You might, for example, want to design a tablet to be pristine and platonic, without any physical buttons, but only a touchscreen. Wouldn’t that be more perfect and true to the ideal? But you can’t ever quite do it. Some extra physical buttons, to turn the thing on, for instance, turn out to be indispensable. Being an absolutist is a certain way to become a failed technologist.

Markets are an information technology. A technology is useless if it can’t be tweaked. If market technology can’t be fully automatic and needs some “buttons,” then there’s no use in trying to pretend otherwise. You don’t stay attached to poorly performing quests for perfection. You fix bugs.

And there are bugs! We just went through taxpayer-funded bail-outs of networked finance, in much of the world, and no amount of austerity seems enough to fully pay for that. So the technology needs to be tweaked. Wanting to tweak a technology shows a commitment to it, not a rejection of it.

The above passage comes from Jaron Lenier’s book, Who Owns the Future?  Lenier is a computer scientist, but in this book he is doing some economic analysis from the point of view of a technologist. I’m not done with the book yet, but I already like a lot of the stuff Lenier is saying. Other stuff I’m not so sure about (e.g. I tend to agree with some of Tim Wortsall’s criticisms, and also don’t like how dismissive Lanier is of Marxian critiques). I do like that Lenier is not afraid to give an economic analysis from a different perspective, I think that alone is a worthwhile en devour. Allowing experts to overlap into other fields is not such a bad thing. Human knowledge has become so fragmented that it’s refreshing to see some integration now and then.

Tags:capitalismeconomicsJaron Laniermarxismmoneytechnologywho owns the future