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It's obvious to anyone who's paying attention that things have gone wrong. The middle class is disappearing; the internet has changed the world and the world has still not caught up to that change; we are more than ever aware of the misery suffered by people halfway 'round the world, but we can't figure out if we care or not. Jaron Lanier, in in the first half of his latest book Who Owns the Future?, lays out all the problems that the Internet Age has created. One of the biggest problems is what Lanier terms "Siren Servers," which he describes as "an elite computer, or coordinated collection of computers, on a network. It is characterized by narcissism, hyperamplified risk aversion, and extreme information symmetry." He says these Siren Servers like Facebook "employ vastly fewer people than big older companies like, say, General Motors," which is one of many causes of economic distress.

In the second half of Who Owns the Future?, Lanier presents solutions for these problems. His solutions involve making the Siren Servers pay their users for access to personal information, easing too-constrictive copyright laws, and forcing people to pay for the intellectual properties that they use on the internet. He presents a bold path out of the stultifying trap set for us by Silicon Valley "thought leaders" and tech wizards. And of course these solutions are wildly hopeful and obviously impractical; they'd basically require us to start the internet over from scratch. But at least someone is presenting these ideas; it's only through the work of the big thinkers like Lanier that smaller, more practical solutions can become apparent. I loved Lanier's last book, You Are Not a Gadget, and I recommend this one just as much. For anyone who suffers from the nagging feeling that this last recession (and the one before it) were at least partly caused by the changes wrought by the internet, this is a book for you.