Hot Press meets Jaron Lanier

When I was young, my friends and I thought that making information free would create a perfect society,” says Jaron Lanier, acclaimed computer scientist, dreadlocked musician and philosophising author of Who Owns The Future? “I’ve realised that doesn’t work because, even if all people are created equal, all computers are not created equal. And whoever has the biggest computer will end up using it to compute away the power and wealth from everyone else.”

Throughout human history, great forward leaps in productivity – like the industrial revolution – generally increased the wealth and freedom of the mass of the people. Not so with our ongoing digital revolution. To date, the internet has killed far more jobs than it has created. Rather than improving all of our lives, the effect of new digital technologies – and the major companies behind them such as Google, Microsoft and Facebook – has been to concentrate wealth, reduce growth and challenge the livelihoods of an ever-increasing number of people, notably musicians, writers, journalists and photographers.
This is the essence of the controversial argument put forward in Lanier’s visionary new tome. Coming from Larnier, this is indded thought-provoking stuff. Known as the ‘philosopher of the digital age’ he is now arguing that we need a radical change in thinking, if we want to avoid mass unemployment.
“What’s happening right now actually screws up society. Therefore you need a different system than what we initially, naïvely thought,” he says. “We need a system where everybody is actually benefiting financially from information rather than just the owners of what I call ‘sirenic’ servers.” It’s a term Larnier has come up with to describe hte likes of Facebook, Google and teh rest of the big indiustry players.
Best known as the man who first coined the term ‘virtual reality’, Lanier is well-qualified to comment. He has been recognised by Encyclopedia Britannica (but not Wikipedia!) as one of history’s 300 greatest inventors and was named one of the top 100 public intellectuals in the world by Prospect and Foreign Policy. The proud owner of over 700 instruments, he also once opened a show for Bob Dylan.
“It was at the Montreux Jazz Festival in the ‘90s,” he recalls, laughing. “I had this act that included virtual reality effects, which we took from the lab and turned into stage effects. It was completely unique. To be honest, it was probably the gimmick of tech that got me that kind of gig. I might not have got there otherwise, but in the music business everything is fair.”
His one major-label album, Instruments Of Change, came out on Polygram in 1994. While he still performs live occasionally, music piracy put paid to the prospect of a profitable recording career.
“I haven’t released an album since the recording industry went down,” he admits. “At the time I was releasing albums, you could be a minor artist and still do well financially. I was at the level where I could sell, like, 30,000 copies, which is not a lot. But it was enough to make a living. I think a lot of young people don’t understand how much harder it is now than it was then.”
Lanier first struck tech-gold in 1983, as the inventor of bestselling Atari videogame Moondust. He doesn’t write software like that anymore.
“The truth is I don’t even like games that much – even games like chess – because, for me, the problem is that they have rules to them. I like to run away from rules.”
As a Silicon Valley dweller involved in many tech start-ups, Lanier is acutely aware that he helped create some of the problems he’s now proposing to solve.
“Absolutely, that’s why I’m proactive,” he laughs. “I think Google is part of the problem. Microsoft is part of the problem. I am part of the problem. I want to admit it, I want to take responsibility for it, I want to change it. That’s what I’m trying to do.”
His book explains how the new power paradigm operates, how it’s conceived and controlled, and why, in so many respects, it’s leading to the collapse of middle-class financial security.
“It’s not the internet that’s specifically at fault, it’s the style of internet we’re given,” he reflects. “It’s important to make that clear because a lot of my argument is how what we see on the internet is like the same architecture that destroyed finance recently. I almost feel that, over there in Ireland, you could probably tell me more about that than I could tell you. Ireland is a great example: what happened there was purely a matter of network dysfunction. It wasn’t the fault of anyone in Ireland, as far as I know.”
His main point is that the digital revolution should really be creating opportunities for everyone, not just a few mega-corporations. With so much money, power and prestige at stake, is there enough heart in Silicon Valley to share the spoils of the digital revolution?
“It’s a place that’s very dominated by a certain technical mind-set,” he proffers. “I’ve always been seeking a way to talk about this better, and I’m not sure that I understand it fully. I think it’s vaguely related to the autism spectrum and Asperger’s Syndrome. There’s this way of thinking in which you assume that, if you’re technical, you have superior knowledge and that the world is a giant video-game. That particular sensibility probably does not have heart. However, Silicon Valley is a more complex place than that. You know, the people there do have kids, they do go on picnics. They do all those things.”
In terms of his fellow influencers, Lanier states that he always had a strong aversion to the late Steve Jobs.
“He was really annoying,” he sighs. “You had to be totally with him or he would be totally against you. He exuded this amazing kind of energy that was either inspirational or incredibly judgmental, depending on what side of it you were on. He demanded total loyalty from anybody who was around him or else he would turn on them terribly. He even turned on people who were his allies sometimes. He was quite mean to people. Of course, he also inspired people.
“I say in the book that he was something like an Indian guru. I personally steered clear of him. When we were all in our early twenties, I would leave a room when he walked in because I didn’t want to be around him. I was my own person, I had my own ideas. I wasn’t ready to be incorporated into his major life vision. I avoided him a lot.”
If Lanier could force any one influential person to read his book, who would it be? Zuckerberg? Gates? Dorsey?
“Actually, I think it would be the top banking executives in the world,” he answers. “The people in the world banks, the people in the IMF, the people in the Chinese Communist Party who are planning the Chinese economy. A lot of the people who deal with economy don’t actually understand what computer networks effects are doing to the economy. It is important that they find out.”

Who Owns The Future? is published by Allen Lane