that I go around thinking about after putting the book down had remember well after finishing it. Bit the concept was very intriguing

Near the end of the book, Jaron Lanier mentioned how he waited decades for his thoughts to mature just to begin writing this book. I think he maybe should’ve waited a little longer.As other reviewers here have already critiqued, this is not a particularly well-organized, well-researched, or particularly insightful book. From his overwrought aphorisms to his clearly high-school history level understanding of anything that didn’t happen in Silicon Valley in the 70s and 80s, to his clear ignorance

I'm giving Jaron Lanier's work five stars for the fact that I must have turned down the corner on a hundred pages because the book is thought-provoking. Three stars go to the editor. This is my second review of a book where I blame the dev edit of a book. In this case I think Jaron's work could have been more concise and a hundred or so pages lopped off and nothing would have been lost. I blame the loss of that editor on exactly what Jaron writes about in his book--the loss of a middle class due...

Should you read this book? Yes. There are three reasons why: 1. His prescriptions may be useful. 2. Even if his prescriptions are unrealistic, the first two-thirds of the book are still a worthwhile way of looking at what's presently going on in our economy. 3. Even if he's totally wrong, he's entertaining, rather like Antonin Scalia. I haven't read any coherent negative reviews of this book, mostly negative reviews by people who have grasped 1% of the argument from reading about it online and a...

The first half of Lanier's book is a strong critique of the current trend in computing and business toward aggregation and exploitation of consumer data. He calls companies like Facebook and Google, as well as financial companies that make rapid trades and find loopholes in the markets algorithmically, "Siren Servers." This is a helpful concept and framing of the problem. Lanier then looks to a future dominated by Siren Servers while technological innovation continues to make humans less relevan...

"We do know that Siren Servers can die. It happened to Lehmann Brothers... Individual Siren Servers can die and yet the Siren Server pattern perseveres, and it is that pattern that is the real problem. The systematic decoupling of risk from reward in the rising information economy is the problem, not any particular server."I'm sure much savvier readers and technologists than me will roll their eyes at a neologism like "Siren Servers," Jaron Lanier's nickname for the entities (Amazon, Facebook, G...

Computer scientist and tech visionary Jaron Lanier has spent his impressive career contributing to many of the most ubiquitous technologies of our time. From virtual reality (a term he coined) to start-up companies that are now a part of Adobe, Oracle and Google, Lanier is a man forever out in front of Silicon Valley’s most forward thinking gurus. In his new book, “Who Owns the Future?” Lanier laments the current state of the middle class and points part of the blame for the loss of middle class...

Documentary filmmaker Adam Curtis remarked on the increasing fragmentation of stories that the world could use a little less whimsy ("Wes Anderson") and a little more Tolstoy. Jaron Lanier makes a similar point regarding the pitfalls of digitalization and the economic and human cost of erasing context. Even better, he does so without sounding like a raving Luddite. He proposes a system of micropayments that would weave individual contributions into a more stable economic narrative. My cynical si...

“You can’t see much of a server as it can see of you.”Lanier takes us through a world of Siren Servers, Soft blackmail, differential pricing, punishing network effects and many other dark corridors of the online world as he observes the architecture and culture that he is partly responsible for, again calling for changes that will almost certainly never happen. “Machine vision has massive creepiness potential. Weren’t wars fought and many lives lost precisely to prevent governments from gaining

Both this and Radical Markets: Uprooting Capitalism and Democracy for a Just Society (which I haven't finished yet) seem to focus on how to make capitalism work. Which, I sugest, even radical leftists should not dismiss immediately, since today so many just want to disrupt it (and our lives as colateral damage, which their philosophy prohibits them from caring about).Even classic capitalism (where the productive are rewarded and so on) is better than what we are heading towards at high speed. Th...

I found "Who Owns the Future?" (I won an advance copy on Goodreads) to be an intriguing forward looking piece with a hypothesis that made me stop and reconsider my current ideas, especially with regard to the Internet. Lanier suggests that rather than creating jobs and stimulating the economy, the Internet is actually taking jobs away and not producing the new knowledge-based jobs as expected. He proposed solutions that truthfully I doubt that I'll see implemented in my lifetime, or that will ev...

I'm so fucking grateful for this book. Not only does it offer a vision of the future that doesn't suck, it convincingly ties together a number of seemingly divergent crises (housing, insurance, information, politics, social media,) positing that they might actually be unified by the manner in which our networks are structured. I came away wanting to *teach* this book as a class. Also, it's funny. Also, it's kind. He's both humble and snarky and he's the first man on Earth to have entered virtual...