Who Owns the Future? (27 page)

Make both buyers and sellers click through agreements that make them, not you, take on all liabilities. These click-through agreements are the grandiosely verbose descendants of the Zen koan about a tree falling in a forest that no one hears. No one will read them, so they are very unlikely to be tested in a legal proceeding. No one wants to read them, not even lawyers. Some lawyer at the Electronic Frontier Foundation or some such place might occasionally be able to make it through one of them, but that is rare. Since they are unread, they basically do not exist, except for setting the basic rule everyone understands, which is that the server takes no risks, only the users of the server. The ideal is for click-through agreements to remain unread until your server becomes so huge that it’s scary.

This principle applies doubly if you are running a Wall Street fund on your server instead of a Silicon Valley startup. The ideal Siren Server is one for which you make no specific decisions. You should do everything possible to not do anything consequential. Don’t play favorites; don’t have taste. You are to be the neutral facilitator, the connector, the hub, but never an agent who could be blamed for a decision. Reduce the number of decisions that can be pinned on you to an absolute minimum.

What you
can
do, however, is pattern how other people make decisions. You can get people to have less privacy or organize a business around coupons, but you never get into the middle of any specific event within the pattern template you’ve created for other people to use.

Bills Are Boring

It isn’t free to run a Siren Server. You will need to hire some of those fabled PhDs from MIT or Caltech sooner or later, and pay the storage
and connectivity bills. For the Silicon Valley startup variety of Siren Server, this brings up the question of monetization. It isn’t polite or cool to think about monetization very early in the game. Have some faith, man! Information always turns to money, somehow, sooner or later.

Money usually doesn’t flow much into a Siren Server in its earliest phases, but fortunately they’re cheap to run. You can outsource much of the nontechnical heavy lifting that might come along to the peasants who populate Mechanical Turk and similar services. “The entire cost of running this business on the human side is incredibly low,” says Keith Rabois, chief operating officer of Square, an up-and-coming Siren Server that hopes to become the router of choice for consumer credit cards.
¹

Coattails

Fleeting success sporadically flares for a lucky few players on the sidelines of Siren Servers, as if by magic. These rags-to-riches tales are 21st century echoes of the famous Horatio Alger tales of the 19th century, in which unlikely underdogs worked hard and found great success—except the hard work part is no longer a given.

No end of ridicule has been directed at Horatio Alger stories ever since they first appeared, because they build false hope. They are deceptive; even when the original story is true, it is vanishingly unlikely that any particular individual will find similar success by pursuing similar strategies. Horatio’s algebra offered horrible ratios. Theater can’t replace a functional economy. An economy can’t grow authentically if it is too much like a casino.

There are actually two types of 21st century Horatio Alger story that spark off of Siren Servers. One type is the occasional “viral” success. This might occur on YouTube, for instance. Every now and then a sympathetic individual will achieve visibility, and perhaps even income. But in the longer term, such people generally must seek to leverage Internet visibility in a gambit to find success in old media, which is being shrunk by the Internet at the same time. For instance, TV talent shows like
The Voice
attract YouTube stars,
even though their audience on YouTube might have been larger. At least old media, even in its decline and with all its problems, still offers a career path.

A more disturbing version of deceptive viral success is the occasional charity effort on sites like Reddit. A sympathetic figure in need will reach the hearts of a large audience and get some help, usually in the form of many small donations. On the one hand, in each case this is wonderful, and yet it’s ultimately a way for people to feel good while having achieved nothing, in statistical terms.

However, viral success is small-time compared to another, more rarefied kind of rags-to-riches tale. When a Siren Server is on the rise, in a honeymoon phase, a small-time player might just score a once-in-a-lifetime spectacular lift.

The Web itself went through a honeymoon phase around the turn of the century, which is now remembered as the “dot-com bubble.” During this time there were weird and wild successes that motivated a stampede of hopefuls. My favorite story was of a young woman who drove up her credit card debt and then created a website asking for donations from strangers to pay off her debt, for no reward and with no real explanation. It worked, but as I recounted in
Gadget,
that was only because her timing was accidentally perfect. She caught the wave at the right moment, and none of the many copycats who followed her could duplicate her success. Of course it would be absurd to think that any could.

Her success was due to the fact that she had a rapt audience for that fleeting magic moment when a network is gaining its network effect but before all the hapless scammers of the world rush in to dilute the radiated benefit of it. She was like the first person to arrive in California for the gold rush, when the gold was still visible, strewn on the surface.

During the honeymoon phase of a newly successful Siren Server, a lucky few people will typically be gifted with astounding, deceptive success. Their stories will be celebrated, creating a distorted popular perception of opportunities.

For instance, musician Amanda Palmer launched a Kickstarter campaign in 2012 that became legendary. She stated a goal of raising a hundred thousand dollars to support a new release and tour,
but instead raised more than a million dollars. There were other similar tales during that honeymoon year for Kickstarter. (Good for her! I would like to believe this type of success will become unremarkable, but as things stand, I won’t hold my breath. World, please prove me wrong!)

An interesting psychological phenomenon, when a modern Horatio Alger–like hero hits the jackpot, is that she might succumb to the illusion, for a moment, that she has achieved Siren Server status herself. Palmer promptly asked for free labor from musician fans on the same tour that had been luxuriously funded by those same fans. Needless to say, the Mechanical Turk effect came into play, and free labor presented itself. In response to a torrent of criticism from professional musicians, Palmer relented and announced a plan to pay musicians. (Good for her, once again! But this doesn’t suggest a societal solution.)

There is always a tale of someone making it big or changing their life because they caught a digital wave at just the right moment. If only there were enough of those moments generated by the regime of Siren Servers to support a society.

The Closing Act

How do Siren Servers die? We don’t know as much as we will someday soon, since the phenomenon is still new. One can imagine Wal-Mart being overwhelmed by Amazon, for instance, simply because Amazon is even more computational than Wal-Mart.

Amazon, by using superior computation, might potentially piggyback on Wal-Mart’s legacy of supply chain optimization, and essentially aggregate Wal-Mart’s efficiencies into its own. It wasn’t Amazon that brought about all the cheaply available goods, but by having the best spy data at a given time, Amazon might become the concern that benefits the most from them.

Maybe some other Siren Server related to self-driving vehicles will come along and be able to make itself meta to Amazon and then steal whatever advantage Amazon builds up, since Amazon depends on vehicles to deliver goods to consumers. Competition
becomes mostly about who can out-meta who, and only secondarily about specialization.

We do know that Siren Servers can die. It happened to Lehman Brothers.

They are not like classical monopolies that can become so entrenched that a regulator might choose to break them up. How would you break up Facebook? Into one for fake hot babes and another for political organizing? The idea is absurd.

Individual Siren Servers can die and yet the Siren Server pattern perseveres, and it is that pattern that is the real problem. The systematic decoupling of risk from reward in the rising information economy is the problem, not any particular server.

Stories Are Nothing Without Ideas

This book proposes a grand future story in which the pattern of Siren Servers will be superseded by a more inclusive new pattern. But even today, it would be a mistake to only see chaos and meaninglessness in the crazed energies of a networked world.

The endgames of contests between Siren Servers are not meaningless. Siren Servers are not interchangeable. While they all share certain traits (narcissism, hyperamplified risk aversion, and extreme information asymmetry), they also represent particular, more specialized philosophies. The requirements of being a Siren Server leave enough room for variation that contests between them can also be collisions of contrasting ideas.

Facebook suggests not only a moral imperative to place certain information in its network, but the broad applicability of one template to compare people. In this it is distinct from Google, which encourages semistructured online activity that Google will be best at organizing after the fact.

Twitter suggests that meaning will emerge from fleeting flashes of thought contextualized by who sent the thought rather than the content of the thought. In this it is distinct from Wikipedia, which suggests that flashes of thought be inserted meaningfully into a shared semantic structure. Wikipedia proposes that knowledge can
be divorced from point of view. In this it is distinct from the
Huffington Post,
where opinions fluoresce.

In all these cases, unquestionably big ideas are at play. The designs of these sites are embodiments of philosophies about what a person is, where meaning comes from, the nature of freedom, and the nature of an ideal society. When Master Servers die, the associated ideas can be suppressed for long periods of time, which is as close as ideas get to death.

The blog TechCrunch keeps a grim count of failed Silicon Valley efforts, called the Deadpool.
²
In it we find not only would-be Siren Servers that died, but also an early hint at how ideas might be lost along with them.

For instance, Google tried to get a new Siren Server going, to tremendous fanfare, called Wave.
³
It proposed that conversations between people could be highly structured from the start, to make the content of the conversation more valuable later. That would mean that meaning in natural language would be preserved even if everything said had to be fit initially into a particular, tree-shaped data structure. That in turn suggests a level of meaning in human conversation that is more orderly and tiered, more Chomskyan, than has ever been isolated by researchers before. It’s a major assertion about what meaning is, or might become. (I am skeptical that the idea is correct, but that is beside the point.)

Since the effort was about big business data instead of big science data, we can’t say that the idea suffered a Popperian
*
disqualification. Instead the idea was attached to a server that failed. With the death of a Siren Server, a distinct sensibility concerning human meaning and how we communicate with one another became effectively dead and unexplored for now.
⁴

*
Karl Popper was an Australian philosopher who famously described how science never achieves absolute, eternal truth, but instead gets closer and closer to truth by disqualifying false ideas. Mathematics, on the other hand, does include a concept of absolute, eternal truth, because of proofs.

A networked story is just as much a contest of ideas as was the Cold War, which served as a standard of meaning for Kushner and Fukuyama. Story lives, and the future is not random.

FIFTH INTERLUDE

The Wise Old Man in the Clouds

THE LIMITS OF EMERGENCE AS AN EXPLANATION

In 2012, the University of San Francisco, a Jesuit institution, themed its recruitment campaign on the idea that Christianity is like Facebook. One of the slogans was “Our CEO mastered social networking 2,000 years before Mark Zuckerberg was born.”
¹

There’s something to the comparison, and I find that worrisome. Each institution became powerful in an unconventional way. Each network created a center of power that bypassed territorial and political boundaries, and existed on its own plane. Each became what might be called a “social monopoly,” engaging in social engineering on a grand scale.

That’s not to say that bad things will necessarily happen in a social monopoly. They can achieve breathtaking large-scale social good. The Catholic Church unquestionably educates many millions of the poor, heals many millions of the sick, stabilizes many millions of families, and comforts many millions of the dying; in 2012 Facebook dipped a toe into the waters of social engineering by increasing the rolls of organ donors with a simple tweak of its user experience. By putting the option to donate right in front of people, many more people embraced that option.

But the problem with freestanding concentrations of power is that you never know who will inherit them. If social networking has the power to synchronize great crowds to dethrone a pharaoh, why might it not also coordinate lynchings or pogroms?

During the Middle Ages, which were characterized by weak states, the Church endured “bad popes.” Access to the afterlife, and indeed the papacy, was bought and sold, and all manner of hypocritical and criminal scheming overwhelmed any charitable or spiritual mission.