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Can Money Buy Happiness?

From Daedalus, volume 133, issue 2
Robert Frank
Professor of economics, Cornell University

What a VC Wants

"What do I want to invest in? Technology that actually reduces the technology footprint in my life. Applications that result in a net increase in productivity. And most importantly, technology that enables me to strengthen interpersonal and family relationships. That technology needs to be very easy to use and easy to integrate into my life. One leading candidate, my Nokia 6230 cell phone (even though I had to hack it). Makes me almost want to be a hardware investor."
Posted on www.ventureblog.com
Martin Tobias
Venture partner, Ignition


I have a recurring nightmare. Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer shows up on my doorstep demanding my left kidney, claiming that I agreed to this in some "clickwrap" contract. In my waking life, I am inundated with such agreements - privacy policies, downloading poliicies, security policies, software licensing agreements - all vying for my assent. As a lawyer, I write these contracts for clients, but I must confess that I never read them online. Who has the time?

Unfortunately, the law assumes we all do - and that by clicking, we are "agreeing" to the unread privacy policy, to spyware being installed on our systems, or to pornographic pop-up ads. Almost every site has terms and conditions; as a result, regular Internet users are faced with dozens of such agreements a week. Some come in the form of the ubiquitous "I Agree" button, others in the form of prose hidden at the bottom of the homepage under the moniker "Legal."

Increasingly, companies have been putting some pretty nasty things into their clickwrap agreements - such as that they can collect and sell your detailed personal information or install software that will capture your every keystroke. A few firms have you agree that, even if they violate their own promises to secure your information, you won't ever sue. This is not legal boilerplate, the kind that everybody assents to when renting a car or buying a ticket to a ball game. It affects the privacy, security, and operability of all the information you access online.

What is needed - desperately - is a law robot. A browser-based automaton that could be adjusted to match your tolerance for legal mumbo jumbo. Take privacy agreements, for example: The browser could be set to share your identity only with sites that promise to use the information solely to complete your purchase, or that agree not to share it with third parties, or any of a host of options. Web site operators would use a similar query-based method to set up their privacy policies. Of course, they could write their own language, but they would then run the risk that your robolawyer wouldn't accept it.

Once you establish privacy settings, your browser would transfer personal data (after prompting you) only to sites that conform with your privacy requirements. And you could always overrule the settings. Is it worth saving $50 on a new iPod by buying from a site with no privacy policy? You decide.

This practice would allow users to take control, deciding in advance which policies are acceptable and which aren't. And privacy is just the start. Many vexing issues of online life boil down to assent and control. Who asked you if they could spam you with porn? Who put John Ashcroft in charge of the Internet police? Your cyberattorney could be used to block content you find offensive, improper, or harmful.

Your robolaywer would also deal with spyware. The real problem with spyware is not technological, but legal. If I know that an application is going to capture my keystrokes, and I've agreed to it, it's not spyware. If I don't know what a program will do, or don't authorize it, then it's likely a felony. The spyware sites would have to ask your legal bot for permission. Falsely describing what the spyware does would likewise be a deceptive trade practice, and therefore no new spyware law would be required.

There have been small steps in this direction, most notably the World Wide Web Consortium's Platform for Privacy Preferences Project. Unfortunately P3P, as it's known, is limited to relatively simple matters of online privacy, ignoring other kinds of online contracts like software license agreements, ISP policies, and terms of service contracts.

We will never fully automate the reading of contracts or agreements online. Nor would we want to - after all, Internet lawyers need jobs, too. But by automating the vetting of clickwraps or implied agreements we could make everybody sleep a little easier.

Mark D. Rasch (www.solutionary.com) is senior vice president of Solutionary, a managed security service provider, and founder and former head of the Department of Justice's computer crimes unit.

VIEW|hot seat



Why not?

Even when it routinely beats up on top grand masters?


You can make machines work the same way?

And then what? What will your memory machines do?

- Lucas Graves


In July, Mexico's attorney general became a smart object. Rafael Macedo de la Concha had an RFID chip implanted in his arm that can track and authenticate him, a bold bid to fight government corruption. Of course, it's his brain that makes him smart. It's the chip that makes him an object: cataloged, searchable, and locatable in space and time.

The same kind of upgrade is happening to brainless devices, tools, toys, and doodads all around us, creating a world that is Googleable. Ordinary items are being embedded with rudimentary communications and tied to databases. The information associated with these items is becoming ever richer, more up-to-date, and more reflective of conditions on the ground. Moreover, it's increasingly available to anyone with a Net connection. Unlike the smart objects imagined by futurists for decades, things to come will be refreshingly dumb, but they'll make their users smarter.

The harbingers are in place, ready to solidify into a proper paradigm. A manufactured item may start with a digital blueprint, its specifications and tolerances available online even before it exists. Automated production and shipping records provide a detailed history of the materials and procedures that went into making it. Once it's off the production line, a global positioning system can track it in space and time. Social software lets people critique it, offer advice, and suggest improvements. Ad-hoc networks like Bluetooth and Wi-Fi keep the item and the people who use it in constant communication. And if it was designed for disassembly and recycling, the object can be tracked well beyond the end of its useful life.


A spime isn't a superfangled, function-heavy gizmo like a Treo 600. A Treo heroically serves as cell phone, camera, calendar, browser, emailer, music player, and word processor. A spime doesn't have to be that complicated. It could be a book.

In fact, books are already well on their way to becoming spimes, thanks mostly to Amazon.com. A book listed on that site is much more than the words between its covers. It looks, feels, and behaves like an ordinary book, yet in short order, you can find out its cost, publisher, and printer; whether other editions have been published and what they look like; what other books the author has written; what readers think of the book and what other books those readers have bought; what other publications quote the book; and so on. And, beyond Amazon.com, you can learn about the composition of the paper, how long it will last before yellowing, and what kinds of products it can become when the book is recycled. Some of this information might be contained in the pages, and some might be conjured on the Web via, say, an RFID tag - but in practice, it won't make much difference. The upshot is that the object's nature is transparent: an open book.

In this way, information technology is laying bare the reality that underlies all manufactured objects. In a world of spimes, even the simplest objects - furniture, cutlery, power tools - will be little more than material billboards for a vast, interactive, postindustrial support system.

Of course, spimes will bring problems as well as benefits. Just as people struggle now with the dark side of the Net, they'll struggle with the downside of spimes. Forewarned is forearmed. Get ready for:

• spime spam (vacuum cleaners that bellow ads for dust bags);

• spime-owner identity theft, fraud, malware, vandalism, and pranks;

• organized spime crime;

• software faults that make even a mop unusable;

• spime hazards (kitchens that fry the unwary, cars that drive off bridges);

• unpredictable emergent forms of networked spime behavior;


If ordinary folks can cope with these loathsome drawbacks, then spimes will be a massive improvement over the present closed, blind regime. Manufactured items will be more practical, efficient, and user- and environment-friendly. Modern products are advanced, but nowhere near advanced enough to sustain civilized life in the long run. This is the path forward.

E-mail Bruce Sterling at bruces@well.com


There's a pesky flaw at the core of our democracy: How do we count those who can't vote? Not those who don't vote (they can take care of themselves by voting). But those people who can't vote, because they're either too young or not yet born. How, in other words, do we reckon the future?

For most of history, this question didn't matter much. Before the atomic bomb, we couldn't really break the future. And before deficit financing, we couldn't easily bankrupt it either.

Technology will soon give us more power to erase the future, or so technologists such as Bill Joy worry. And one body in particular - government - has become efficient at using technology to burden the future.

Think about our behavior over the past four years. We have cut taxes but increased spending, benefiting us but burdening our kids. We have relaxed the control of greenhouse emissions, creating cheaper energy for us but astronomically higher costs for our kids, if they are to avoid catastrophic climatic change. We have waged an effectively unilateral war against Iraq, giving some a feeling of resolve but engendering three generations of angry souls focused upon a single act of revenge: killing Americans. And we have suffocated stem cell research through absurdly restrictive policies, giving the sanctimonious ground upon which to rally, while guaranteeing that kids with curable diseases will suffer unnecessary deaths. In each case, we have burdened children - that one group that can't complain - so as to supposedly benefit those of us who do.

This is the shameful application of a simple political truth: The future doesn't vote. And when tomorrow's generations get their turn at the polls, they won't be able to punish those who failed to consider their interests. The cost of shifting burdens to the future is thus quite small to us, even if it is quite large to them. And we, or the politicians representing us, happily follow this calculus.

This isn't the first time a government has imposed costs on others. But when it comes to other issues, there is often resistance. When a government burdens its own people, they respond either by defending their interests or, if disenfranchised, by demanding the vote. When a government imposes costs internationally, that drives diplomatic negotiations or, failing that, war.

But future generations can't picket. They can't demand a vote. And the only war on us that they will wage is one of hatred when they recognize what we have done. If the game of politics is to decide which ox to gore, then our politicians, both Republican and Democrat, have finally found the perfectly gorable ox.

It may always have been like this. I don't believe in "golden age" histories; the past was not always better than the present. But somehow it seems that we have lost an ethic. When your grandfather spoke of building a better world for you than he knew himself, you believed him. And when you look into the eyes of any 1-year-old child, you may understand what he meant.

Which makes it even harder to understand how we've become who we are. The Me Generation - which elected the first two presidents to have actively avoided military service (Clinton and Bush) and which will decide this election, too - is in charge, but it has taken its name much too seriously. Gone is the sense of duty that made so compelling Kennedy's demand "ask what you can do for your country." We don't even ask what we, as a nation, can do for our kids. The rhetoric of self-interest so deeply pervades politics that an ideal as fundamental as building a better future has been lost.

As I've framed this issue, my point may seem critical of the Republicans (the only next-generation-aware policy for them, arguably, is abortion). The president's policies burden the next generation because it's convenient to do so. But I don't mean to praise the Democrats. They don't defend the next generation against these policies because it would be inconvenient.

In his primary bid for his party's presidential nomination, John Edwards urged audiences, "Think about how much we have lost in just four years." It was a powerful sentiment, properly stated. But against the rhetoric of both parties today, a better thought might be this: Think about how much we have taken, and continue to take. And how has it become so easy?

Email Lawrence Lessig at lawrence_lessig@wiredmag.com.