Books › Who Owns the Future?
Who Owns the Future?
416 pages
A visionary and deeply humane reckoning with the hidden costs of our digital lives, offering a radical blueprint for reclaiming our data.
What it feels like
Reading this book feels like sitting down with a brilliant, slightly eccentric tech pioneer who is urgently trying to warn you about the house he helped build. The pace is steady and deliberate, asking you to pause and rethink the invisible digital structures that govern modern life. Lanier's prose is a unique blend of Silicon Valley insider knowledge and poetic humanism, creating an atmosphere that is both deeply apprehensive about the present and radically hopeful about the future. It is intellectually stimulating and occasionally sobering, as it unpacks the economic realities of free data. This is a must-read for anyone who feels a lingering unease about the power of big tech and yearns for a more equitable digital society.
- Mood
- intellectually stimulating
- apprehensive
- cautiously optimistic
- Tone
- provocative
- visionary
- urgent
- humane
- philosophical
- Pace
- steady
- Themes
- commodification of personal data · technological determinism · erosion of the middle class · digital humanism · power dynamics in the information age
- The writing
- Accessible yet deeply philosophical, blending tech-industry insider knowledge with poetic, humanist reflections.
- The arc
- Moves from a sobering realization of systemic digital exploitation toward a hopeful, radical reimagining of a fairer technological future.
- Who it's for
- Tech-skeptics, digital ethicists, and anyone feeling uneasy about the hidden costs of free online services.
Content notes
- economic anxiety
- systemic inequality
About the book
Jaron Lanier is the father of virtual reality and one of the world’s most brilliant thinkers. Who Owns the Future? 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.
Lanier has predicted how technology will transform our humanity for decades, and his insight has never been more urgently needed. 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 provocative, poetic, and deeply humane book, Lanier charts a path toward a brighter future: an information economy that rewards ordinary people for what they do and share on the web.
Description from Open Library.
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