Lanier is fascinating to me in that his perspective seems so far askew from my own that the exercise of even trying to understand what he's saying is necessarily broadening.

If you had talked to anyone involved in it twenty years ago, everyone would have said that the ability for people to inexpensively have access to a tremendous global computation and networking facility ought to create wealth. This ought to create wellbeing; this ought to create this incredible expansion in just people living decently, and in personal liberty. And indeed, some of that's happened. Yet if you look at the big picture, it obviously isn't happening enough, if it's happening at all.

Is he really questioning whether the internet has created wealth?

His whole section on automated cars is well trodden (as he notes, since Aristotle) and his position basically seems to land on Ludditism.

Because in every example in which there have been very large numbers of people who were just taken care of by a society, it eventually breaks.

But we've also never really had a society that had that much excess labor before, have we?

I also think he misrepresents the current convservative stance. It's not "Don't you dare support my dialysis, don't you dare support my nursing home expenses! That reduces my liberty! I need my freedom and my options." It's more like: "don't take my money, I'll spend however much I need to and that will align incentives in the most efficient way to provide the optimal outcomes." (Not that I agree with that, necessarily, I just object to the mischaracterization.)

He also sets up a false dichotomy between liberty of expression and economic prosperity which I don't really understand.

To me, a lot of the culture of youth seems to be using the Internet as a form of denialism about their reduced prospects. They're like, "Well, sure we can't get a job and we need to live with our parents, but we can tweet", or something. "Let us tweet!"

I mean, I guess I sort of recognize the phenomenon, but I don't think internet use has a causal relationship with economic prospects. We would be using the internet, and we would be proponents of internet freedom regardless of our job prospects. (Note: I am employed, married, and live in my 'own' house.)

The meat of the post seems to be his ideas on people selling their information. They're interesting, and I empathize with his desire to keep the middle class alive, but I'm not sure how this works.

Google has done something that might even be more destructive of the middle class, which is they've said, "Well, since Moore's law makes computation really cheap, let's just give away the computation, but keep the data." And that's a disaster.

What's happened now is that we've created this new regimen where the bigger your computer servers are, the more smart mathematicians you have working for you, and the more connected you are, the more powerful and rich you are. (Unless you own an oil field, which is the old way.) II benefit from it because I'm close to the big servers, but basically wealth is measured by how close you are to one of the big servers, and the servers have started to act like private spying agencies, essentially.

With Google, or with Facebook, if they can ever figure out how to steal some of Google's business, there's this notion that you get all of this stuff for free, except somebody else owns the data, and they use the data to sell access to you, and the ability to manipulate you, to third parties that you don't necessarily get to know about. The third parties tend to be kind of tawdry.

But the kind of information he's talking about, stuff about me, my interests, and my browsing habits, are all basically worthless to me. I can't do anything with that information. But when Google aggregates that information with everyone else's it becomes hugely useful, and worth a ton of money. That's a bunch of wealth they created. From nothing. And what do they do with that wealth? They make amazing things that make the world better for everyone. It seems obtuse not to see that.

It's funny to say that because I'll often get a lot of pushback and they'll say, "No, no, no. There are all these people who are being empowered by all this stuff on the Internet that's free", and I'll say, "Well, show me. Where's all the wealth? Where's the new middle class of people who are doing this?" They don't exist. They just aren't there. We're losing the middle class, and we should be saving it. We should be strengthening it.

See above.

I agree that this seems to have a concentrative effect on power, i.e. the rich (Google engineers, financial sector, and the like) get more, the middle class get poorer. But I'm not sure his prescription, Ted Nelson's "marketplace of ideas" is viable.

Don't get me wrong, I'd be the first in line to try to make a living from my "head and heart," but I don't believe it works.

His idea for a car with a better UI instead of a driverless car sounds a lot like a horseless carriage vs. a car.

If we enter into the kind of world that Google likes, the world that Google wants, it's a world where information is copied so much on the Internet that nobody knows where it came from anymore, so there can't be any rights of authorship. However, you need a big search engine to even figure out what it is or find it. They want a lot of chaos that they can have an ability to undo.

I disagree with this premise. Google wants maximum idea generation for this reason, not maximum copying. I don't think people care about authorship. People care about getting the correct idea. And Google is better when the ideaspace is larger. Copying is irrelevant.

It should be pointed out that the original design of the Internet didn't have even a copy function, because it originally just seemed stupid. If you have a network, why would you copy something? That's just inefficiency. I'm convinced the reason copying happened on the Internet was because Xerox PARC was so important as an early supporter of computers, that for Alan Kay to go to the Xerox people and say, "Oh, by the way, copying itself, even in the abstract will become obsolete because of computer networks", would have just blown their minds. We ended up with copying on a network.

But anyway, when you have copying on a network, you throw out information because you lose the provenance, and then you need a search engine to figure it out again. That's part of why Google can exist. Ah, the perversity of it all just gets to me.

Copying is rampant on the internet because the benefits of redundancy outweigh the drawbacks of (provenance) data loss.

I think 3d printing that can replace low-end manufacturing is still a long way off.

The use of networks can turn you from a local player in a larger system into your own global system.

I don't understand that statement. At all.

But Google's thing is not advertising because it's not a romanticizing operation. It doesn't involve expression. It's a link. It's just a little tiny minimalist link, and basically what they're selling is not advertising, they're not selling romance, they're not selling communication, what they're doing is selling access. What they're doing is they're saying, "You give us money, we give you access to these people, and then what you do with them is up to you." It's a gate keeping function. It's an arbiter of access. It's turning connections instead of being open into being paid. That's essentially what Google does. "We'll own the data, you'll pay for access to other people, but we'll give a whole ton of other stuff for free." And then it leads to this very strange schizophrenia, I'd say, where you think you're the user, but you're the used, or you're the product, and then you end up doing all this stuff to control your online presence, and your online reputation, and people become obsessed with that.

This resonates as true, but I don't see how this is a distinction from traditional advertising. They were also selling access, you were also the product then. The difference to me is that that's not the only avenue for access. In fact, Google embodies the other one, which is actually much bigger, and it's a basically democratic one: search.

His main point that the means for a middle class to sustain itself are disappearing is valid and well known, I think. His solution is to monetize ideas. But I'm not sure how that works.

The problem with direct monetization of ideas is that it's friction, which reduces the overall system-wide proliferation of ideas, which also hinders more idea-generation. Bad all around. Doesn't help the middle class.

I think the thing about ideas is that you don't know how good one is until you already have it. And that's why advertising works well with it. Not only because you can see it with little cost (having to see an ad), but also because it's freely shareable, which means good ones get spread more, and make more money. In a sense, our ideas are already monetized by ads. I don't think ads are the only way, either, though. I think kickstarter is an interesting model that would work for ideas.