​​A Millennial Technologist’s View on Jaron Lanier’s “Who Owns the Future?”

“Lanier draws a straight line from the idealism and optimism that ‘information wants to be free’ to the dystopian problems facing today’s world, including but not limited to a declining middle class, filter bubbles, and dysfunctional politics.”

Among the few attitudes many of us share today is a general apprehension about the role and influence of large technology platforms. Thinkers from Jonathan Haidt to Noam Chomsky have criticized social media for undermining the foundations of democracy. Frances Haugen’s leak of internal Facebook documents triggered widely covered congressional hearings. How did we get here?

Jaron Lanier, a quirky polymath technologist who was “in the room where it happened” as the World Wide Web took shape, tried to warn us nearly a decade ago about what was coming. His 2013 book “Who Owns the Future?” puts forward a compelling analysis of the economic systems we have set up around information technology, warns us about the dystopia that awaits if we follow the current path, and presents a human-centered vision for an alternative future.

Lanier argues that the main outlines of today’s technology world can be traced to a decision between two competing technical and economic models. The model that ultimately shaped the Internet as we know it today is represented by the maxim “information wants to be free.” That radical idea proposed that the world’s accumulated knowledge (and intellectual property more generally) should be free for everyone to access. Such a future was easy to envision at a time when technology enabled copying and sharing information at a level never before imaginable. Indeed, by the turn of the century, not only could songs and digital newspapers be transferred in seconds, “libraries of congress” became a unit of measurement for boasting about how large or fast one’s server or internet connection was.