As an enthusiastic photog who grew up exactly on the film/digital divide, I can tell you exactly where all of that value that was "destroyed" at Kodak went. Straight to me. When I had my own darkroom and I saved the money I made cutting lawns for film and chemicals, I knew exactly, viscerally, how much it cost me to press that shutter release. Flubbing a shot made me feel physically ill.
When I pull 300 high quality pictures off my freaking phone and casually discard 275 of them that I'm not happy with, I still feel as rich as a sultan.
Well... the guy should read Schumpeter. Every "industrial" revolution wipes off industries. In the same time, a whole new industry appears, a whole new class of jobs and a whole new lifestyle and culture. The middle class is not destroyed at all. On a world scale, it is rising. Rising in China and South East Asia.
We can't reduce a world wide phenomenon without taking into account hundreds of other factors ( populations in western countries growing old, the globalization, sacrificed generations in Europe and exodus of its skilled youth ) to Kodak vs Instagram.
Whenever I see the name Jaron Lanier I get an image of a being not unlike the Caterpillar from Alice in Wonderland: happily smoking his bong, taking great pride in being difficult and obstreperous and in saying things that sound profound, but don't really mean anything.
To be fair to him, I believe he's quite an able programmer. His team won a facial recognition competition some years back. Their algorithm was (ironically considering his mysterianism) heavily inspired by the human brain.
Normally, I'm fairly (unconsciously) biased against such 'longhairs,' but in the case of Lanier, my impression is that he is, in fact, extremely intelligent.
I'd highly encourage you to read this (very long) interview with him from 2011 in Edge:
Even more on point, the smartphone makers are the ones that have really taken over Kodak's former space (i.e, basic snapshots). Canon sells high-end equipment - they were never really in direct competition with Kodak.
To name just one, Apple employs almost 400,000 workers directly, plus god knows how many contract factory workers.
Wasn't it Kodak's focus to sell film? And, by extension, enabling its customers to share their pictures? In a sense Instagram would be a modern day analogue of such a company -- just that it doesn't need a hardware division anymore.
But I still see your point. It isn't the best comparison, and using it as a quotation does not bode well for his book, IMO.
> If you look at something like Facebook, Facebook is adding the tiniest little rind of value over the basic structure that’s there anyway. In fact, it’s even worse than that. The original designs for networking, going back to Ted Nelson, kept track of everything everybody was pointing at so that you would know who was pointing at your website. In a way Facebook is just recovering information that was deliberately lost because of the fetish for being anonymous. That’s also true of Google.
Wow, this is so wrong I am annoyed by it. The Internet is not "anonymous" (it really isn't, for the most part) because someone designed it that way. You can read the design rules set out by DARPA and see that they were concerned about infrastructure above all else [1]. The fundamental goal was the multiplexing of many different networks. The top three secondary goals were:
1. Network resilience
2. Multiple communication types
3. Support for different network types
Anonymity was not part of the design of the Internet--period.
I think a better example would be the travel industry... the corner travel business has virtually been obliterated in part of the easy access to on-line travel booking and planning services. A lot of "middle-person" jobs are now unnecessary as most of their functions are now accomplished with scripts and servers, this goes with booksellers and other specialty shops.
Just look at any business that isn't direct from the company and does not really require direct contact with the customer ; those are the ones to worry about.
And sometimes we push it along, I've seen companies work hard to cut the bottom line by automating things, developing on-line materials, and reducing the accessibility from the public, part to cut costs, other to "be more efficient." Those are the ones what one day have worked themselves into obscurity, because what's the different if local person A helps you over the phone or corporate/outsourced person B?
So what do we get left with - outside (cheapest) labor and local direct services (construction, health, entertainment/dining), and creative.
If you think about it its the creative developments over the past couple hundred years that made many of us redundant. We either should look for new opportunities to grow (space colonization/exploration) or break down the mass production industry to make more communities sustainable.
What's really interesting about all of this is the deflation that results from all this automation. Cellphones and video games are well known examples but it's easy to forget that plenty of free flash games are as good or better than all Atari games and most first gen Nintendo games. Fanfiction + ranking means the classic pulp novel is somewhat obsolete. Now fanfiction and flash games are not actually free but a few banner adds are enough to keep things going.
The downside seems to be the loss of durable goods, but other than my car they represent a tiny fraction of my budget and cars are much better now than a even just 20 years ago.
In the US housing, healthcare, and education seem to be what's killing the middle class without those areas we would just say we are in The middle of a huge deflationary period. And printing money can fix deflation.
"And there is truly nothing wrong with that! I am not saying, “The internet is turning us all into children, isn‟t that awful;” quite the contrary. Cultural neoteny can be wonderful. But it‟s important to understand the dark side." This is from a book from Jaron Lanier called "You are not a gadget".
I think Jaron Lanier is just lost like any of us trying to explain the current present and especially the use of cybernetics in our life. We know that a lot of people were afraid of technology and the changes introduced in our societies (including myself). If you ever read Jacques Ellul, Ivan Illich or even Theodore Kaczynski, you'll see the issues of changing our human societies with the technologies (especially the ones that we cannot control) can be really scary.
It's really difficult to evaluate the positive or negative impact of technologies when you are directly living the change. In the previous book of Jaron Lanier, I think Jaron was still trying to find the balance between the positive and negative side of technologies. Nowadays, he is more into the "sole" negative side...
To go back to the example of Kodak, I'm not sure that's the right example. Especially that Kodak completely overlooked the aspect of film processing for the online market where Fujifilm was ahead with their "minilabs"... even it was a difficult step for Fujifilm, they moved into something profitable on the long-run.
Interesting article but my impression is that you try to compare apples and melons and you want to get some results on oranges, they kinda look alike but they are not the same.
This article is written as some kind of drunken rant, desperately holding on to overly formed opinions and 2 validating points of data.
That's not to say that the author doesn't have a point, it's almost certainly true, but Salon should have really had an editor look over this. For crying out loud, he shifts between 14k and 140k employees for Kodak in the article.
How will readers who do not already agree w/ him become convinced?
> How will readers who do not already agree w/ him become convinced?
Because it's getting blatantly obvious for those who are not lucky enough to be part of us, technologist beneficiaries (so over-represented on this site)?
When Ford made the model T should we have cared about the catastrophic loss of employment facing blacksmiths, horse-breeders, stablehands, and carriage-makers?
It's true that digital communication has obliterated industries. And that's awesome, because those industries were inefficient, smelly, and slowed us down. Compared to the incredible value we each get by being able to speak to anyone else, anywhere in the world, any time we like - not to mention, the millions of jobs bourne out of the internet - the loss of jobs in these obsolete industries is nothing.
A) It proposes a solution that is already happening on its own. (micropayments for work that enriches the network.)
B) It compares apples to oranges. Instagram is not the Kodak of the Internet.
C) It misidentifies the cause-effect relationship of phenomenon that happened well before the Internet boom. The reason inequality is so high has very much to do with the winner-take-all society that was in place well before the Internet came to prominence. Libertarian fiscal policy and lax government regulation is mostly to blame.
> Libertarian fiscal policy and lax government regulation is mostly to blame.
Not only is this claim entirely unsubstantiated, it's wrong in quite a few ways.
1) In the U.S. we have not had libertarian fiscal policy in the slightest.
2) We have plenty of regulations in most areas.
3) Even if we did lack regulations or have libertarian policy, this couldn't explain the shift that has happened.
A much more compelling and less baseless argument would be one presented by one of my Econ professors Enrico Moretti in his book The New Geography of Jobs. His argument essentially is that the way in which the U.S. economy has shifted away from manufacturing and toward technological innovation has resulted in a declining middle class and an increase in inequality. As globalization has set in, manufacturing has left the U.S. and with it traditional middle class jobs. On the other hand, technology has been booming, creating cities with a huge amount of wealth. So now we're left with poor, has-been cities like Detroit on one hand, and cities like SF on the other.
I suppose you could argue that not imposing huge tariffs and not being incredibly protectionist in order to protect manufacturing jobs is "libertarian". But these sorts of "lax" policies also have support from most economists, and for good reason. So I don't really know what you're arguing for.
If you don't like the Kodak example use a little imagination and you will find a million others.
Take a look at state government employees most of whom are middle class. A major portion of this labor force is involved in managing data. Rough guess ~30000 * 50 states=1500000. Pretty sure its a much bigger number.
Facebook can manage the data of a billion people with 5000 employees.
Bad examples. The worst examples are yet to come. Health!
We talk about health technology to save 100 billions of dollars or more in cost savings, EHR saving so much cost, etc. But what they don't talk about is these costs are coming at the expense of replacing human work. This is why I think we'll see continual increase of unemployment and underemployment. We moved to the service-based industry where machines can do many of the work.
Having watched the first few minutes of the above, I think he means his "antifragility" to be an attribute of economic and political systems, not of individual jobs or even whole occupations. E.g., he says that, in order for the restaurant business to be at least robust and maybe even antifragile, individual restaurants must be allowed to be fragile. It gets more interesting when he turns to the banking business ...
Looking at the comments posted here, I'm getting the sense that I'm not alone in thinking that Jaron Lanier is a huge hack. In fact it looks as if I may be in the majority. Why is it, then, that he has this reputation as being a great luminary?
[+] [-] noonespecial|13 years ago|reply
When I pull 300 high quality pictures off my freaking phone and casually discard 275 of them that I'm not happy with, I still feel as rich as a sultan.
[+] [-] julienmarie|13 years ago|reply
We can't reduce a world wide phenomenon without taking into account hundreds of other factors ( populations in western countries growing old, the globalization, sacrificed generations in Europe and exodus of its skilled youth ) to Kodak vs Instagram.
[+] [-] nazgulnarsil|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tks2103|13 years ago|reply
he's austrian right... are there better or worse translators for his books?
[+] [-] bitwize|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] JamesArgo|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] FelixP|13 years ago|reply
I'd highly encourage you to read this (very long) interview with him from 2011 in Edge:
http://edge.org/conversation/the-local-global-flip
[+] [-] cs648|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] whatshisface|13 years ago|reply
I was not aware that instagram manufactured cameras or mass storage devices. Cannon employs 198,307.
[+] [-] Turing_Machine|13 years ago|reply
To name just one, Apple employs almost 400,000 workers directly, plus god knows how many contract factory workers.
[+] [-] jckt|13 years ago|reply
But I still see your point. It isn't the best comparison, and using it as a quotation does not bode well for his book, IMO.
[+] [-] fruchtose|13 years ago|reply
Wow, this is so wrong I am annoyed by it. The Internet is not "anonymous" (it really isn't, for the most part) because someone designed it that way. You can read the design rules set out by DARPA and see that they were concerned about infrastructure above all else [1]. The fundamental goal was the multiplexing of many different networks. The top three secondary goals were:
1. Network resilience 2. Multiple communication types 3. Support for different network types
Anonymity was not part of the design of the Internet--period.
[1] http://ccr.sigcomm.org/archive/1995/jan95/ccr-9501-clark.pdf
[+] [-] LarryMade2|13 years ago|reply
Just look at any business that isn't direct from the company and does not really require direct contact with the customer ; those are the ones to worry about.
And sometimes we push it along, I've seen companies work hard to cut the bottom line by automating things, developing on-line materials, and reducing the accessibility from the public, part to cut costs, other to "be more efficient." Those are the ones what one day have worked themselves into obscurity, because what's the different if local person A helps you over the phone or corporate/outsourced person B?
So what do we get left with - outside (cheapest) labor and local direct services (construction, health, entertainment/dining), and creative.
If you think about it its the creative developments over the past couple hundred years that made many of us redundant. We either should look for new opportunities to grow (space colonization/exploration) or break down the mass production industry to make more communities sustainable.
[+] [-] Retric|13 years ago|reply
The downside seems to be the loss of durable goods, but other than my car they represent a tiny fraction of my budget and cars are much better now than a even just 20 years ago.
In the US housing, healthcare, and education seem to be what's killing the middle class without those areas we would just say we are in The middle of a huge deflationary period. And printing money can fix deflation.
[+] [-] adulau|13 years ago|reply
I think Jaron Lanier is just lost like any of us trying to explain the current present and especially the use of cybernetics in our life. We know that a lot of people were afraid of technology and the changes introduced in our societies (including myself). If you ever read Jacques Ellul, Ivan Illich or even Theodore Kaczynski, you'll see the issues of changing our human societies with the technologies (especially the ones that we cannot control) can be really scary.
It's really difficult to evaluate the positive or negative impact of technologies when you are directly living the change. In the previous book of Jaron Lanier, I think Jaron was still trying to find the balance between the positive and negative side of technologies. Nowadays, he is more into the "sole" negative side...
To go back to the example of Kodak, I'm not sure that's the right example. Especially that Kodak completely overlooked the aspect of film processing for the online market where Fujifilm was ahead with their "minilabs"... even it was a difficult step for Fujifilm, they moved into something profitable on the long-run.
[+] [-] deluxaran|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Turing_Machine|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bw2|13 years ago|reply
That's not to say that the author doesn't have a point, it's almost certainly true, but Salon should have really had an editor look over this. For crying out loud, he shifts between 14k and 140k employees for Kodak in the article.
How will readers who do not already agree w/ him become convinced?
[+] [-] varjag|13 years ago|reply
Because it's getting blatantly obvious for those who are not lucky enough to be part of us, technologist beneficiaries (so over-represented on this site)?
[+] [-] unknown|13 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] ukoki|13 years ago|reply
It's true that digital communication has obliterated industries. And that's awesome, because those industries were inefficient, smelly, and slowed us down. Compared to the incredible value we each get by being able to speak to anyone else, anywhere in the world, any time we like - not to mention, the millions of jobs bourne out of the internet - the loss of jobs in these obsolete industries is nothing.
[+] [-] Aqueous|13 years ago|reply
A) It proposes a solution that is already happening on its own. (micropayments for work that enriches the network.) B) It compares apples to oranges. Instagram is not the Kodak of the Internet. C) It misidentifies the cause-effect relationship of phenomenon that happened well before the Internet boom. The reason inequality is so high has very much to do with the winner-take-all society that was in place well before the Internet came to prominence. Libertarian fiscal policy and lax government regulation is mostly to blame.
[+] [-] thatswrong0|13 years ago|reply
Not only is this claim entirely unsubstantiated, it's wrong in quite a few ways.
1) In the U.S. we have not had libertarian fiscal policy in the slightest. 2) We have plenty of regulations in most areas. 3) Even if we did lack regulations or have libertarian policy, this couldn't explain the shift that has happened.
A much more compelling and less baseless argument would be one presented by one of my Econ professors Enrico Moretti in his book The New Geography of Jobs. His argument essentially is that the way in which the U.S. economy has shifted away from manufacturing and toward technological innovation has resulted in a declining middle class and an increase in inequality. As globalization has set in, manufacturing has left the U.S. and with it traditional middle class jobs. On the other hand, technology has been booming, creating cities with a huge amount of wealth. So now we're left with poor, has-been cities like Detroit on one hand, and cities like SF on the other.
I suppose you could argue that not imposing huge tariffs and not being incredibly protectionist in order to protect manufacturing jobs is "libertarian". But these sorts of "lax" policies also have support from most economists, and for good reason. So I don't really know what you're arguing for.
[+] [-] Sven7|13 years ago|reply
Take a look at state government employees most of whom are middle class. A major portion of this labor force is involved in managing data. Rough guess ~30000 * 50 states=1500000. Pretty sure its a much bigger number.
Facebook can manage the data of a billion people with 5000 employees.
[+] [-] salimmadjd|13 years ago|reply
We talk about health technology to save 100 billions of dollars or more in cost savings, EHR saving so much cost, etc. But what they don't talk about is these costs are coming at the expense of replacing human work. This is why I think we'll see continual increase of unemployment and underemployment. We moved to the service-based industry where machines can do many of the work.
[+] [-] taylodl|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ams6110|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] chaetodon|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] harryh|13 years ago|reply
Farming is a fragile profession? It's been around for thousands of years!
[+] [-] JamesArgo|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] EliRivers|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cynwoody|13 years ago|reply
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=e...
Having watched the first few minutes of the above, I think he means his "antifragility" to be an attribute of economic and political systems, not of individual jobs or even whole occupations. E.g., he says that, in order for the restaurant business to be at least robust and maybe even antifragile, individual restaurants must be allowed to be fragile. It gets more interesting when he turns to the banking business ...
[+] [-] arkitaip|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] der3k|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] abraininavat|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] thatusertwo|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bowerbird|13 years ago|reply
because reputations can be manufactured like any other kind of lie, that's why.
-bowerbird
[+] [-] twic|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nohorse|13 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] jack9|13 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] taylodl|13 years ago|reply
[deleted]