Pylimitics

Jaron Lanier is always interesting to listen to or read. Just this week he was a guest on Neil Degrasse Tyson’s Startalk. The discussion turned to AI (in its current form), and Lanier brought up his notion of data dignity. This hasn’t gotten much attention, as far as I can tell. According to Lanier, the idea predates large language models, and is “an alternative to the familiar arrangement in which people give their data for free in exchange for free services, such as internet searches or social networking.”

Lanier’s The New Yorker article linked above explains “In a world with data dignity, digital stuff would typically be connected with the humans who want to be known for having made it. In some versions of the idea, people could get paid for what they create…”

The thing is, this idea not only predates LLMs, it predates the World Wide Web. It goes 66 years back to Project Xanadu, founded by Theodor (Ted) Nelson when he was an undergraduate at Harvard. It was the world’s first hypertext project, and Nelson is the one who coined the term.

Xanadu was more ambitious than the World Wide Web, and maybe overly so — it took decades before a working prototype was released. But it included the idea of compensating people for their contributions. If you posted something on Xanadu and it went viral (not that that concept yet existed back then), it would earn for you without monopolistic platforms, ads, or monetization.

There’s no way to know whether Xanadu would have resulted in a system better than the web we have today, or whether network effects would have handed control to monopolists just like now. Nelson is not a technical guy who could implement his ideas in working software. According to his profile in Forbes, he “sees himself as a literary romantic, like a Cyrano de Bergerac, or ‘the Orson Welles of software’.” I’m not sure what it would mean to be the Orson Welles of software, but Nelson seems to have had the same sense as Lanier in seeing the possibility of a more humane and (potentially) less centrally-controlled worldwide connection system. It would be nice to be able to try some of these things.

(In fact you sort of can try it, at Project Xanadu.)