Who Owns the Future? by Jaron Lanier – review

Jaron Lanier, groundbreaking computer scientist and infectious optimist, is concerned that we are not making the most of ourselves. In Who Owns the Future? he tellingly questions the trajectory of economic value in the information age, and argues that there has been a fundamental misstep in how capitalism has gone digital. For Lanier, late capitalism is not so much exhausted as humiliating: in an automated world, information is more important to the economy than manual labour, and yet we are expected to surrender information generated by or about ourselves – a valuable resource – for free.

Information here is a broad term for any conscious intellectual, artistic, or pragmatic contribution to the production of goods, services and cultural output, but it also includes the data that we unconsciously radiate simply by exhibiting certain behavioural and consumer traits. Lanier's project is to foresee how livelihoods might be better sustained in a world in which information is king.

In his view, disproportionate economic power now accumulates around companies who "own the fastest computers with the most access to everyone's information". We donate extremely lucrative information – our interests, demographic predilections, buying habits, cyber-movements – in exchange for "free" admission into social media networks. (Digitisation has also allowed banks to repackage the "information" of a mortgage debt and sell it on as increasingly complex financial products, while excluding the indebted home-owner from a percentage of the profits.) Lanier argues that the early internet years have fetishised open access and knowledge-sharing in a way that has distracted people from demanding fairness and job security in an economy predicated on data flow.

To counteract this one-way, feudal system of financial gains, he suggests that we become more ferocious agents of our own informational resources. His vision of a humanistic information economy is one in which participants achieve "economic dignity" by being proportionally compensated for all their contributions to the massive clusters of information – the so-called "big data" – circulating across digital networks.

To illustrate what he means, Lanier describes a couple who found love on an online dating site and whose subsequent marriage has proved long-lasting. In his economy of compensation, if 30 years later another young couple is paired up using some of the statistical data supplied by the first couple's compatibility, then the latter should receive a tiny royalty payment for the use of this information. One of the frightening aspects of a digital world is that it does not forget, but Lanier believes we can use this lack of forgetting to account for the myriad complex ways in which we each supply useful data. In such an economy we would, throughout our lives, be financially buoyed by an accumulation of small remunerations for both our intellectual and biometric property. One of Edith Wharton's characters, a novelist, declares that "a keen sense of copyright is my nearest approach to an emotion". She would brim with feeling in Lanier's world of nanopayments.

In keeping with Wharton's historical moment, if I'm asked to imagine life in a networked, commercialised collective, I tend to retreat into the conception of happiness offered by Isabel Archer in Henry James's The Portrait of a Lady: "A swift carriage, of a dark night, rattling with four horses over roads that one can't see." In a hyperlinked society it's easy to be seduced by an antiquated vision of total, off-grid remoteness, without limitless occasions to commodify some aspect of your behaviour and offer it up for sale to some ceaselessly strategising, data-crunching corporation.

But we should also remember that Archer is an heiress who has the luxury of such isolationist bliss, and that this gilded time is also one in which her cousin Ralph Touchett slowly dies of a consumptive disease that can now be cured. Lanier believes in the future, and refuses to indulge in laments for past eras that were actually more difficult, more restrictive and more deadly than the technologically advanced present.

An economy of nanopayments is an economy of remembering, for which we will need more sophisticated archives of value than the senile currencies of today. "Cash unfortunately forgets too much for an information economy." This urge to remember the true ownership of the fruits of production is implied by Marx's theory of reification, the process through which consumerism's obsession with relationships between commodities obscures the relationships between the people who have laboured to produce them. Lanier's concept of provenance – the recording of where value originates – is fundamental to an ethical information economy, and also – though Marx is clearly not one of his pals – represents an antidote to reification.

A typical dream of revolution is to promise a new age of social transparency. After the storming of the Bastille, French revolutionaries banned masks and costumes, decrying the carnivalesque custom of the masquerade as both symbolic of aristocratic tyranny and a security threat. Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg famously claimed that "By giving people the power to share, we're making the world more transparent." Lanier is interested in a type of partial unmasking whereby digital economies operate according to the principle that "Information is people in disguise." This ethos emphasises that information is not a neutral, boundless resource to be exploited, but rather is morally inextricable from the humans who supply it.

Lanier wouldn't insist on fitting out Isabel Archer's happy carriage with GPS and pushing a networked device into her clenched palm. He believes that economic transparency is not incompatible with personal privacy. He is not an advocate for social media in its present form, and is no fan of conspicuous consumption. He also understands the need "to preserve the selective blindness accomplished by cash", and believes that, in an information economy, privacy is always securable simply by making the cost of your personal data prohibitive.

So should we be excited or frightened by Lanier's vision? An economy of individuals who manufacture commercial products merely by existing has nightmarish implications, and, given his belief that commercialism should be celebrated for having driven the progress of modernity, Lanier isn't the best person to dispel them. "Advertising counterbalances the tendency of people to adhere to familiar habits," he claims. This hagiography of the billboard is a far cry from Orwell's dismissal of advertising as a stick rattling inside a swill-bucket – in Lanier's future the bucket will be hung around our necks.

What's more, his writing is infused with the caffeinated enthusiasm of Silicon Valley, and his technologist's bias shields him from angst over the social and psychological ramifications of saturating human experience with such chronic opportunities for data analysis as the real-time tracking of our royalties. After all, he has researched the possibility of "pixels grafted into your eyelashes so you could always look up at them". If you have trouble keeping your friends' attention in the era of the smartphone, imagine this culture of endless eye-rolling.

And yet one of the triumphs of Lanier's intelligent and subtle book is its inspiring portrait of the kind of people that a democratic information economy would produce. His vision implies that if we are allowed to lead absorbing, properly remunerated lives, we will likewise outgrow our addiction to consumerism and technology. Lanier's New World is founded on hard, fulfilling work. He concedes that such a radical reorganisation of worth will demand from us new levels of maturity, discipline and collective responsibility – but then who said dignity should be downloadable for free?