A lot of people are telling me that as an “autism mother,” I should be thrilled that SAP, the German software company, is looking to hire hundreds of adults with the same disability as my son. SAP believes individuals who have autism make excellent software testers, programmers and data quality assurance specialists.

But I am not thrilled. I am worried.

Setting aside our own family’s reality—that an SAP job would be completely inappropriate for my son, now 25—I envision enormous potential for failure and disappointment. True, these come with the autism “territory.”  This neuro-biological, communication disability is, indeed, both an epidemic and a puzzle not easily solved, even by a mass hiring like this one.

SAP seems to think it can take on the task of hiring and training so many disabled individuals with very little experience of its own. According to its own press release, it has hired only six people with autism in India, while screening for another five positions in Ireland. Compare these numbers to current official US data, which show that one in 88 children who are eight years old still have autism, meaning they are not likely to grow out of it. Globally, tens of millions of people are said to be affected.

Granted, what may save SAP is that it is wisely teaming up with the Specialisterne Foundation, an organization that has been earnestly working to employ individuals with autism in the software industry since 2004, founded by parents of a son with autism.

But does SAP know how to translate this into its own corporate culture? And what about all the “copycat” companies that might try to do this without support, whether to seek altruism brownie points or because they believe, with justification, that people with autism will help them to make more money?

To make money, a company needs to spend money. This is particularly true when it comes to hiring people with autism. Supporting even the most “high functioning” and verbal but affected individuals in a work environment often requires an extraordinary amount of resources, patience, skill, and perhaps genius. It takes life coaches, behaviorists, sensory integration experts, “social script” writers and more. You don’t merely welcome someone with autism to the firm and send them off to human resources.

The much-heralded ability of the autistic brain to focus is also widely  misunderstood. I know very smart people with autism who would much prefer to “focus” on CSI, Star Wars or the intricacies of the calendar, than any other task at hand, including choosing a health plan or naming a beneficiary. Some would fight—legitimately, I think—for their right to do so, for their right to think differently. Learning how to handle this in an office setting requires training.

Getting back to my own son, Dan, and so many on the spectrum like him, I worry that this grandstanding by SAP will lead to stereotyping, which is the last thing people with autism need. Software is not the one-size-fits-all industry for autism. Or, as the cliché goes: “If you’ve met one person with autism, you’ve met one person with autism.”

My son stopped talking when he was 3, after a period of prolonged development. He has movement issues, but they seem to fade when he works at a farm or when someone works closely with him. Over a few months, one of his aides was able to teach him to dismantle a computer with a screwdriver. What once took Dan 40 minutes to do now takes him four. He now also works taking apart computers in order for the parts to be recycled rather than landfilled.

I am grateful that my son is engaged by work. But it is frightening how truly far away we are from making sure that those who have autism live the full and productive lives to which they are entitled as human beings. An uncounted plethora of young adults with autism—adults who, like my son, would not be hired by SAP—work at jobs that are meaningless to them and society or stay home with elderly parents who soon won’ t be able to care for them.

As a society, we need to come up with many more solutions so that people with autism can work. In the best of worlds, SAP’s initiative will open those doors, as well as its own.

You can follow Barbara on Twitter at  @BarbaraFischkin. We welcome your comments at ideas@qz.com. 

Coffee futures on IntercontinentalExchange, the commodities trading market, for arabica beans (not the cheaper, nastier robusta) traded below $1.30 per pound today for the first time since March 5, 2010. That continues a decline in prices since the April 29, 2011 high of $2.99 per pound.

This three-year low comes after heavy rains in Brazil’s growing regions failed to suppress the harvest as expected, and stockpiles of the bean remain high. The long-term decline in prices has prompted coffee makers J.M. Smucker and Kraft to lower the prices of their Maxwell House and Folgers brands. Starbucks has followed suit with its pre-packaged coffee, but hasn’t dropped prices for its over-the-counter beverages. So don’t go waving the graph above indignantly at your barista—there’s nothing he or she can do about it.

New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg told the head of a taxicab fleet that he plans to “fucking destroy” the city’s taxi industry when he leaves office on January 1. Bloomberg’s frustration with New York’s yellow cabs and their drivers stems from their unwillingness to adopt new technology such as accepting electronic passenger hails from smartphones, and their resistance to one of the mayor’s pet projects, a redesigned Taxi of Tomorrow.

There aren’t a lot of people who can credibly threaten to upend an entire microeconomy. The mayor is a billionaire, though, and he might just have the wherewithal to make it happen. So how might he go about it?

Well, first, when Bloomberg says “destroy,” we’re going to presume creative destruction, not physical annihilation. (It’s not that he couldn’t literally wipe out the taxi industry—with his $27 billion in personal wealth, he could undoubtedly afford the requisite military hardware—but even the famously direct Bloomberg might consider such a method unsubtle.) But isn’t car-service app Uber, which lets users order a cab, see on a map how far away it is, and pay for it, all through their phones, already going to disrupt the hidebound taxi industry?

Well, probably not while it’s so expensive (although, in my personal experience, the cheaper UberX option has proven cheaper than Los Angeles taxis). More importantly, though, Uber still faces an enormous challenge as long as paid automotive transportation is heavily regulated by public officials under the sway of a concentrated bloc of self-interested small-business owners riding in culturally significant yellow sedans. Uber, along with competitors like Zimride, exists in a regulatory grey area that officials from New York to San Francisco are trying close down, and while they may claim—with some justification—to be worried about consumer safety, a lot of the rules in mind, like banning lighter, eco-friendly cars or using GPS to calculate fares, clearly don’t have safety as their first concern.

Still, the laws that have allowed cabbies to block Mayor Bloomberg’s top-down technocratic paternalism while in office are the same ones that keep Uber from disrupting the the hired car sector from below. So if Bloomberg is serious about this smashing-the-yellow-cab-monopoly thing—and please, let him be—what does he have that Uber doesn’t? The answer is the distinguishing feature of his entire political career, from the shift in party allegiance that marked his first mayoral run to his quixotic campaign to enact gun safety rules: His firm belief that money well-deployed can buy any political outcome. And, of course, that $27 billion.

A heavily regulated marketplace creates high barriers to entry, but sufficient capital can break through them. Uber has raised $50 million since 2010, and while it doesn’t release revenue figures, it’s clearly in a precarious position when it comes to fighting regulatory lawsuits and city rule-makers. But a Bloomberg-funded trade group, with publicists, lobbyists and lawyers could open the legal doors, while Uber and the like force mobile efficiencies into the sector.

And then the market will provide all the destruction a megalomaniacal billionaire could want.

Venezuela’s lawmakers are rolling out plans to import toilet paper and allot a $79 million trade credit to help alleviate the country’s shortages on many basic goods.

Last week, commerce minister Alejandro Fleming promised he’d import 50 million rolls of toilet paper, but the recent overture comes in more than 10 million short, at 39 million rolls. Why exactly is unclear—the government neither addressed the discrepancy, nor has it been asked about it.

Still, the measure will help quell Venezuela’s short-term scarcity problems—besides toilet paper, milk, butter and coffee, among others—but still seems to lack long-term perspective. What happens a few months down the road when supplies diminish?

Many believe that the crux of Venezuela’s goods shortage lies in the government’s attempt to stem the country’s inflation, the highest in Latin America. ”Price controls, for example, act as a disincentive to local producers, forcing them to cut output. The resulting scarcity forces up inflation, defeating the entire purpose of price controls in the first place,” says the survey organization Consensus Economics.

Meanwhile, president Nicolas Maduro’s government places some blame for the toilet paper shortage on Venezuelans themselves.

Only a few hours after the government’s National Assembly voted for the trade credit, Maduro’s statistics office suggested an odd reason for all the shortages: “95% of people eat three or more meals a day,” president of the National Statistics Institute (INE) Elias Eljuri said while referencing a national survey.

The announcement couldn’t have been more poorly timed, or less insightful. The inability to stock supermarkets with basic staples can be blamed on poor market management, not Venezuelans’ eating habits, and much less their bathroom habits.

“Governor Moonbeam” has definitely left the building.

Jerry Brown’s spacey-techno New Age musings during his first stint as California governor in the 1970s earned him that enduring sobriquet. Brown, who dated singer Linda Ronstadt and refused to live in the governor’s mansion, pushed then-exotic technologies like solar energy, and proposed that the state launch its own satellite.

Now, in his third term as governor, Brown is showing himself to be a born-again pragmatist, at least when it comes to environmental politics.

Yesterday in Silicon Valley, Brown joined 500 scientists calling for action on climate change. “This is not just about science, this is about activism,” said Brown. “This is an important challenge, cause and undertaking. We can do it, but we have to do a lot more than we’re doing now.”

His speech rekindled the anger of environmentalists over Brown’s latest state budget, announced earlier this month, which proposes to raid $500 million in revenues from California’s new carbon market. That money, earned from the auction of pollution allowances to industrial companies, is supposed to be used to promote renewable energy, energy efficiency and other programs to cut California’s carbon emissions, as well as help poorer neighborhoods cope with pollution.

Brown, however, wants to borrow the money to help plug a $1.8 billion hole in the state’s budget. He claims programs to deploy the cash for its intended purpose aren’t ready to go; environmentalists say there are existing projects it can be spent on. To Brown’s opponents, these look suspiciously like the type of budget shenanigans he pledged to end when he was elected in 2010.

With the US’s chances of enacting a national carbon market nil after Congress failed to pass such a scheme in 2010, and with the European cap-and-trade system in disarray, environmental and business interests are closely watching the California experiment, which was launched in November. So far, it has gone smoothly. On Jan. 1, 2014, the state will link its carbon market to Quebec’s, allowing carbon credits bought in one to offset emissions in the other. On May 3, California held its third auction for credits (pdf), raising $284 million.

But proponents of the scheme fear that after successfully vanquishing business opposition to California’s carbon market, Brown will endanger its success in an internecine battle with his erstwhile allies in the environmental movement. “The governor is playing a dangerous game that could wreck California’s push toward clean energy,” Ryan Young, an attorney for the Greenlining Institute, a California advocacy group, in a statement.

A new McKinsey report names genomics—combining and synthesizing the structure of genes, from crops to cancer—as one of 12 disruptive technologies, projecting it could have an economic impact of $700 billion to $1.5 trillion per year by 2025.

Yet great risks loom. Governments have yet to decide who owns genetic material. The US Supreme Court is scheduled this fall to decide whether pharmaceutical companies can patent human cells. Currently, about a quarter of the genes in the human genome are patented. Parents are already using genomics to create “designer babies,” raising concerns about the return of eugenics.

The most important number in today’s report on US durable goods—which tracks items intended to last at least three years like cars, washing machines, ovens and manufacturing machinery—is something called “nondefense capital goods excluding aircraft.” While it’s a choppy data set, economists like to look at it as a proxy for capital expenditures from businesses. Actual shipments of such business equipment have been somewhat soft lately, including a 1.5% decline in April versus March. Here’s a look.

​

But economists tend to put a bit more weight on the more-forward-looking future orders for such goods, which have been a bit better than expected. Orders rose 1.2% in April and March’s numbers were revised higher to a 0.9% increase.

​

What to make of it? Here’s the takeaway, according to economists at RBS:

On a three-month annualized basis, orders and shipments of core capital goods both grew at 4.5% in April. In other words, despite some cooling from its pace a few months ago (a development that has been apparent in most other indicators of business activity), business investment in capital equipment continues to advance at a mid-single-digit pace.

In other words, business spending is just kind of puttering along but shows no signs of rocketing up any time soon.

The sociologist Robert Bellah once wrote that the real purpose of Memorial Day, a US holiday that’s celebrated this Monday and commemorates those who have died in battle, is to re-indoctrinate the American public into the “national cult.”

His point is that federal holidays serve to reinforce American values, which can be viewed as a kind of religion. If Bellah were writing about the subject today, he would certainly mention one ceremony conducted with religious fervor all over the country on Memorial Day: the barbecue cookout.

And increasingly, those Americans are cooking at the altar of the Big Green Egg.

Created in 1974, the Big Green Egg is a barbecue grill that can be used as an oven or smoker, as well. The design is based on slow-cooking clay pots from Japan that date back centuries and were brought to the US by American soldiers after World War II. The clay was ultimately ditched in favor of NASA-developed ceramics that can withstand much higher temperatures without cracking.

Emphatic users of the Egg, many of whom own two or three, are known as “eggheads.” They can be found contributing to online forums, proffering tips and recipes and gleefully extolling its virtues. It really locks in the moisture. It cooks so evenly. It smokes even as it grills. It can be used to make real Italian brick-oven pizza…

“Our customers are the best sales people,” says Jodi Burson, the product’s marketing manager. She says the privately held Big Green Egg Company has seen double-digit sales growth for over a decade, thanks to a cultish following that would be the envy of any business startup. So what is it about the Big Green Egg that inspires such passion?

1. It’s kitschy

​

The Big Green Egg has the name and appearance of a product that just might be marketed with the promise of changing your life for six easy payments of $19.95 (it in fact costs more.) But the Egg’s infomercial-like qualities actually seem to stoke, not dampen, the ferventness of its following.

Images of “Eggfests”—official gatherings where eggheads get together to cook, including the annual Eggtoberfest—make the events look far tackier than the ceramic cooker itself. The same could be said of a lot of websites dedicated to using the Egg.

http://www.biggreeneggsperience.com/

http://www.nakedwhiz.com/ceramic.htm

And then there’s the informal Egghead vocabulary, which consists entirely of egg-based puns. For eggsample. The company encourages this kind of word play by referring to its supplementary products as “eggcessories.” A collection of these terms can be found in the “eggictionary” section of a popular egghead forum. Eggheads adore the product’s kitsch.

But kitsch in and of itself does not a cult make. A product has to also be uniquely functional. The combination of the two seems to be the key. Take Crocs, the groan-inspiring foam clogs that come in an unlimited array of bright colors and that quickly rose to consipicuous popularity in the US. The footwear found an early following among backpackers, who need lightweight shoes to slip on at camp, and cooks (Mario Batali, famously), who simply want something comfortable to stand up in for hours.

2. It makes a statement

The Big Green Egg couldn’t have succeeded if it didn’t produce decent food; it’s just too expensive. Even the smallest model costs about $400. The large Egg is close to $800, more comparable to a high-quality laptop than a barbecue.

So, obviously, people buy their Eggs because it works well. But owning a Big Green Egg also makes a statement about how seriously you take barbecuing. This is important, since cooking out is such an American pastime.

The skilled preparation of meat—producing steaks or burgers that are exactly medium rare, roasting a turkey without drying out the breast meat, smoking a pork shoulder to perfect succulence—is highly venerated, especially among men. Cooking meat in an Egg signals dedication to doing it right, and it does so in a very public fashion.

3. It’s easy—but not too easy

The Big Green Egg is far from the only home appliance with an evangelical following. If you know anyone with a Dyson vacuum or Wolf stove, then you’ve probably been subjected to a fair share of proselytizing.

The Egg fits into a particularly special sub-category of appliances that don’t simply make life easier, but actually make it possible to create things in your own home that you couldn’t otherwise. Slow-smoked ribs. Neopolitan-style pizza. As a do-it-yourself appliance, the Egg is similar to a SodaStream, the popular and religously espoused counter-top device that lets you make carbonated water and soft drinks on demand.

The Big Green Egg markets itself as incredibly easy to use. “The first time you cook, you get great results,” Burson, the marketing manager told me. Others have more or less echoed that sentiment. A first time user blogged on Wired that “it took a little getting used to, but…within a week, we had it down to a science.”

But the cooker isn’t so simple as to make it impersonal. In a TED talk he delivered late last year about the psychology of motivation, Dan Ariely, a behavioral economist and the author of Predictably Irrational, told a story about the development of processed cake mixes. Early formulations required the baker to simply add water, but market research showed that left people unsatisfied. They didn’t feel like they had anything to do with the cakes they made. Removing the egg and milk ingredients from the powdered mix and requiring bakers to add those things themselves gave them a greater sense of accomplishment and ownership of the end result.

Egg users have a lot of control over what they do with their cookers, which is ultimately why there is a vibrant community of eggheads who share techniques and recipes with each other. The SodaStream may have its die-hards, but even the biggest fans probably wouldn’t know what to do with themselves at “Streamfest,” if such a thing ever happened.

The management prowess of Procter & Gamble used to be seen as an example of how to groom and keep talent. When AG Lafley retired as CEO in 2009, the market wasn’t worried because P&G had a deep bench of other qualified executives.

But after Bob McDonald took over from Lafley, P&G’s performance started to lag and several executives left the firm. Now Lafley is back, replacing the man he himself had picked as a successor.

Lafley was a great CEO at P&G. He increased sales by 110% over nine years by building around the “consumer is boss” mantra. There are high hopes that he can turn the company back around. But he’s also 65. Can he stick around long enough to revitalize P&G, while also grooming current executives so the company once again has a deep bench when he is gone—and, while he’s at it, pick a better successor this time?

The fact that P&G had to bring Lafley out of retirement shows how its “Build From Within” system, which tracks every manager’s performance, has fallen off. It’s a system that helped P&G find CEO candidates from inside the firm in the past. But this time, P&G apparently couldn’t find anyone qualified enough.

Some of the people who could have taken over had already left during McDonald’s tenure, in an exodus of top executives unusual for the company. Ed Shirley and Robert Steele, both former vice chairmen at P&G, and Chip Bergh, who had been president of male grooming, all left the firm in 2011. Craig Bahner, who was vice president of P&G’s important hair care business in North America, also left that year.

By the time Lafley leaves, hopefully he will have built up an array of qualified candidates to take over. One possible CEO who has been mentioned in the past is Melanie Healey, a group president. Another option is for P&G to look outside the company, but that may be too much of a leap. One of the strikes against Healey is that she’s been with the company for a mere 23 years. Prior to that, she was with SC Johnson. Lafley spent his entire career at P&G.

The term “hardest job-hunting season in history” has become a buzzword in China recently. According to China’s Ministry of Human Resources and Social Security,6.99 million students will be graduating institutions of higher education this year, a record high since the establishment of the People’s Republic of China in 1949.

This intimidating number is inextricably tied with discussion of another pressing issue: the employment rate of college graduates. The latest statistics released by Beijing Municipal Commission of Education show that only 33.6% of college graduates in Beijing have signed employment contracts, up 5% from April. Meanwhile, a recent report by Tecent-Mycos reveals that college graduates face gloomy employment prospects.

“I just can’t figure out why it’s so hard to get a job this year,” said Miranda Zhang, who is graduating from a university in Beijing. “I feel desperate—campus recruitment is competitive, with dozens of people competing for one position, while HR offices out in the real world usually disregard graduating students because we do not have any prior work experience.”

This has not always been the case. Before the financial crisis in 2008, economic prospects for China and Chinese students were a lot better. Businesses were expanding, new companies were emerging, and thus hordes of new employees were needed. However, as China’s growth has slowed to 7.5% this year, businesses, especially small- and medium-sized enterprises, are showing signs of shrinking. The numbers show that Miranda is not alone in her worries—the total number of job openings is down 15% from 2012.

As Chinese college students come face to face with these gloomy prospects, complaints or expressions of disappointment have grown in online communities such as Sina Weibo (a Twitter-like service), Renren (a Facebook-like service) and Douban (an IMDB-like website for users with shared interests in movies, books, and music).

One of the most common complaints is the unfairness recent graduates have experienced in the job interview process. In fact, a lack of transparency or the use of guanxi (connections) is particularly evident in competition for jobs at state-owned enterprises or in civil service—these positions are considered much more stable and better-paying than other jobs in China.

Sara Wang, a journalism student at Wuhan University, described what she thought to be unfair competition for a job at Chinese National Radio. She stated that she made it all the way through the resume selection process and written exams to the last round of interviews, but was eliminated during the physical examination. She speculated that someone else used guanxi to get the job, but was unable to prove that this had been the case. Perhaps that is why Weibo user @我是千里驴 proposed that to solve the problem of unemployment, “the essential thing to do is to ensure the transparency and fairness of the employment process.”

Some attributed the large-scale unemployment to the college students themselves. Netizen @穿心莲籽 wrote:

How can you satisfy a bunch of poor college students who have grandiose aims but puny abilities? What they want is a job that does not require much labor, in which they do not need to expose themselves to the elements, one with high social status and a high salary, where they can play games while they are at work and attend social gatherings while they are off work; in other words, a “golden rice-bowl” job within the system. [College students] think that with their educational achievements, they do not belong to the working class anymore and that they deserve a white-collar job at the very least. No wonder they cannot get a job.

While this is true to some extent, a larger proportion of people held the government responsible for the unemployment problem. In fact, the public has long criticized Chinese colleges’ blind expansion.

Weibo user @M3MStudio mused:

The Ministry of Education is responsible for maintaining the employment rate—isn’t that ridiculous?” “The Ministry of Education should feel guilty because students nowadays cannot make full use of what they learn in college, and what they learn in college is useless in their careers. Colleges are like companies; teachers are like bosses; and students have become nothing but tools for colleges and teachers to compete for fame and profit. The education system in mainland China has collapsed.

Despite such gloom, Xu Mei, the spokesperson for the Ministry of Education, suggested that the employment rate and the number of graduating students signing employment contracts would increase greatly in June. At the same time, Xu also affirmed that the Ministry would act to ensure that the employment rate of college graduates would not decrease, a statement to which netizens responded with some derision.

Weibo user @寻找LostMyself wrote, “The Ministry of Education’s prediction will be realized with 100% success, because this is what they are best at. I believe every graduate knows the real deal with the so-called employment contract signing rate!”

Lotus Yuen is a Beijing-based writer and editorial intern at Ifeng.com. She has written forSouthern Metropolis Daily, New Business Magazine, and Hong Kong Independent Media.

This originally appeared at The Atlantic. More from our sister site:

Chinese media: Don’t go to Mars

If corporate profits are at an all-time high in the US, why are corporate taxes at a 60-year low?

America’s top colleges have a rich kid problem

Both German and French measures of business confidence rose on a monthly basis. Germany’s Ifo survey of business confidence hit 105.7, topping a long-term average of 100. The French business climate measure rose to 92 from 88.

These data are better than analysts expected. Although the euro zone—and nearly all individual euro zone countries—have long since slipped into recession, German businesses continue to remain optimistic about their prospects. That’s quite different from the situation of the French, however. Despite some marginal increases in confidence sporadically over the last year, French businesses haven’t reported such a poor climate in the last decade at any point except the 2008 financial crisis. The divergence between Germany and the rest of Europe continues.

Imagine our world later in this century, when machines have gotten better. Cars and trucks drive themselves, and there’s hardly ever an accident.  Robots root through the earth for raw materials, and miners are never trapped. Robotic surgeons rarely make errors. Clothes are always brand new designs that day, and always fit perfectly, because your home fabricator makes them out of recycled clothes from the previous day.  There is no laundry. I can’t tell you which of these technologies will start to work in this century for sure, and which will be derailed by glitches, but at least some of these things will come about.

Who will earn wealth? If robotic surgeons get really good, will tomorrow’s surgeons be in the same boat as today’s musicians? Will they live gig to gig, with a token few of them winning a YouTube hit or Kickstarter success while most still have to live with their parents?

This question has to be asked. Something seems terribly askew about how technology is benefitting the world lately. How could it be that so far the network age seems to be a time of endless austerity, jobless recoveries, loss of social mobility, and intense wealth concentration in markets that are anemic overall? How could it be that ever since the incredible efficiencies of digital networking have finally reached vast numbers of people that we aren’t seeing a broad benefit?

The medicine of our time is purported to be open information. The medicine comes in many bottles: open software, free online education, European pirate parties, Wikileaks, social media, and endless variations of the above. The principle of making information free seems, at first glance, to spread the power of information out of elite bubbles to benefit everyone.

Unfortunately, although no one realized it beforehand, the medicine turns out to be poison.

* * *

While people are created equal, computers are not. When people share information freely, those who own the best computers benefit in extreme ways that are denied to everyone else. Those with the best computers can simply calculate wealth and power away from ordinary people.

It doesn’t matter if the best computers are said run schemes called high frequency trading firms, social media sites, national intelligence agencies, giant online stores, big political campaigns, insurance companies, or search engines. Leave the semantics aside and they’re all remarkably similar.

All the computers that crunch “big data” are physically similar. They are placed in obscure sites where they can radiate heat into the environment, and they are guarded like oil fields. They all offer excellent espresso to holders of PhDs in math and computer science from top schools.

The programs that the best computers are running are also similar. First comes the gathering of freely offered information from everyone else in the world. The ogling might include scanned emails or social media sharing, sightings through cloud-connected cameras, or commercial and medical dossiers; there’s no boundary to the snooping.

In order to lure people into asymmetrical information relationships, some treat is often dangled. The treat might be free internet services or music, or insanely easy to get mortgages. What is always true is that the targeted audience eventually pays for these treats through lost opportunities. Career options will eventually narrow, or credit will become insanely tight.

Ordinary people, or more precisely people with only ordinary computers, are the sole providers of the information that makes the big computers so powerful and valuable. And ordinary people do get a certain flavor of benefit for providing that value. They get the benefits of an informal economy usually associated with the developing world. The formal benefits concentrate around the biggest computers.

More and more ordinary people are thrust into a winner-take-all economy. It is a 21^st century reprise of the Horatio Alger stories from the 19^th century. A token few will find success on Kickstarter or YouTube, while overall wealth is ever more concentrated and social mobility rots. Social media sharers can make all the noise they want, but they forfeit the real wealth and clout needed to be politically powerful. Real wealth and clout instead concentrate ever more on the shrinking island occupied by elites who run the most powerful computers.

Once the data is gathered, statistical analysis is performed to create behavioral models. The consumer-facing giant computers like social media, search, or big online stores use models of people to optimize the options put in front of them to generate desired behaviors. The term “advertising” once meant an act of communication, the romanticizing of a product, but no more. Similarly, investing used to mean evaluating risk and reward, but now it has come to mean getting people locked into massive too-big-to-fail schemes in which only the little people absorb the risks and the best computer gathers the rewards.

Whether the activity of a giant computer is called “media,” “finance,” or something else, the end goal is to come up with schemes that transcend the usual connection between risk and reward. The operation of the best computers takes place at arm’s length, so that the owners don’t need to really understand what’s going on, and can take as little responsibility as possible. The financier, the social media site owner, or anyone else with a top computer is rarely held responsible for what goes on through that computer. All risk falls on those who are aggregated.

* * *

In most cases there was no evil plot. Many of the people who own the top computers are genuinely nice. I helped create the system, and benefit from it. But nonetheless, it is not sustainable.

The core problem starts with philosophy. The owners of the biggest computers like to think about them as big artificial brains. But actually they are simply repackaging valuable information gathered from everyone else. This is what “big data” means.

For instance, a big remote Google or Microsoft computer can translate this piece, more or less, from English to another language, but what is really going on is that real human translators are being made anonymous, invisible, and insecure. Real translations, made by humans, are gathered in multitudes, and pattern-matched against new texts like this one. A mashup of old translations will approximate the new translation that is needed, so long as there are many old translations to serve as sources.

As long as we keep doing things the way we are, every big computer will hide a crowd of disenfranchised people. In the case of translation, the people are translators, and in the case of surgery, someday they will be surgeons and patients.

As it happens, the very first conception of digital networked communication foresaw a way out of this trap. I am referring Ted Nelson’s early work, dating back to 1960. The first idea of networked digital media included a universal micropayment system, so that people would be paid when data they added to a network was used by someone else.

This idea is anathema to the current orthodoxy. If you are bristling, please give what I’m saying a chance.

Just because things have a cost, that does not mean they can’t be affordable. To demand that things be free is to embrace an eternal place for poverty. The problem is not cost, but poverty.

Monetizing information will bring benefits that far outweigh the inconvenience of having to adjust one’s worldview. Consider the problem of creepiness. Creepiness is when you don’t have enough influence on your information life. Government cameras track you as you walk around town, despite wars having been fought to limit the abilities of governments to spy without contraint. Aside from governments, every other owner of a big computer is doing exactly the same thing. Private camera track you as often as government ones.

Privacy regulations attempt to keep up, but face dismal odds. Does anyone believe such regulations have a chance?  But what if you were owed money for the use of information that exists because you exist? This is what accountants and lawyers are for. The government should not be able to spy on you for free any more than should the police get free guns or cars.  Budgets create moderation.

If the biggest computers had to pay for information, they wouldn’t cease to exist. Instead big computers would have to earn their way by providing new kinds of value. Spying and manipulating would no longer be business plans, because the raw materials would no longer be free.

In fact, the owners of the best computers would do fine in a world of monetized information, because that would be a world with a growing economy. In a world of free information, the economy will start to shrink as automation rises radically, later in this century. This is because in an ultra-automated economy, there won’t be much to trade other than information.

But this is the most important thing: A monetized information economy will create a strong middle class out of information sharing- and a strong middle class must be able to outspend the elite tip of an economy for democracy to endure. While the open information ideal feels empowering, it is actually enriching those with the best computers to such an extreme that it is gradually undermining both markets and democracy.

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