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PREFACE

PART ONE
WHAT IS A PERSON?

Chapter 1
Missing Persons

Chapter 2
An Apocalypse of Self-Abdication

Chapter 3
The Noosphere Is Just Another Name for Everyone’s Inner Troll

PART TWO
WHAT WILL MONEY BE?

Chapter 4
Digital Peasant Chic

Chapter 5
The City Is Built to Music

Chapter 6
The Lords of the Clouds Renounce Free Will in Order to Become Infinitely Lucky

Chapter 7
The Prospects for Humanistic Cloud Economics

Chapter 8
Three Possible Future Directions

PART THREE
THE UNBEARABLE THINNESS OF FLATNESS

Chapter 9
Retropolis

Chapter 10
Digital Creativity Eludes Flat Places

Chapter 11
All Hail the Membrane

PART FOUR
MAKING THE BEST OF BITS

Chapter 12
I Am a Contrarian Loop

Chapter 13
One Story Of How Semantics Might Have Evolved

PART FIVE
FUTURE HUMORS

Chapter 14
Home at Last (My Love Affair with Bachelardian Neoteny)

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

INDEX

This book is dedicated
to my friends and colleagues in the digital revolution.
Thank you for considering my challenges constructively,
as they are intended.

Thanks to Lilly for giving me yearning,
and Ellery for giving me eccentricity,
to Lena for the mrping,
and to Lilibell, for teaching me to read anew.

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IT’S EARLY in the twenty-first century, and that means that these words will mostly be read by nonpersons—automatons or numb mobs composed of people who are no longer acting as individuals. The words will be minced into atomized search-engine keywords within industrial cloud computing facilities located in remote, often secret locations around the world. They will be copied millions of times by algorithms designed to send an advertisement to some person somewhere who happens to resonate with some fragment of what I say. They will be scanned, rehashed, and misrepresented by crowds of quick and sloppy readers into wikis and automatically aggregated wireless text message streams.

Reactions will repeatedly degenerate into mindless chains of anonymous insults and inarticulate controversies. Algorithms will find correlations between those who read my words and their purchases, their romantic adventures, their debts, and, soon, their genes. Ultimately these words will contribute to the fortunes of those few who have been able to position themselves as lords of the computing clouds.

The vast fanning out of the fates of these words will take place almost entirely in the lifeless world of pure information. Real human eyes will read these words in only a tiny minority of the cases.

And yet it is you, the person, the rarity among my readers, I hope to reach.

The words in this book are written for people, not computers.

I want to say: You have to be somebody before you can share yourself.


THUS FAR, I have presented two ways in which the current dominant ideology of the digital world, cybernetic totalism, has been a failure.

The first example might be called a spiritual failure. The ideology has encouraged narrow philosophies that deny the mystery of the existence of experience. A practical problem that can trickle down from this mistake is that we become vulnerable to redirecting the leap of faith we call “hope” away from people and toward gadgets.

The second failure is behavioral. It naturally happens that the designs that celebrate the noosphere and other ideals of cybernetic totalism tend to undervalue humans. Examples are the ubiquitous invocations of anonymity and crowd identity. It shouldn’t be much of a surprise that these designs tend to reinforce indifferent or poor treatment of humans. In this section, a third failure is presented, this time in the sphere of economics.

For millions of people, the internet means endless free copies of music, videos, and other forms of detached human expression. For a few brilliant and lucky people, the internet has meant an ability to spin financial schemes that were too complex to exist in the past, creating dangerous, temporary illusions of risk-free ways to create money out of thin air.

I will argue that there are similarities and hidden links between these two trends. In each case, there are obvious short-term benefits for some people, but ultimately a disaster for everyone in the long term.

I’ll discuss “free culture” first. The disaster related to free culture is still in its early stages. Low-bandwidth forms of human expression, like music and newspaper-style reporting, are already being demoted into a sorry state. High-bandwidth expressions, like movies, are on their way to meeting the same fate.