Jaron Lanier is a computer scientist and musician, best known for his work in virtual reality research. He coined and popularized the term, and he received a Lifetime Career Award from IEEE in 2009 for his contributions to the field. Time named him as one of the "Time 100" in 2010. And a profile in Wired described him as "the first technology figure to cross over to pop-culture stardom."

In Who Owns the Future? Lanier laments the wealth and power of Siren Servers, giant computer networks like Facebook, Google, and other high tech companies that are gathering all kinds of data, analyzing and reselling it, without paying people for it. Siren Servers are shafting the middle-class and taking away millions of jobs.

Early in the book, he points that the once prosperous Kodak employed over 140,000 people, whereas Facebook recently bought Instagram and its staff of 13 people. More of the same is on the horizon as everything in the economy from manufacturing to energy to health care is shifting to information. Lanier predicts that software is destined to be the final industrial revolution with self-driving cars, 3D printing, robotic mining equipment, and robots to care for the elderly.

The author hopes that this book will serve as a wake-up call for those of us who have become "digital serfs." We're being exploited by Siren Servers and should be paid for all the data they are collecting about our habits, purchases, and hobbies. All this information should result in micro-payments for our part in making social networks, search engines, ad services, and others so rich. Lanier is not only angry about this high tech thievery, he has some caustic comments on power players of Big Data who plan to usher in a techie utopia that merges biology and technology and "methusalization" (immortality).