A review by dlrcope
Who Owns the Future? by Jaron Lanier

4.0

I found this book to be pretty dry, requiring some discipline to complete (and that was just listening to the audiobook, which is faster than reading for me.) It was worth it though. The situation he describes here is very familiar to me and probably to you too, our changing digital world, but the conclusions he draws, the patterns he defines, those were not as clear. I agreed with some, but not all of what he said, but that's not really the point. The point is to think it through yourself; and Lanier's ideas advanced my thinking. I recommend this book to anyone who's trying to understand what's happening in our economy, especially with employment, money and power.

This quote gives you a feel for what the books is going to discuss, "Here’s a current example of the challenge we face. At the height of its power, the photography company Kodak employed more than 140,000 people and was worth $28 billion. They even invented the first digital camera. But today Kodak is bankrupt, and the new face of digital photography has become Instagram. When Instagram was sold to Facebook for a billion dollars in 2012, it employed only thirteen people. Where did all those jobs disappear to? And what happened to the wealth that those middle-class jobs created? This book is built to answer questions like these, which will only become more common as digital networking hollows out every industry, from media to medicine to manufacturing.”
― Jaron Lanier, Who Owns the Future?