Computer And Technology News: Digital economy What if Facebook times goes bust?

Would someone save all the posts? Do we need a government guarantee for our online identity? The cyber-guru Jaron Lanier thinks about the future Internet. By Marc Reich wine

With Jaron Lanier lands you almost traditional in the future. At least the term “virtual reality” invented since the cyber-thinkers from day one, the journalists of the world entitle him as net oracle or as an Internet Kassandra.

And Cassandra warns: Not only is the Internet of Things will come, all areas of life will be software-mediated and largely automated. We will for example not drive a car anymore, for we have taken a driver’s license. Because driver’s licenses will be unnecessary, because cars drive by itself. And why not? “Man is by nature a bad driver,” says Lanier.

prosthetic leg to go?

Or: We will be visiting a library, in which we borrow any more books. Also, no audio books or DVDs. No, in the future we go to a public library, there to have access to a 3D printer. And that is us, we are insured, print our prosthetic leg. Jaron Lanier predicts us:

“At some point, most of the productivity software will expire taught.” The digital information technology that makes our world more efficient, will eventually lead to an implosion of capitalism, as will be done more and more in the do-it-yourself method with time.

to now have the above all the photos, music and news industries get to feel, but Lanier is certain that by the force of digitizing many other industries and jobs will lose their “economic dignity.”

The impact of digitization

on the power, huge amounts of business-related information (“Big Data”) automated process it, have in addition to the company of them originating on the Internet today insurance companies, financial service providers and secret services specialized. In the future, other industries will use data-based networking technologies to improve efficiency.

self clothes we will not let one day sew of Asian economies in textile factories, but on small 3D printers create at home individually by pressing a button. A similar Print @ Home principle says Lanier also for consumer electronics, firearms and the bread ahead.

What Big Data makes us

Yes, it puts a good bit of science fiction in Lanier’s new book on the question of what Big Data in the future does to us – and we with Big Data. Lanier talks a lot of siren servers. Sirens are known in Greek mythology for their power to lure sailors by singing into ruin.

In the imagery of his book Siren Server stand for the power of cybernetic computer services whose siren call succumb more and more industries – the end user anyway. Companies like Facebook, Google or Amazon farming in cyberspace already “massive dossiers of personal data”.

your evaluation can our tendency to crime or terrorism as well as automated predict party preferences in Wahlomat or the likelihood of a click on a certain, perhaps ever purchased Belgian chocolate brand on Amazon. Who knows what the algorithms to know everything about him?

an end to the free-culture!

central thesis of “Who owns the future?” is that the steadily progressing in the digital age proliferation of personal data is only to stop, if we do not put our data free of charge. Rather, as Lanier, we would have our network economics change over completely.

The current practice, regardless of data to feed siren server therefore represents an extremely asymmetric business model dar. We feed our data with a Facebook, but we do not know what’s behind the scenes with our data happens. Only at the moment, would pay in the Facebook for our data, the business relationship would be symmetrical.

Conversely, should we have to pay for membership in social networks, rather than come to terms with the illusion of a pseudo-free concerts, for which we pay in truth with our data, more said, with the willingness to be analyzed our data by automated processes. So far, so Lanier, we would have at Facebook or Google but not even customer status (to have the advertisers).

“is available for your data a bit too”

“is available for your data a bit too”, now formulated Lanier – and this is almost the central credo of his new digital economy, the us from the state of our digital immaturity wants to free and permanent data powerlessness, not by the idea of ??encryption and cryptography. This possibility is repeatedly raised in the room to escape the espionage business and government seems for the common user, who can not even delete the cookies in his browser, not a realistic option.

Rather Lanier says: “The only effective way interaction in the fight against abuse of data provides an economic approach.” Only when digital information would really cost anything, we would have something like customers rights against Internet giants such as Google or Facebook. Is that really so?

Big Data for all monetize

Lanier’s model tends in the direction of a basic fee for information flows, with everyone participating in the Internet, on the one hand occupied, on the other hand also reimbursed. The new digital economy before saw that the value of our information is completely monetized in the software-based network systems.

money would not necessarily abolished, but Big Data adopted as the currency of own value: “There will be significantly more financial transactions than we are used to today.” Lanier envisions, for example, that couples who have met and married through an online brokerage that were so “successful” conveys, are remunerated for their record-correlation. Especially when other potential pairs were successfully verkuppelt on the basis of their matching data points: Each pair would be here a so-called nano payment to

Is this technically possible?

technical prerequisite for this complete capitalization of the digital would be the so-called “two-way link”, as the Internet Utopian and hypertext theorist Ted Nelson had his time conceived. A bit contradictory, it seems certainly know that Lanier wants to make Big Data Big Data harmless calculated by even more. But his argument is: “Information can always be turned into money, somehow, sooner or later.”

Lanier, who has always positioned itself in the past as an opponent of Wikipedia, also suggests that people who are free fed their digital life long knowledge in the online encyclopedia have to be rewarded with a kind of old-age pension for it. “The idea that the lifetime contributions of creative people could be forgotten (…), is more than unfair,” he writes.

royalties for Wikipedia authors

Wikipedia as a retirement, which probably had the fewest penniless academics on the bill. The question is from a German perspective, only those who paid such royalties as long as’ Wikipedia ‘author’ is no ordinary profession in Künstlersozialkasse.

“Who owns the future” is a clever, self-confident, sometimes even a bit contradictory book. It has both very capitalist ideas by it wants to monetize any form of data communication and abolish the pseudo-gratuitousness of the Internet. It involves the other hand, quasi-socialist overtones when Lanier asks: What would that be if Facebook would go bankrupt (which is theoretically possible for any company)

What would then happen to the online identity of around one billion of our humanity? If all of the posts, friends, life chronicles then just go away? Or there would be a government guarantee against failure?

Facebook – digitally relevant to the system

“More and more,” writes Lanier, “similar to Facebook a power company. The company is part of the infrastructure that is needed for life, and if people need something necessarily require it at some point that the government should ensure to continue to provide it. “

Would we want to save Facebook as systemically important or even need? Or should our online identity not ever be operated by the State itself? The idea that each person is allocated with the birth of an online identity or even must have (such as a tax number or a bank account) and later a digital data account for a cloud service, and can equip, so has a right to digital data ownership, does not sound far-fetched.

civil rights on online identity, privacy, including

But can you explain this online identity for the citizen to the state sovereignty task and challenge at the same time, to commercialize the complete exchange of digital information? “In practice, the implementation of humanistic economics would be more complicated than I can explain in a few pages,” Lanier stressed on the last pages of his book.

Generally you can keep systems that lead the attribute name in the humanistic, even for arg dangerous; rhetorically took socialism and communism always claim for themselves, the people at the center provide for their economic order, and then went with equality only at the expense of freedom.

how exactly the internet Lanierismus wants to look and should, probably does not even know itself Lanier He tries to think his ideas for the future with concrete examples – but whether the future belongs to his ideas, time will tell.

Computer And Technology News

Sunday, February 16, 2014

Digital economy What if Facebook times goes bust? - THE WORLD