R. U. Sirius | The Verge

‘Who Owns The Future?’ Jaron Lanier thinks Google and the government should pay for your data

2013-05-23T13:00:07-04:00

who owns the future review lede

In Who Owns the Future?, Jaron Lanier, the computer scientist and musician who became the face of virtual reality in the 1990s, pins the devolution and ultimate destruction of the Western middle class on accelerating technological change, and on the internet in particular. He then suggests a way to re-engineer our networked world to recreate a middle class. His critique of the conditions that led to America’s economic crisis, while flawed, is mostly a sharp and enjoyable read. The last 150 pages (nearly half of the book) dedicated to the solution, however, get bogged down in the contingencies of something that will never occur.

Lanier would have done better with a blast of pure pessimism or by embracing far simpler and more probable fixes. But some surprisingly knee-jerk reactionary political prejudices lead him away from the more likely solutions. The result is an often brilliant book that is subverted, in the end, by an obscure intellectual exercise.

Lanier’s fundamental point is that power and wealth have drifted upward in the digital economy and toward what he calls “Siren Servers.” These giant information-gathering “services” — ranging from Facebook and Google to giant financial players and the government surveillance industry — take data that we all provide freely (and, often, enthusiastically) and use their advantages in data collection to build enormous economic fiefdoms.

Publishing, TV, and a whole series of industries are being squeezed dry by the people’s demand for free digitized stuff

In Lanier’s view, it’s unfair that we receive no income from being the informational source of this “Big Data” economy. But the bigger problem is that the “free culture” we create, which is, more or less, curated by the Siren Servers, eliminates industries, and with it, jobs. Musicians — and the music industry that (in Lanier’s estimation) supported them — were the canaries in the coal mine. Slowly but surely, book publishing, television, and a whole series of media industries are being squeezed dry by the people’s demand for free digitized stuff. Large cloud-based companies hold a singular advantage, too, floating above the complexities of making content and amassing ridiculous fortunes simply by providing a nexus through which content is found and / or distributed. This large-scale disintermediation puts a lot of people out or work and shrinks the middle-class economy. But the trouble doesn’t end there. With the rapid evolution of robotics and other forms of automation (like 3D printing), pretty much everybody else will become economically superfluous and marginalized. A middle class already in a tailspin will disappear almost entirely.

Portrait of the author, Jaron Lanier

There’s a lot that’s right with Lanier’s analyses, and it’s accomplished with a concision and wit that occasionally spills over into genuine hilarity, as in Lanier’s satire of the power relations between the Siren Servers and the average participant in the digital economy. In this funny segment, he imagines a real world functioning similarly to our current or near-future digital world. In the imagined scenario, the parents of some children setting up a lemonade stand receive notice that they must apply to the fictional über-Facebook, StreetBook, for a jointly operated “Lemonade Stand” app. An accompanying contract blatantly advantages StreetBook over the Lemonade Stand partners at every turn. Finally, at the end, in all caps, the contract reveals the totality of StreetBook’s domination: “STREETBOOK MAY CHANGE OR AMEND ANY AND ALL ASPECTS OF THIS AGREEMENT ENTERED INTO BY YOU AT ANY TIME. STREETBOOK ACCEPTS NO LIABILITY OF ANY KIND.”

This cracked me up, having read contracts not dissimilar to this on a few occasions. But then I realized that the contracts I was remembering were from conventional, pre-digital media corporations. And therein lies one of the biggest flaws in Lanier’s tome. His view of pre-digital capitalism — and the middle-class lifestyle it granted to a fairly substantial number of (white) people — is more than a little bit gauzy.

In fact, once you get past the critical part of the book and begin to gather glimpses of its advocacy, there’s a strong undercurrent of nostalgia for a very specific set of economic and social conditions that defined Western democratic capitalism during the second half of the 20th century. To wit: according to Lanier’s late-20th-century sensibility, in order to have a thriving middle class with economic dignity, we must recode our networked system in a way that causes the market to reward efforts with payments in currency. The trouble is — in the face of disintermediation and automation — said system has to contort itself in peculiar (and, most of all, unlikely) ways for this to occur. The market, left to its current devices, won’t have a reason to pay enough people enough money for what they do to support a booming middle class. Lanier’s solution for this is… well… very complicated.

Lanier’s solution is to cut us in on the action — to monetize our activities to our own financial advantage

Lanier reaches back to the ideas of computer visionary Ted Nelson. Nelson proposed something similar to our contemporary internet in the 1960s, but with the important distinction that links would be two-way and therefore always traceable back to the original source. Presuming to somehow fix this “error” in the way things actually occurred, Lanier seems to be proposing a quasi-egalitarian micro-commoditization of virtually all our moments in public space (now tractable thanks to the Nelsonian linking scheme) so that people somehow get paid every time they make a contribution to the datasphere. For example, he imagines a pedestrian whose stroll uncovers a pedestrian safety issue receiving a micro-payment from the government.

Leaving aside the complications in measuring an endless dataflow of such subjective value (well beyond what the market does on its own), the scheme seems mainly reactive. Since the complaint is that Facebook and Google (for example) are selling our spontaneous activities in virtual space to advertisers, Lanier’s solution is, essentially, to cut us in on the action — to monetize our activities to our own financial advantage. But the entire edifice on which our participation in the world of the Siren Servers is built depends on advertising, or the expectation of advertising. That foundation is so flimsy that a slight upturn in an already present mass skepticism could topple the whole thing. Anyway, pulling so much of our lives into the realm of accountancy and currency exchange hardly seems like a path to the more humanistic economy Lanier is hoping for.

Many of us believe that a healthier version of a radically automated culture would increasingly decommodify public and private information and activity. An excess of wealth generated by automated production would make it possible to live more dynamic economic lives. This would be done by combining guaranteed income with an amplification of participatory cultural tendencies and the continued fostering of market competition to inspire innovation. Weirdly, Lanier — who self-identifies as a liberal — cries socialism or even communism at such proposals. What it really suggests is an adaptation of his much-beloved late-20th-century Western democratic mixed-economy social welfare state to the realities of the 21st century.

R.U. Sirius

Ted Nelson

The reader may start to feel as if she is stuck in a room with a smart engineer on stimulants who is taking his late-night “If I ruled the world” fantasy too seriously

In contrast to a Nelsonian coding of the networked world, social welfare capitalism has the advantage of having actually occurred and — perhaps more to the point — of having been tacked on to other things that actually occurred. That’s the way shit actually happens. It’s tacked on to the shit that happened before.

And that’s why the section of Who Owns The Future? which proposes a solution starts to get tedious. It’s not gonna happen. And after a while, the reader may start to feel as if she is stuck in a room with a smart engineer on stimulants who is taking his late-night “If I ruled the world” fantasy too seriously, filling in way too much detail and working through an entire list of contingencies that the fantasy system would probably produce.

Jaron Lanier brings noble intentions to the book. He wants to gently derail the Siren Servers’ dominant plutocratic tendencies by recoding the fundamentals of digital exchange. He even claims that everybody — even the plutocrats — would ultimately benefit from his idea. But the sad truth is that his elegant Nelsonian concept is even now disappearing into the memory hole of a dissipative, inelegant, and chaotic present and future. Jaron Lanier is trying to fit a square peg into a black hole.

Cypherpunk rising: WikiLeaks, encryption, and the coming surveillance dystopia

2013-03-07T10:32:39-05:00

cypherpunk lede

In 1989, when the internet was predominantly ASCII-based and HyperCard had yet to give birth (or at least act as a midwife) to the world wide web, R.U. Sirius launched Mondo 2000. “I’d say it was arguably the representative underground magazine of its pre-web day,” William Gibson said in a recent interview. “Posterity, looking at this, should also consider Mondo 2000 as a focus of something that was happening.”
Twenty years ago, it was cypherpunk that was happening.And it’s happening again today.

Sticky TOC engaged! Do not remove this!

Early cypherpunk

Early cypherpunk in fact and fiction

Cypherpunk was both an exciting new vision for social change and a fun subculture dedicated to making it happen

Flashback: Berkeley, California 1992. I pick up the ringing phone. My writing partner, St. Jude Milhon, is shouting down the line: “I’ve got it! Cypherpunk!”

Jude was an excitable girl and she was particularly excitable when there was a new boyfriend involved. She’d been raving about Eric Hughes for days. I paid no attention.

At the time, Jude and I were contracted to write a novel titled How to Mutate and Take Over the World. I wanted the fiction to contain the truth. I wanted to tell people how creative hackers could do it — mutate and take over the world — by the end of the decade. Not knowing many of those details ourselves, we threw down a challenge on various hacker boards and in the places where extropians gathered to share their superhuman fantasies. “Take on a character,” we said, “and let that character mutate and/or take over.” The results were vague and unsatisfying. These early transhumanists didn’t actually know how to mutate, and the hackers couldn’t actually take over the world. It seemed that we were asking for too much too soon.

And so I wound up there, holding the phone away from my ear as Jude shouted out the solution, at least to the “taking over” part of our problem. Strong encryption, she explained, will sever all the ties binding us to hostile states and other institutions. Encryption will level the playing field, protecting even the least of us from government interference. It will liberate pretty much everything, toute de suite. The cypherpunks would make this happen.

For Jude, cypherpunk was both an exciting new vision for social change and a fun subculture dedicated to making it happen. Sure, I was skeptical. But I was also desperate for something to hang the plot of our book on. A few days later I found myself at the feet of Eric Hughes — who, along with John Gilmore and Tim May, is considered one of the founders of the cypherpunk movement — getting the total download.

This was my first exposure to “The Crypto Anarchist Manifesto.” Written by Tim May, it opens by mimicking The Communist Manifesto: “A specter is haunting the modern world, the specter of crypto anarchy.” In a fit of hyperbole that perfectly foreshadowed the mood of tech culture in the 1990s — from my own Mondo 2000 to the “long boom” of digital capitalism — May declared that encrypted communication and anonymity online would “alter completely the nature of government regulation, the ability to tax and control economic interactions, the ability to keep information secret.” The result would be nothing less than “both a social and economic revolution.”

Just as a seemingly minor invention like barbed wire made possible the fencing-off of vast ranches and farms, thus altering forever the concepts of land and property rights in the frontier West, so too will the seemingly minor discovery out of an arcane branch of mathematics come to be the wire clippers which dismantle the barbed wire around intellectual property.

Those words were written way back in 1988. By 1993, a bunch of crypto freaks were gathering fairly regularly in the San Francisco Bay Area. In his lengthy Wired cover story, Steven Levy would describe them as mostly “having beards and long hair — like Smith Brothers [cough drops] gone digital.” Their antics would become legendary.

John Gilmore set off a firestorm by sharing classified documents on cryptography that a friend of his had found in public libraries (they had previously been declassified). The NSA threatened Gilmore with a charge of violating the Espionage Act, but after he responded with publicity and his own legal threats, the NSA — probably recognizing in Gilmore a well-connected dissident who they couldn’t intimidate — backed down and once again declassified the documents.

Phil Zimmermann’s PGP (Pretty Good Privacy) software was being circulated largely thanks to cypherpunk enthusiasts. According to Tim May’s Cyphernomicon, PGP was “the most important crypto tool” available at the time, “having single-handedly spread public key methods around the world.” It was available free of charge for non-commercial users, and complete source code was included with all copies. Most importantly, May wrote, “almost no understanding of how PGP works in detail is needed,” so anyone could use its encryption to securely send data over the net.

In April 1993, the Clinton administration announced its encryption policy initiative. The Clipper Chip was an NSA-developed encryption chipset for “secure” voice communication (the government would have a key for every chip manufactured). “Not to worry,” Phil Zimmermann cuttingly wrote in an essay about PGP. “The government promises that they will use these keys to read your traffic only ‘when duly authorized by law.” Not that anyone believed the promises. “To make Clipper completely effective,” Zimmermann continued, “the next logical step would be to outlaw other forms of cryptography.” This threat brought cypherpunks to the oppositional front lines in one of the early struggles over Internet rights, eventually defeating government plans.

John Gilmore summed up the accomplishments of the cypherpunks in a recent email: “We did reshape the world,” he wrote. “We broke encryption loose from government control in the commercial and free software world, in a big way. We built solid encryption and both circumvented and changed the corrupt US legal regime so that strong encryption could be developed by anyone worldwide and deployed by anyone worldwide,” including WikiLeaks.

As the 1990s rolled forward, many cypherpunks went to work for the man, bringing strong crypto to financial services and banks (on the whole, probably better than the alternative). Still, crypto-activism continued and the cypherpunk mailing list blossomed as an exchange for both practical encryption data and spirited, sometimes-gleeful argumentation, before finally peaking in 1997. This was when cypherpunk’s mindshare seemed to recede, possibly in proportion to the utopian effervescence of the early cyberculture. But the cypherpunk meme may now be finding a sort of rebirth in one of the biggest and most important stories in the fledgeling 21st century.

I am annoyed

This is beginning to sound very much like a dystopian fantasy

Flashback: 1995. Julian Assange’s first words on the cypherpunk email list: “I am annoyed.”

Of course, Julian Assange has gone on to annoy powerful players all over the world as the legendary fugitive editor-in-chief and spokesperson for WikiLeaks, publisher of secret information, news leaks, and classified media from anonymous sources. And while the mass media world has tracked nearly every aspect of Assange’s personal drama, it’s done very little to increase people’s understanding of WikiLeaks’ underlying technologies or the principles those technologies embody.

In the recent book Cypherpunks: Freedom and the Future of the Internet, Assange enlists the help of three fellow heroes of free information to set the record straight, aligning those principles with the ideas that Tim May dreamed up in 1989 with “The Crypto Anarchist Manifesto.”

The book is based on a series of conversations filmed for the television show The World Tomorrow while Assange was on house arrest in Norfolk, England during all of 2011. Attending were Jacob Appelbaum, the American advocate and researcher for the Tor project who has been in the sights of US authorities since substituting as a speaker for Assange at a US hackers conference; Andy Müller-Maguhn, one of the earliest members of the legendary Chaos Computer Club; and Jérémie Zimmerman, a French advocate for internet anonymity and freedom.

The conversation is sobering. If 1990s cypherpunk, like the broader tech culture that it was immersed in, was a little bit giddy with its potential to change the world, contemporary cypherpunk finds itself on the verge of what Assange calls “a postmodern surveillance dystopia, from which escape for all but the most skilled individuals will be impossible.”

How did we get here? The obvious political answer is 9/11. The event provided an opportunity for a vast expansion of national security states both here and abroad, including, of course, a diminution of protections against surveillance. The legalities involved in the US are a confusing and ever-shifting set of rules that are under constant legal contestation in the courts. Whatever the letter of the law, a September 2012 ACLU bulletin gave us the essence of the situation:

Justice Department documents released today by the ACLU reveal that federal law enforcement agencies are increasingly monitoring Americans’ electronic communications, and doing so without warrants, sufficient oversight, or meaningful accountability.

The documents, handed over by the government only after months of litigation, are the attorney general’s 2010 and 2011 reports on the use of “pen register” and “trap and trace” surveillance powers. The reports show a dramatic increase in the use of these surveillance tools, which are used to gather information about telephone, email, and other Internet communications. The revelations underscore the importance of regulating and overseeing the government’s surveillance power.

“In fact,” the report continues, “more people were subjected to pen register and trap and trace surveillance in the past two years than in the entire previous decade.”

Beyond the political and legal powers vested in the US intelligence community and in others around the world, there is the very real fact that technology once only accessible to the world’s superpowers is now commercially available. One example documented on WikiLeaks (and discussed in Cypherpunks) is the Zebra strategic surveillance system sold by VASTech. For $10 million, the South African company will sell you a turnkey system that can intercept all communications in a middle-sized country. A similar system called Eagle was used in Gadhafi’s Libya, as first reported by The Wall Street Journal in 2011. Sold by the French company Amesys, this is a commercial product, right down to the label on the box: “Nationwide Intercept System.” In the face of systems designed to scoop up all electronic communication and store it indefinitely, any showcase civil libertarian exceptions written into the surveillance laws are meaningless. But the threat isn’t limited to the surveillance state. There are more than a few self-interested financial players with $10 million lying around, many of whom would love to track all the private data in a several thousand mile radius.

All of this is beginning to sound very much like a dystopian fantasy from cyberpunk science fiction.

Total surveillance

If, in 1995, some cypherpunks had published a book about the upcoming “postmodern surveillance dystopia,” most commentators would have shrugged it off as just a wee bit paranoid and ushered them into the Philip K. Dick Reading Room. Now, it is more likely that people will shrug and say, “that ship has already sailed.”

David Brin seems to think so. The author of The Transparent Society is well known for his skepticism regarding the likelihood of maintaining most types of privacy as well as his relative cheerfulness in the face of near universal transparency. In an email, I asked him about the cypherpunk ethic, as expressed by Julian Assange: “privacy for the weak and transparency for the powerful.”

Brin’s response was scathing. The ethic, he says, is “already enshrined in law. A meek normal person can sue for invasion of privacy, a prominent person may not.” He’s just getting started:

But at a deeper level it is simply stupid. Any loophole in transparency ‘to protect the meek’ can far better be exploited by the mighty than by the meek. Their shills, lawyers and factotums will (1) ensure that ‘privacy protections’ have big options for the mighty and (2) that those options will be maximally exploited. Moreover (3) as I show in The Transparent Society, encryption-based ‘privacy’ is the weakest version of all. The meek can never verify that their bought algorithm and service is working as promised, or isn’t a bought-out front for the NSA or a criminal gang.

Above all, protecting the weak or meek with shadows and cutouts and privacy laws is like setting up Potemkin villages, designed to create surface illusions. Anyone who believes they can blind society’s elites — of government, commerce, wealth, criminality and tech-geekery — is a fool…

In other words, cypherpunk may be doing a disservice by spreading the illusion of freedom from surveillance.

I posed a similar question to Adrian Lamo, who reported Bradley Manning to federal authorities. Not surprisingly, Lamo is even more cynical.

“Privacy is quite dead,” he responded to me in an email. “That people still worship at its corpse doesn’t change that. In [the unreleased documentary] Hackers Wanted I gave out my SSN, and I’ve never had cause to regret that. Anyone could get it trivially. The biggest threat to our privacy is our own limited understanding of how little privacy we truly have.”

In Cypherpunks, Assange raises an essential point that at least partly refutes this skepticism: “The universe believes in encryption. It is easier to encrypt information than it is to decrypt it.” And while Appelbaum admits that even strong encryption can’t last forever, saying, “We’re probably not using one hundred year (safe) crypto,” he implies that pretty good privacy that lasts a pretty long time is far better than no privacy at all.

Assuming that some degree of privacy is still possible, most people don’t seem to think it’s worth the effort. The cypherpunks and their ilk fought to keep things like the PGP encryption program legal — and we don’t use them. We know Facebook and Google leak our personal online habits like a sieve and we don’t make much effort to cover our tracks. Perhaps some of us buy the good citizen cliché that if you’re not doing anything wrong, you don’t have anything to worry about, but most of us are just opting for convenience. We’ve got enough to deal with day to day without engaging in a privacy regimen. Occasionally, some slacker may lose his job because he posted a photo of himself cradling his bong or the like, but as with civil liberties more generally, as long as the daily outrages against individuals don’t reach epic proportions, we rubberneck in horror and then return to our daily activities.

Beneath this complacent surface lies a disquieting and mostly unexamined question. To what degree is the ubiquity of state surveillance a form of intimidation, a way to keep people away from social movements or from directly communicating their views?

Do you hesitate before liking WikiLeaks on Facebook?

“Privacy is quite dead. That people still worship at its corpse doesn’t change that.”

Throughout its entire history, the FBI has used secret intelligence operations to spy on, disrupt, and otherwise target activists and groups it considered subversive (mostly on the political left). The most notorious incidents occurred between 1956 and 1971, under the umbrella of COINTELPRO (Counter Intelligence Program). When the FBI’s activities were revealed first in 1971 and later, more fully by the 1976 Church Committee, no politically astute person shrugged it off. It was understood without question that mega surveillance of political activists was an act of suppression period, full stop.

Part of the shock of the COINTELPRO revelations was the FBI’s engagement in illegal activities to destroy political organizations. The government’s violation of its own surveillance laws even trumped the desire to punish the “symbolic bombings” of the Weather Underground. Since the FBI used illegal breaking and entering surveillance in an attempt to destroy the radical group, the leaders received light sentences when they emerged from underground. The same FBI techniques, once illegal, are undoubtedly so legal now under anti-terrorism laws that US Attorney General Holder could conduct the searches personally, dressed like Elvis and surrounded by the Real Housewives of Orange County in front of the cameras on a popular reality show.

“The universe believes in encryption. It is easier to encrypt information than it is to decrypt it.”

We have, perhaps, already let the surveillance culture slide too long.

It’s not as though the spirit of COINTELPRO has left us. Jacob Appelbaum, who has never been accused of any crime, has been subjected to relentless harassment, starting in the summer of 2010, when he was held up at Newark Airport where he was frisked, his laptop was inspected, and his three mobile phones were taken. He was then passed along to US Army officials for four hours of questioning. One army interrogator told him, menacingly, “You don’t look like you’re going to do so well in prison.” Several contacts found on the confiscated cell phones were then also given a hard time at airports and border crossings. In December of that year he was — along with other WikiLeaks activists — one of the subjects of a court order that compelled Twitter to let the feds snoop inside his account. (He only knows this because Twitter won a petition to be able to inform the subjects.) He has since been continually harassed by airport security and has been detained at the US border twelve times.

That this harassment is happening to someone who hasn’t been charged with a crime is particularly frightening.

“The Galgenhumor of our era,” Appelbaum told me in an email, “revolves around things that most people simply thought impossible in our lifetime.” He lists a number of chilling examples, including indefinite detention under the National Defense Authorization Act of 2012, warrantless wiretaps, drone strikes, state-sponsored malware, and the Patriot Act.

“It isn’t a great time to be a dissenting voice of any kind in our American empire,” he continues. But it isn’t the myriad of ways that civil liberties have been gutted that we’ll look back upon. “What we will remember is the absolute silence of so many, when the above things became normalized.”

Photo credits: Joi Ito, Irina Slutsky, and Wikipedia.

Information wants to be free, but the world isn’t ready

2013-01-23T10:05:05-05:00

sirius

Every few years, one of my friends from the early days of digital enthusiasm turns up on the media’s radar as a “defector.” Huzzah! The former advocate or progenitor of the Next New Thing has turned into a flaming critic. Perhaps he or she has even issued a jeremiad against the former Great Hope of All Humanity. It’s a turnkey, media-ready narrative, easy to convey and easy for a low-attention reading public to digest: He was for it. Now he’s agin’ it. You can tweet that and have enough characters left over for a haiku.

Jaron Lanier, who emerged into the media spotlight in the early ’90s as the chief spokesperson for Virtual Reality, seems to be having a longer — and more vocal — run at this sort of thing than most. In “Half A Manifesto,” published in Wired (2000), Lanier struck out against what he saw as a cybernetic totalism wherein some techno enthusiasts were laboring to create our nonbiological replacement species. You Are Not A Gadget (2011) went a bit further into “fighting the future,” exploring the ways in which Web 2.0 disruption depersonalized or was economically unfair to “creatives.” The latest chapter of this saga, “What Turned Jaron Lanier Against the Web,” is the much-ballyhooed portrait by Ron Rosenbaum for Smithsonian Magazine that portrays Jaron as being like a “spy who came in from the cold.”

“Free” culture

I partly agree with every point that Jaron Lanier makes in the Smithsonian article… with the emphasis on partly. But there is one place where I stand, politically, in opposition to Lanier’s implicit stance: that whole “information wants to be free” thing.

I asked him if there was a single development that gave rise to his defection.

“I’d had a career as a professional musician and what I started to see is that once we made information free, it wasn’t that we consigned all the big stars to the bread lines.” (They still had mega-concert tour profits.)

“Instead, it was the middle-class people who were consigned to the bread lines. And that was a very large body of people. And all of a sudden there was this weekly ritual, sometimes even daily: ‘Oh, we need to organize a benefit because so and so who’d been a manager of this big studio that closed its doors has cancer and doesn’t have insurance. We need to raise money so he can have his operation.’

“And I realized this was a hopeless, stupid design of society and that it was our fault. It really hit on a personal level—this isn’t working. And I think you can draw an analogy to what happened with communism, where at some point you just have to say there’s too much wrong with these experiments.”

In a nutshell, either Jaron just wants to express his dissatisfaction with people taking cultural stuff for free, or he thinks he can convince people that it’s the ethical thing to do to stop all this P2P sharing. I think P2P sharing is a natural and friendly act that should be honored, and that the digitization, availability, and replicability of cultural wealth represents the onset of a crisis in late capitalism that simply won’t get resolved without broad systemic reform.

Free culture tends to devalue and demean creative types as we’re pushed down into the shit end of the Long Tail

“Free culture,” as some call it, is not economically kind to artists, musicians, writers, and creative folks in general. Almost all cultural product today is digital, infinitely replicable and instantly available to everyone with web access. This tends to devalue and demean creative types as we’re pushed down into the shit end of the Long Tail alongside the vast, relatively unskilled hordes who are happy to provide their own content, thank you very much, and to grab up our stuff for free. The creative middle class is effectively being removed from the supply chain. It’s being disintermediated.

Despite my immediate self interests, I stand on the side of those who want information to be free, who oppose the creation of false scarcity. Back in the early days of new media — I met Jaron back in 1987 or ‘88 — we contemplated ideas like Free Culture as future probabilities instead of new (complicated and convoluted) realities. We were both younger then, and perhaps more resilient. I can’t speak for him, but I think it’s fair to say that there was a broad feeling amongst those of us at play in the fields of the arising tech revolution that if the anarchic shockwaves of shifting social relations brought about by — among other things — the digitization of cultural stuff and the resultant ease with which that stuff could be copied unto infinity and accessed from anywhere hit us, then we would happily surf those crazy waves of change.

The other part of that deal, as many of us perceived it, was that everything else had to change too. We knew that the end of scarcity in the digital realm would be “heightening the contradictions” (as they say) in the industrial capitalist model. We assumed that either capitalism would rise to the challenge by finding ways to support those disintermediated or displaced by technical change — or it would be forcibly altered or dissipated in the forward rush of boundary defying technologies.

Culture workers are not removed from the equation, but they are devalued

We’re now experiencing the change we once contemplated. While there’s certainly a surfeit of free culture, there’s also this middle terrain best represented by iTunes. By offering convenience and legitimacy (and by being extremely well advertised) those old school turnstiles are resurrected and money is exchanged. In this distribution model, culture workers are not removed from the equation, but they are devalued. This only serves to cloud the discussion by offering the almost entirely false premise that creative professionals can still make a reasonable livelihood off of their digitized stuff.

The big question is whether there is an economic place in the world for the cultural professionals — for the musician, the writer, etcetera. It seems to me that there is, down there with the hobbyists at the shit end of the Long Tail. In Chris Anderson’s glib happyland, everybody gets to bring his or her game to a nearly infinite market. In reality, that Long Tail is populated almost entirely by people who either don’t need to — or simply don’t — make anything like a reasonable livelihood from their efforts.

That Long Tail is populated almost entirely by people who either don’t need to make anything like a reasonable livelihood from their efforts

Why should this matter to you? Well, aside from the fact that everybody’s salable skill will eventually get disintermediated, automated, or both, it shouldn’t. There is no intrinsic entitlement to a middle class life for creative workers — or for anyone — written into the cosmos.

On the other hand, there’s no intrinsic entitlement to free access to the products of cultural creativity written into the cosmos either. All of these tendencies come about (or don’t) as the result of where the technology takes us, within the context of the type of society in which those technologies grow, and with the additional and important possible directional thrust that might occur as we negotiate what’s fair and, if warranted, actually make those societies change. And this finally is where the shouting over the P2P exchange of digital stuff versus the interests of the creator to gather a livelihood needs a contextual shift.

Idealism in isolation

Apparently, it was the economic marginalization of creatives in the age of free culture that pushed Jaron Lanier into this dark and foreboding mood. This is an understandable reaction to both the destabilizing effect of digital technology on society and the stress of living in an economic pressure cooker that’s about to blow. Unfortunately, the thing that needs to be targeted is the tendencies and policies that make for such economic pressure and not the natural urge that people feel to share stuff that can so easily be shared. And that’s going to require a radical change in our economic and political discourse. That may be a long shot, but it’s a better shot than trying to put the Free Culture genie back in the bottle. That ain’t gonna happen… and it shouldn’t.

This story took a darker turn a few days after I finished my first pass at it, when I learned about the suicide of Aaron Swartz. The hacker and free information activist faced a possible 30 years in prison for “liberating” several million academic journal articles from JSTOR, a paid subscription repository for digitized academic journals.

The free access to academic journals goes to the heart of the most idealistic intentions of free information advocates, as it has been understood since the earliest days of hacker ethics. This is the idea that hoarding information does harm to humanity. Progress is best made when other explorers can access the latest ideas and discoveries and build on them. Conversely, not having access to the discoveries and insights of others leads to wasted time, money and effort. That the information provided by researchers to academic journals might be valuable to others working in similar fields seems pretty obvious. Getting the latest Beyoncé album for free is not really the same thing, except by the broadest interpretation in which all signals are understood to contain information that, therefore, could be useful. Anyway, once you establish the principle of free information, any attempt to limit that principle to the sort of information that conforms to the values of the original idealists leads us inexorably into a near-infinite fog of subjective valuation.

It has been understood since the earliest days of hacker ethics that hoarding information does harm to humanity

Aaron Swartz is, in some sense, a victim of the disconnect that this essay has tried to illustrate. The idealism at the heart of digital free culture exists in a kind of isolation. It is not reflected and supported by other types of idealism around property — intellectual or otherwise — and the distribution of wealth. The federal prosecutors in the Swartz case represent the sort of hard-ass, legalistic, economic concerns that surrounds digital idealism like a school of sharks that senses the potential for an oncoming feeding crisis.

To some extent, both Jaron Lanier’s turn against ”free culture” and the insane, heavy-handed prosecution of Aaron Swartz stem from an inability to come to terms with the reality that in the digital age, it’s easy to share stuff for free with everybody, but people still want and need money. The larger tragedy is that lots of people (not just middle class creative professions) will eventually be rendered economically superfluous. The hope is that this will result in a critical mass of folks demanding a solution. The solution, which seemed obvious to people when they discussed the coming “cybernetic revolution” in the 1970s, is to find a way to (or an excuse to) distribute wealth to those rendered economically obsolete. This notion has been rendered taboo by a decades-long reactionary campaign to instill a visceral horrified response to any claims that displaced people should be “entitled” to anything. But this is a big subject that requires another essay questioning the legitimacy of a whole series of political and economic paradigms, so I’ll have to leave it there for now.

In the meantime, I’m convinced that with the slightest loosening of the economic pressure cooker — and even better, a modicum of slack — this techno-juggernaut will start to look again like the marvelous garden of intriguing possibilities that it did to some of us back in the day, when we enthused and dreamed an expansive and delightful future.

R.U. Sirius was editor-in-chief of Mondo 2000 and a columnist for San Francisco Examiner and Artforum International. He has authored or coauthored numerous books, including Mondo 2000: A User’s Guide to the New Edge, Design for Dying (with Timothy Leary) and Counterculture Through the Ages. He is currently working on Use Your Hallucinations: The Making of Mondo 2000 in Late 20th Century Cyberculture.

Photo credits: psd, vanz, dombrassey