Free Who Owns the Future? by Jaron Lanier

the universe: It ultimately comes down to having some special “in,” some special connection, or some special knowledge. You needed to know the right people to get the special data, or the special tap into the market’s computers, or the agreements to let your algorithms automatically enact trades in far-flung locations where such things had not happened before.
    Ultimately, there was an old-fashioned old boys’ club obscured under the tangle of cables in the foundation of the newfangled digital network.
    While there is never an absolutely sure thing, in the upper reaches of finance certain schemes come close to perfection. In the past, the perfect investment always rested on at least a touch of corruption. There was some chink in the law that you depended on.
    There are certainly such legal maneuvers these days, such as tax loopholes for hedge fund managers. But the cores of these businesses, where the profit comes from, are in many cases more organic, more pure than previous “sure things.” If you can pull money out of sufficiently advanced math, then the law couldn’t keep up even if it tried.
    Just as this book left my hands, regulators in Europe began to consider the regulation of high-frequency trading. I hope they appreciate the nature of the challenge they face. To an algorithm, a circuit breaker or timing limit is just another feature in the environment to be analyzed and exploited. Algorithms will “learn” to trip circuit breakers at the right millisecond to capture a profit,for instance. If the frequency of trades is limited, then some other parameter, like the phase, or relative timing, of trades, will be automatically refined in order to find an advantage. The cat-and-mouse game can go on forever. Undoing the Siren Server pattern is the only way back to a truer form of capitalism.
    This is what computers appear to have made possible in some cases (though I can’t know enough to be absolutely sure): a new path to a “sure thing” that sidesteps the nasty old business of having to court politicians.
    What is absolutely essential to a financial Siren Server, however, is a superior information position. If everyone else knew what you were doing, they could securitize you . If anyone could buy stock in a mathematical “sure thing” scheme, then the benefits of it would be copied like a shared music file, and spread out until it was nullified. So, in today’s world your mortgage can be securitized in someone else’s secretive bunker, but you can’t know about the bunker and securitize it . If it weren’t for that differential, the new kind of sure thing wouldn’t exist.

SECOND INTERLUDE (A PARODY)
    If Life Gives You EULAs, Make Lemonade
    The information economy that we are currently building doesn’t really embrace capitalism, but rather a new form of feudalism.
    We aren’t creating enough opportunity for enough people online. The proof is simple. The wide adoption of transformative connecting technology should create a middle-class wealth boom, as happened when the Interstate Highway System gave rise to a world of new jobs in transportation and tourism, for instance, and generally widened commercial prospects. Instead we’ve seen recession, unemployment, and austerity.
    I wonder if thinking about lemonade stands might help. A prominent political meme for the Republican half of America in 2012 went like this: “You built it.” This was a retort to an out-of-context attribution to President Barack Obama: “You didn’t build that,” originally referring to infrastructure like roads.
    The contention was approximately that entrepreneurship is the most fundamental activity, and can close its own loops. Business would solve more problems if it were just left alone. Government taxes and regulation are the problem. Removing those things is the solution. Who needs infrastructure? Businesses would build their own roads if the government would just leave them alone.
    Some girls who had created a