Who Owns the future? By Jaron Zepel Lanier

The following very short videos (I think the shortest is 2 minutes) feature Jaron Zepel Lanier. Jaron is a computer philosophy writer, computer scientist, visual artist, and composer of classical music. In the book Who Owns the Future? (2013), Lanier posits that the middle classis increasingly disenfranchised from online economies. By convincing users to give away valuable information about themselves in exchange for “free services”, firms can accrue large amounts of data at virtually no cost. Instead of paying each individual for their contribution to the data pool, it concentrates wealth in the hands of the few who control the data centers. He also wrote, Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now. The following short video op-eds are from the New York Times and feature him calling for a new economy, where people are paid for their data and also pay for the services they use one the internet as means to deal with growing inequality.