Who Owns the Future? Read Online Free PDF Page A

strange. Music is no longer a nutrient to be supplied, but something more mystical, a forge of meaning and identity: the realization of flow in life.
    Multitudes of people want nothing more than to be able to play music for a living. We know this because we see their attempts online. There’s a constant retweeting of the lie that there’s a substantial new class of musicians succeeding financially through Internet publicity. Such people do exist, but only in token numbers.
    However, a remarkable number of people do get attention and build followings for their music online. This book imagines that people like that might someday make a living at what they do. Improving the designs of information networks could result in the improvement of life for everyone as machines get better and better.
THE PLOT
    Aristotle seems to want to escape the burden of accommodating lesser people. His quote about self-operating lutes and looms could be interpreted as a daydream that better technology will free us to some degree from having to deal with one another.
    It’s not as if everyone wanted to be closer to all of humanity when cities first formed. Athens was a necessity first, and a luxury second. No one wants to accommodate the diversity of strangers. People deal with each other politically because the material advantages are compelling. We find relative safety and sustenance in numbers. Agriculture and armies happened to work better as those enterprises got bigger, and cities built walls.
    But in Aristotle’s words you get a taste of what a nuisance it can be to accommodate others. Something was lost with the advent of the polis, and we still dream of getting it back.
    The reward for a Roman general, upon retiring after years of combat, was a plot of land he could farm for himself. To be left alone, to be able to live off the land with the illusion of no polis to bug you, that was the dream. The American West offered that dream again, and still loathes giving it up. Justice Louis Brandeis famously defined privacy as the “right to be left alone.”
    In every case, however, abundance without politics was an illusion that could only be sustained in temporary bubbles, supported by armies. The ghosts of the losers haunt every acre of easy abundance. The greatest beneficiaries of civilization use all their power to create a temporary illusion of freedom from politics. The rich live behind gates, not just to protect themselves, but to pretend to not need anyone else, if only for a moment. In Aristotle’s quote, we find the earliest glimmer of the hope that technological advancement could replace territorial conquest as a way of implementing an insulating bubble around a person.
    People naturally seek the benefits of society, meaning the accommodation of strangers, while avoiding direct vulnerabilities to specific others as much as possible. This is a clichéd criticism of the online culture of the moment. People have thousands of “friends” and yet stare at a little screen when in the proximity of other people. As it was in Athens, so it is online.

PART TWO

The Cybernetic Tempest

CHAPTER 4
The Ad Hoc Construction of Mass Dignity
Are Middle Classes Natural?
    The advent of finance in the last four centuries or so coincided with rising ideals, the introduction of technologies that brought comfort and health to millions of people for the first time, and even the miraculous, imperfect rise of middle classes. In the context of this transformation, it is natural to ask why more people could not benefit from modernity sooner. If technology is getting so good, and there is so much wealth, why should there still be poor people at all?
    Technological progress inevitably inspires demands for greater benefits than it has delivered at a given time. We expect modern medicine to be mishap-free and modern planes to be crash-proof. And yet, a century ago it would have been unimaginable to be even able to want these things. Modern finance similarly pairs