You are not a Gadget: A Manifesto (16 page)

In each case, human creativity and understanding, especially one’s own creativity and understanding, are treated as worthless. Instead, one trusts in the crowd, in the big
n
, in the algorithms that remove the risks of creativity in ways too sophisticated for any mere person to understand.

A natural question to ask at this point is, Are there any alternatives, any options, that exist apart from the opposing poles of old media and open culture?

Early on, one of the signal ideas about how a culture with a digital network could—and should—work was that the need for money might be eliminated, since such a network could keep track of fractional barters between very large groups of people. Whether that idea will ever come back into the discussion I don’t know, but for the foreseeable future we seem to be committed to using money for rent, food, and medicine. So is there any way to bring money and capitalism into an era of technological abundance without impoverishing almost everyone? One smart idea came from Ted Nelson.

Nelson is perhaps the most formative figure in the development of online culture. He invented the digital media link and other core ideas of connected online media back in the 1960s. He called it “hypermedia.”

Nelson’s ambitions for the economics of linking were more profound than those in vogue today. He proposed that instead of copying digital media, we should effectively keep only one copy of each cultural
expression—as with a book or a song—and pay the author of that expression a small, affordable amount whenever it is accessed. (Of course, as a matter of engineering practice, there would have to be many copies in order for the system to function efficiently, but that would be an internal detail, unrelated to a user’s experience.)

As a result, anyone might be able to get rich from creative work. The people who make a momentarily popular prank video clip might earn a lot of money in a single day, but an obscure scholar might eventually earn as much over many years as her work is repeatedly referenced. But note that this is a very different idea from the long tail, because it rewards individuals instead of cloud owners.

The popularity of amateur content today provides an answer to one of the old objections to Nelson’s ideas. It was once a common concern that most people would not want to be creative or expressive, ensuring that only a few artists would get rich and that everyone else would starve. At one event, I remember Nelson trying to speak and young American Maoists shouting him down because they worried that his system would favor the intellectual over the peasant.

I used to face this objection constantly when I talked about virtual reality (which I discuss more fully in
Chapter 14
). Many a lecture I gave in the 1980s would end with a skeptic in the audience pointing out loudly and confidently that only a tiny minority of people would ever write anything online for others to read. They didn’t believe a world with millions of active voices was remotely possible—but that is the world that has come to be.

If we idealists had only been able to convince those skeptics, we might have entered into a different, and better, world once it became clear that the majority of people are indeed interested in and capable of being expressive in the digital realm.

Someday I hope there will be a genuinely universal system along the lines proposed by Nelson. I believe most people would embrace a social contract in which bits have value instead of being free. Everyone would have easy access to everyone else’s creative bits at reasonable prices—and everyone would get paid for their bits. This arrangement would celebrate personhood in full, because personal expression would be valued.

There is an intensely strong libertarian bias in digital culture—and what I have said in the preceding section is likely to enrage adherents of digital libertarianism.

It’s not hard to see why. If I’m suggesting a universal system, inspired by Ted Nelson’s early work, doesn’t that mean the government is going to get in the middle of your flow of bits in order to enforce laws related to compensation for artists? Wouldn’t that be intrusive? Wouldn’t it amount to a loss of liberty?

From the orthodox point of view, that’s how it probably looks, but I hope to persuade even the truest believers that they have to pick their poison—and that the poison I’m suggesting here is ultimately preferable,
especially
from a libertarian perspective.

It’s important to remember the extreme degree to which we make everything up in digital systems, at least during the idyllic period before lock-in constricts our freedoms. Today there is still time to reconsider the way we think about bits online, and therefore we ought to think hard about whether what will otherwise become the official future is really the best we can do.

Let’s take money—the original abstract information system for managing human affairs—as an example. It might be tempting to print your own money, or, if you’re the government, to print an excessive amount of it. And yet smart people choose not to do either of these things. It is a common assertion that if you copy a digital music file, you haven’t destroyed the original, so nothing was stolen. The same thing could be said if you hacked into a bank and just added money to your online account. (Or, for that matter, when traders in exotic securities made bets on stupendous transactions of arbitrary magnitudes, leading to the global economic meltdown in 2008.) The problem in each case is not that you stole from a specific person but that you undermined the artificial scarcities that allow the economy to function. In the same way, creative expression on the internet will benefit from a social contract that imposes a
modest
degree of artificial scarcity on information.

In Ted Nelson’s system, there would be no copies, so the idea of copy protection would be mooted. The troubled idea of digital rights management—that cumbersome system under which you own a copy of bits you bought, but not really, because they are still managed by the seller—would not exist. Instead of collections of bits being offered as a product, they would be rendered as a service.

Creative expression could then become the most valuable resource in a future world of material abundance created through the triumphs of technologists. In my early rhetoric about virtual reality back in the 1980s, I always said that in a virtual world of infinite abundance, only creativity could ever be in short supply—thereby ensuring that creativity would become the most valuable thing.

Recall the earlier discussion of Maslow’s hierarchy. Even if a robot that maintains your health will only cost a penny in some advanced future, how will you earn that penny? Manual labor will be unpaid, since cheap robots will do it. In the open culture future, your creativity and expression would also be unpaid, since you would be a volunteer in the army of the long tail. That would leave nothing for you.

The only alternative to some version of Nelson’s vision in the long run—once technology fulfills its potential to make life easy for everyone—would be to establish a form of socialism.

Indeed, that was the outcome that many foresaw. Maybe socialism can be made compassionate and efficient (or so some digital pioneers daydreamed) if you just add a digital backbone.

I am not entirely dismissive of the prospect. Maybe there is a way it can be made to work. However, there are some cautions that I hope any new generations of digital socialists will take to heart.

A sudden advent of socialism, just after everyone has slid down Maslow’s pyramid into the mud, is likely to be dangerous. The wrong people often take over when a revolution happens suddenly. (See: Iran.) So if socialism is where we are headed, we ought to be talking about it now so that we can approach it incrementally. If it’s too toxic a subject to
even talk about openly, then we ought to admit we don’t have the abilities to deal with it competently.

I can imagine that this must sound like a strange exhortation to some readers, since socialism might seem to be the ultimate taboo in libertarian Silicon Valley, but there is an awful lot of stealth socialism going on beneath the breath in digital circles. This is particularly true for young people whose experience of markets has been dominated by the market failures of the Bush years.

It isn’t crazy to imagine that there will be all sorts of new, vast examples of communal cooperation enabled through the internet. The initial growth of the web itself was one, and even though I don’t like the way people are treated in web 2.0 designs, they have provided many more examples.

A prominent strain of enthusiasm for wikis, long tails, hive minds, and so on incorporates the presumption that one profession after another will be demonetized. Digitally connected mobs will perform more and more services on a collective volunteer basis, from medicine to solving crimes, until all jobs are done that way. The cloud lords might still be able to hold on to their thrones—which is why even the most ardent Silicon Valley capitalists sometimes encourage this way of thinking.

This trajectory begs the question of how a person who is volunteering for the hive all day long will earn rent money. Will living space become something doled out by the hive? (Would you do it with Wikipedia-style edit wars or Digg-style voting? Or would living space only be inherited, so that your station in life was predetermined? Or would it be allocated at random, reducing the status of free will?)

Private property in a market framework provides one way to avoid a deadening standard in shaping the boundaries of privacy. This is why a market economy can enhance individuality, self-determination, and dignity, at least for those who do well in it. (That not everybody does well is a problem, of course, and later on I’ll propose some ways digital tech might help with that.)

Can a digital version of socialism also provide dignity and privacy? I view that as an important issue—and a very hard one to resolve.

How, exactly, could a transition from open copying to paid access work? This is a situation in which there need to be universal, governmental solutions to certain problems.

People have to all agree in order for something to have monetary value. For example, if everyone else thinks the air is free, it’s not going to be easy to convince me to start paying for it on my own. These days it amazes me to remember that I once purchased enough music CDs to fill a wall of shelves—but it made sense at the time, because everyone I knew also spent a lot of money on them.

Perceptions of fairness and social norms can support or undermine any economic idea. If I know my neighbor is getting music, or cable TV, or whatever, for free, it becomes a little harder to get me to pay for the same things.
^*
So for that reason, if all of us are to earn a living when the machines get good, we will have to agree that it is worth paying for one another’s elevated cultural and creative expressions.

There are other cases where consensus will be needed. One online requirement that hurt newspapers before they gave up and went “open” was the demand that you enter your password (and sometimes your new credit card numbers) on each and every paid site that you were interested in accessing. You could spend every waking minute entering such information in a world of millions of wonderful paid-content sites. There has to be a universal, simple system. Despite some attempts, it doesn’t look as if the industry is able to agree on how to make this happen, so this annoyance seems to define a natural role for government.

It is strange to have to point this out, but given the hyper-libertarian atmosphere of Silicon Valley, it’s important to note that government isn’t always bad. I like the “Do not call” list, for instance, since it has contained the scourge of telemarketing. I’m also glad we only have one currency, one court system, and one military. Even the most extreme libertarian must admit that fluid commerce has to flow through channels that amount to government.

Of course, one of the main reasons that digital entrepreneurs have tended to prefer free content is that it costs money to manage micro-payments. What if it costs you a penny to manage a one-penny transaction? Any vendor who takes on the expense is put at a disadvantage.

In such a case, the extra cost should be borne by the whole polis, as a government function. That extra penny isn’t wasted—it’s the cost of maintaining a social contract. We routinely spend more money incarcerating a thief than the thief stole in the first place. You could argue that it would be cheaper to not prosecute small crimes and just reimburse the victims. But the reason to enforce laws is to create a livable environment for everyone. It’s exactly the same with putting value on individual human creativity in a technologically advanced world.

We never record the true cost of the existence of money because most of us put in volunteer time to maintain the social contract that gives money its value. No one pays you for the time you take every day to make sure you have cash in your wallet, or to pay your bills—or for the time you spend worrying about the stuff. If that time were reimbursed, then money would become too expensive as a tool for a society.

In the same way, the maintenance of the liberties of capitalism in a digital future will require a general acceptance of a social contract. We will pay a tax to have the ability to earn money from our creativity, expression, and perspective. It will be a good deal.