Fixing the Digital Economy
On the hidden costs of giving our data away to the “Siren Servers,” and how we can make changes to help the Internet support a middle class:
“Siren Servers drive apart our identities as consumers and workers. In some cases, causality is apparent: free music downloads are great but throw musicians out of work. Free college courses are all the fad, but tenured professorships are disappearing. Free news proliferates, but money for investigative and foreign reporting is drying up. One can easily see this trend extending to the industries of the future, like 3-D printing and renewable energy.”
The Local-Global Flip, Or, ‘The Lanier Effect’
“It’s funny to say that because I’ll often get a lot of pushback and they’ll say, ‘No, no, no. There are all these people who are being empowered by all this stuff on the Internet that’s free’, and I’ll say, ‘Well, show me. Where’s all the wealth? Where’s the new middle class of people who are doing this?’ They don’t exist. They just aren’t there. We’re losing the middle class, and we should be saving it. We should be strengthening it.”