Your online newspaper is different from mine. That’s right, we can go to the same website and get different versions. With cookies, websites keep track of user behavior and adjust the content to fit the preferences. If you’re into cooking, you will get a lot more cooking content and –ads on the same website as somebody who has clicked links about celebrities. Your daily news feed is tailored to you, not by you, but by the system’s algorithms. It is a mirror of your tastes and interests. You may even find that your self-image is different from what you actually do. This also means, taken to an extreme, that you risk only getting access to content that fits your profile and not other items that you may be interested in without knowing it. The scenario was described in 1995 by Nicholas Negroponte in what he called The Daily Me, the imaginary newspaper tailored to the reader. What was sci-fi in the Nineties is standard procedure today. The risk of isolation from other news is sometimes called the Filter Bubble- phenomenon, from a book by Eli Pariser. This is of course not exclusive to newspapers online, but all sorts of tailored content: search results, online dating suggestions, and not least adverts. But judging from the quality of the adverts I get on some of these sites, it seems however that either the algorithms need to get better, or the selection of potential ads more varied, before this dystopic vision becomes reality.

This week’s column by Waldemar Ingdahl discusses the proposition that robots could take over all sorts of jobs from humans, not only the ones we have learned to associate with automation (such as manufacturing). This begs the question: do machines have rights? If a robot (or, rather, algorithm) writes a book, does it get copyright? If somebody wishes to censor it, does it have freedom of speech? Should machine-to-machine-communication be considered private? And what about robots that do economic activity: buy and sell stock or currency? Place bids on auctions? Play poker for money? These and many other similar questions will have to be addressed, actually they should have already been addressed because all the above examples exist today.

It is easy to say that only humans have rights and any rights that can be derived from machine activity should transfer to the machine’s owner. But it may not always be clear who owns the machine, think about cloud services for example. And the case is often made that all internet traffic should be considered private correspondence. This will get no less complicated going forward. Do we give machines human rights? Or should we make a clear distinction that only humans have rights? Or is there a third way? My instinct says human rights should be exclusive to humans, if you agree there are some tough decisions ahead. In that case, we should not devalue these rights by extending them to machines in cases that are difficult to call. There will be lots of those going forward.

Today’s Digital program at the Gothenburg Book Fair featured a presentation by Google’s Santiago de la Mora on cloud-based e-books. E-books are now part of the Google Play-service, but as opposed to ad-based business model we are used to for Google’s free services, this is actually an e-book store where you pay for the content. So it seems, not even Google believes information wants to be free. I asked de la Mora if he saw this as a paradigm shift, but he talked about how some enterprise services were always paid-services. However, I think this is profoundly different, with the case of e-books, it is actually paying for content – just that which so many have said is impossible on the internet. Now, if Google believes they can do it, then we should all wish them the best of luck. This strategy could have some profound implications on the market for online content.

Remember Stewart Brand’s old quote “information wants to be free”. Except it’s just half a quote, the full aphorism is “Information Wants To Be Free. Information also wants to be expensive. …That tension will not go away”. Looks like Google revisited that gem of wisdom!

The computing power doubles on average every eighteen months. This principle is known as Moore’s law, after Intel co-founder Gordon E. Moore. Actually, it is the number of transistors on an integrated circuit that doubles in this time-frame, but it translates in to double computing power – or half price for the same computing power. No-one knows if this is really a law of nature, divine intervention or simply a vision that a lot of engineers work hard to achieve, making it a self-fulfilling prophecy. But it has been consistent since the Sixties and it also turns out that not only computing power, but also memory capacity and network bandwidth follows the same pattern. This principle is key to understanding digital development and Silicon Valley-ideology (my earlier post on Kurzweil and Calico, for example). Moore’s law has put GPS-navigators in our smart phones, technology that twenty years ago was exclusive to the military and maybe ocean vessels. It is the logic behind jokes like “today an average microwave has ten times the computer power of the Apollo 13”. And we have Moore to thank for high-end graphics in video games. And so on…

Now, the strange thing is Moore’s law does not actually make everything cheaper (like some have argued). Our laptops do largely the same things they did ten years ago (granted, netbooks). Word processing has not changed fundamentally since the eighties (granted, spell check). Some things are becoming more and more expensive: software development for example. Last week, the video game GTA V was released. It is considered the most expensive game ever developed – with 250 developers working four years, industry experts estimate the development cost to $137 million. GTA V is extreme, but block-buster video games follow a similar trajectory of increasing production cost. This is the opposite end of Moore’s law: because technology gets cheaper and allows new opportunities, the public’s expectations grow and more resources have to be spent on creating content that can live up to these expectations and opportunities. This irony was first described in the Sixties (pre-Moore!) by US economist William Baumol who did research on productivity. The industrial revolution(s) increased productivity in similar way as Moore’s law, but not for all aspects of human activity. Anything that requires human involvement becomes by comparison increasingly expensive. Baumol’s example is classic music: while the cars that takes the audience to the concert hall becomes better with every new model, it still takes the same number of musicians the same time to play a Beethoven string quartet as 100 years earlier! This is called “Baumol’s cost disease” and it can be worth keeping in mind in a time that is mesmerized by the promises of Moore’s law.

How does technology shape the book business? Is it technology, readers, authors, libraries, book sellers or publishers that drive evolution? In one aspect, the book is itself a technology – a distribution format resulting not from specific content or demand, but from the invention of the printing press. Now that books are becoming digital, is it safe to assume that readers will read similar books as in print? Or will books themselves be different?

This week, Netopia takes part in Gothenburg Book Fair’s Digital Square. These and many other questions will be discussed in a stage program hosted by Netopia editor Per Strömbäck. Among the speakers are Kobo’s Diego Marano, Random House’s digital publisher Dan Franklin, Google’s book evangelist Santiago de la Mora, author Robert Levine and bestselling magical optimist Paolo Coelho (the last two on video link). In case you’re in town, join the conversation!

Today, Netopia writes an opinion comment in European Voice. It discusses the focus on so-called net neutrality in the Commission’s policy proposal on the digital single market.

Net neutrality is the idea that all data traffic should have the same priority. It’s great in theory, but in practice the telecom carriers use traffic shaping methods to discriminate, prioritise and otherwise control the data traffic, often for competition reasons but of course also for things like network security. The proposal suggests to deal with this not by stopping traffic shaping, but only by demanding of the carriers to tell us what types of traffic are discriminated. So, even if net neutrality were a good idea, this is nothing like it.

But the point is that network neutrality is based on the assumption that technology can be independent of vested interests and influence from outside. That infrastructure is neutral. This is of course not true of any kind of infrastructure, most construction projects are objects of much debate and often court processes. And the internet can only partly be understood as infrastructure, it is also very much an extension of society – and increasingly so as larger parts of work, business and social life are done not through but on the internet. Therefore, responsible policy must not accept the idea that absence of regulation is the way to freedom or openness. We would not accept that logic in any other aspect of society.

One of the best things about the internet is that it brings so many big questions and big ideas. Will technology provide growth, freedom, democracy? Is crowd-funding the answer to investment? Is democratised distribution and production of content the future of expression? Is open source a radical way to develop products? And so on: if you read books on these topics, they all have title tag lines with words like “revolution” or “radical”. Chris Anderson’s “Free – The Future of a Radical Price” or Cukier/Mayer-Schönberger’s “Big Data: A Revolution that Will Transform How We  Live, Work and Think” (recently reviewed by Netopia) are only two examples. Netopia is no different, our Manifesto has similar language. It’s very dramatic and important and philosophical and to me, that’s a big part of the appeal of these issues.

One of the big ideas is Open Data and it will be discussed at the Truly Digital Conference in Helsinki this week. The headline is “Open Data is Nothing Without a Narrative” and it will take a closer look on the topic of the arts in the digital space. I have been invited to speak and will introduce my new book “The Dream of Alexandria – the Dilemma of Digital Distribution”. Regrettably, it’s only available in Swedish (so far). If you have the chance, please join us at the beautiful Kiasma in Helsinki this week!

Today, Paul Frigyes reviews Jaron Lanier’s Who Owns the Future? Lanier’s previous book You Are Not a Gadget – a Manifesto was published in 2010, the same year Netopia started as a Swedish edition. And it blew my mind. Lanier described things I had only briefly touched with depth and intensity. Reading it was like talking to friend who’s ten or a hundred times smarter than yourself. Lanier articulated the religious aspects of Silicon Valley-philosophy – technology as a force greater than ourselves, the promise of eternal life (in the form of cell-reparing nano-bots or your mind uploaded on a computer) and the feeling of being part of a greater cause (“the only problem with digital technology is that some people don’t embrace it”). For a hippie-rationalist ideology, those look very similar to Christian beliefs. Lanier also opened my eyes to the importance of scarcity for the economy. Because what is economy but the theory of scarcity? Well-designed “artificial scarcities” (Lanier’s term) can boost both demand and growth, think about how we pay extra for the exclusivity of limited edition sneakers or a better plane seat – these are scarcities artificially created to increase the value. And tech companies use it too: the Gmail roll-out was invite only, the Iphone  used to be exclusive to select carriers. The Lanier Manifesto also made it clear who rules the digital waves, he calls them the “Lords of the Clouds”, those few companies that owns the servers that our supposedly free internet services operate on. We pay in the currency of personal information sold to advertisers,  the same model as commercial television only more sophisticated. This explains how the promise of pluralism in the “Global village” was turned into a mono-culture.

All in all, a great read for anyone  who wants to better understand Silicon Valley ideology and its everyday consequences. So read Frigyes review, and do also read Lanier’s new book. But before you do anything else, read “Gadget”!

Don’t tell me the NSA doesn’t have a sense of humour. NSA chief General Keith Alexander built his control room inspired by the flight deck on Star Trek’s spaceship Enterprise. And named it the Information Dominance Center. Allegedly, this was a way to convince congress to green-light PRISM. Or maybe it was just one general’s daydream come true. I spent many years in the video games industry and can testify that game developers have similar creativity when it comes to interior design. One especially successful developer turned their office into a British gentleman’s club, complete with Chippendale leather chairs, green glass lamp shades, and oil-painted portraits of employees. We never got around to it, but when I was a game developer our fantasy was to decorate our office as a Hill Street Blues-style police station, with worn wood furniture, loudly ringing analogue phones that nobody ever bothers to pick up, and a chain-smoking sergeant with loads of paperwork on the front desk. The meeting room would be a patrol car sitting outside in the street. So, laugh all you want about the Information Dominance Center. Or call it the ultimate man cave.