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Who Owns the Future?

By: Jaron Lanier
Narrated by: Pete Simoneilli
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Publisher's summary

The dazzling new masterwork from the prophet of Silicon Valley

Jaron Lanier is the best-selling author of You Are Not a Gadget, the father of virtual reality, and one of the most influential thinkers of our time. For decades, Lanier has drawn on his expertise and experience as a computer scientist, musician, and digital media pioneer to predict the revolutionary ways in which technology is transforming our culture.

Who Owns the Future? is a visionary reckoning with the effects network technologies have had on our economy. Lanier asserts that the rise of digital networks led our economy into recession and decimated the middle class. Now, as technology flattens more and more industries - from media to medicine to manufacturing - we are facing even greater challenges to employment and personal wealth.

But there is an alternative to allowing technology to own our future. In this ambitious and deeply humane book, Lanier charts the path toward a new information economy that will stabilize the middle class and allow it to grow. It is time for ordinary people to be rewarded for what they do and share on the web.

Insightful, original, and provocative, Who Owns the Future? is necessary listening for all who live a part of their lives online.

©2013 Jaron Lanier. All rights reserved (P)2013 Simon & Schuster Audio

Critic reviews

"Daringly original... Lanier's sharp, accessible style and opinions make Who Owns the Future? terrifically inviting." (Janet Maslin, The New York Times)
"Lanier has a mind as boundless as the internet.... [He is] the David Foster Wallace of tech." ( London Evening Standard)
"One of the triumphs of Lanier's intelligent and subtle book is its inspiring portrait of the kind of people that a democratic information economy would produce. His vision implies that if we are allowed to lead absorbing, properly remunerated lives, we will likewise outgrow our addiction to consumerism and technology." ( The Guardian)