Who Owns the Future?

Front Cover
Penguin Books, 2014 - Business & Economics - 372 pages
The author evaluates the negative impact of digital network technologies on the economy and particularly the middle class, citing challenges to employment and personal wealth while exploring the potential of a new information economy. This is his visionary reckoning with the most urgent economic and social trend of our age: the poisonous concentration of money and power in our digital networks. He has predicted how technology will transform our humanity for decades. He shows how Siren Servers, which exploit big data and the free sharing of information, led our economy into recession, imperiled personal privacy, and hollowed out the middle class. The networks that define our world, including social media, financial institutions, and intelligence agencies, now threaten to destroy it. But there is an alternative. In this book he charts a path toward a brighter future: an information economy that rewards ordinary people for what they do and share on the web.

Other editions - View all

About the author (2014)

Jaron Lanier is a philosopher and computer scientist who has spent his career pushing the transformative power of modern technology to its limits. He is one of the premier designers and engineers at work today, and has been named one of the top one hundred public intellectuals in the world by Prospect and Foreign Policy. His previous book is You Are Not A Gadget.