Jaron Lanier is a digital visionary with a difference. As the New Yorker once put it, he is a technology expert who dislikes what technology has become. He is a go-to person for those worried about the internet. His latest book, Who Owns the Future?, describes the assault on the middle classes by the Siren Servers. These are giant computer networks, devised by the smartest technical folk around, systems that gather data often without having to pay for it. Lanier has in his sights Facebook, Google and the other mega-tech firms (interest declared: I advise Google on free-expression issues).

The people who lose out are the creators. The author starts his list with the translation services: "with each so-called automatic translation, the humans who were the sources of the data are inched away from the world of compensation and employment". Much of the non-payment culture is voluntary, based in the ethos of the US west coast. "It is a commonplace in Silicon Valley for very young people with a startup in a garage to announce that their goal is to change human culture globally and profoundly, with a few years, and that they aren't ready yet to worry about money."

His lament ranges from copyright to privacy and beyond. Lanier argues that our insatiable demand for information and entertainment and for access to instant communication has come at a heavy price. Most people don't know they're paying it or will regret doing so in future. We "expect online services to be given for free or, rather, in exchange for acquiescence to being spied on".

Successful technologists are the new "ruling class". In this digital world order, money and power are concentrated in the hands of a few. "Siren Servers are narcissists; blind to where value comes from, including the web of global interdependence that is at the core of their own value." Lanier compares the online economic model to that off-line giant Walmart, with its low-cost, low-value, low-payment principles. "If you already have enough to live on, saving some money on a purchase is a nice perk."

Geeks are not necessarily egalitarians  far from it. Forget the veneer of T-shirts and flip-flops; for all the roots in hippy culture, it is a Darwinian world in which only the most successful are able to monetise their products. The author does not convince me that the internet, as it currently operates, reinforces inequality. But it is a point that policymakers and technologists should think more deeply about.

Lanier mixes historical metaphors with abandon. At one point he quotes Aristotle: "What a shame about enslaving people, but we need to do it so someone will play the music, since we need music." On another occasion, he suggests Karl Marx was the first technologist. Then he suggests many in the present middle-class creative and academic sectors are operating in "feudal conditions". The structure and language do not help the cause either. The book is written as a series of snippets, more like TED-style mini-lectures, rather than developing the ideas into a longer train of thought. At times the language is impenetrable.

Still, the book raises important questions and Lanier is highly qualified to ask them. His danger signs are worth noting. Each technological innovation produces the potential not just for cyber-crime, but for manipulating the way we lead our lives. Take the driverless cars that Google is developing. He conjures the following thought: imagine you take a driverless taxi. Without explanation, it lingers in front of billboards during your journey or forces you to a particular convenience store if you need to pick up something. Is that very different to search engines reading your mind through your click-habits or Amazon telling you, often accurately, what you really want to read next?

For a more sanguine take on the power of data, Viktor Mayer-Schönberger and Kenneth Cukier point out that numeric information has little value unless it is applied to human habits. Big Data warns of the dangers of misuse by governments and corporations alike, but from predicting climate change to health epidemics, they prefer to focus on the value.

Life is enhanced when smart data helps passengers identify those airports that are more prone to delays or which patients, on discharge from hospital, are more likely to be readmitted. In a fascinating experiment, an expert who used data to predict the likelihood of American soldiers being blown up by roadside bombs in Iraq was asked by the mayor of New York to tackle illegal property conversions. He did so by a mixture of computer data sets and walking the streets, inputting manually observations such as the quality of brick. Armed with uncannily accurate information, inspectors moved in, clearing buildings that had become fire hazards and dens of criminality.

The amount of raw data about all our lives continues to rise exponentially. It is a frightening prospect. But as both books demonstrate, ultimately, benefit and danger will depend on the use to which the information is put and the safeguards that protect us from technical malfunction and human malevolence.

John Kampfner is author of Freedom For Sale and Blair's Wars

Jaron Lanier, groundbreaking computer scientist and infectious optimist, is concerned that we are not making the most of ourselves. In Who Owns the Future? he tellingly questions the trajectory of economic value in the information age, and argues that there has been a fundamental misstep in how capitalism has gone digital. For Lanier, late capitalism is not so much exhausted as humiliating: in an automated world, information is more important to the economy than manual labour, and yet we are expected to surrender information generated by or about ourselves  a valuable resource  for free.

Information here is a broad term for any conscious intellectual, artistic, or pragmatic contribution to the production of goods, services and cultural output, but it also includes the data that we unconsciously radiate simply by exhibiting certain behavioural and consumer traits. Lanier's project is to foresee how livelihoods might be better sustained in a world in which information is king.

In his view, disproportionate economic power now accumulates around companies who "own the fastest computers with the most access to everyone's information". We donate extremely lucrative information  our interests, demographic predilections, buying habits, cyber-movements  in exchange for "free" admission into social media networks. (Digitisation has also allowed banks to repackage the "information" of a mortgage debt and sell it on as increasingly complex financial products, while excluding the indebted home-owner from a percentage of the profits.) Lanier argues that the early internet years have fetishised open access and knowledge-sharing in a way that has distracted people from demanding fairness and job security in an economy predicated on data flow.

To counteract this one-way, feudal system of financial gains, he suggests that we become more ferocious agents of our own informational resources. His vision of a humanistic information economy is one in which participants achieve "economic dignity" by being proportionally compensated for all their contributions to the massive clusters of information  the so-called "big data"  circulating across digital networks.

To illustrate what he means, Lanier describes a couple who found love on an online dating site and whose subsequent marriage has proved long-lasting. In his economy of compensation, if 30 years later another young couple is paired up using some of the statistical data supplied by the first couple's compatibility, then the latter should receive a tiny royalty payment for the use of this information. One of the frightening aspects of a digital world is that it does not forget, but Lanier believes we can use this lack of forgetting to account for the myriad complex ways in which we each supply useful data. In such an economy we would, throughout our lives, be financially buoyed by an accumulation of small remunerations for both our intellectual and biometric property. One of Edith Wharton's characters, a novelist, declares that "a keen sense of copyright is my nearest approach to an emotion". She would brim with feeling in Lanier's world of nanopayments.

In keeping with Wharton's historical moment, if I'm asked to imagine life in a networked, commercialised collective, I tend to retreat into the conception of happiness offered by Isabel Archer in Henry James's The Portrait of a Lady: "A swift carriage, of a dark night, rattling with four horses over roads that one can't see." In a hyperlinked society it's easy to be seduced by an antiquated vision of total, off-grid remoteness, without limitless occasions to commodify some aspect of your behaviour and offer it up for sale to some ceaselessly strategising, data-crunching corporation.

But we should also remember that Archer is an heiress who has the luxury of such isolationist bliss, and that this gilded time is also one in which her cousin Ralph Touchett slowly dies of a consumptive disease that can now be cured. Lanier believes in the future, and refuses to indulge in laments for past eras that were actually more difficult, more restrictive and more deadly than the technologically advanced present.

An economy of nanopayments is an economy of remembering, for which we will need more sophisticated archives of value than the senile currencies of today. "Cash unfortunately forgets too much for an information economy." This urge to remember the true ownership of the fruits of production is implied by Marx's theory of reification, the process through which consumerism's obsession with relationships between commodities obscures the relationships between the people who have laboured to produce them. Lanier's concept of provenance  the recording of where value originates  is fundamental to an ethical information economy, and also  though Marx is clearly not one of his pals  represents an antidote to reification.

A typical dream of revolution is to promise a new age of social transparency. After the storming of the Bastille, French revolutionaries banned masks and costumes, decrying the carnivalesque custom of the masquerade as both symbolic of aristocratic tyranny and a security threat. Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg famously claimed that "By giving people the power to share, we're making the world more transparent." Lanier is interested in a type of partial unmasking whereby digital economies operate according to the principle that "Information is people in disguise." This ethos emphasises that information is not a neutral, boundless resource to be exploited, but rather is morally inextricable from the humans who supply it.

Lanier wouldn't insist on fitting out Isabel Archer's happy carriage with GPS and pushing a networked device into her clenched palm. He believes that economic transparency is not incompatible with personal privacy. He is not an advocate for social media in its present form, and is no fan of conspicuous consumption. He also understands the need "to preserve the selective blindness accomplished by cash", and believes that, in an information economy, privacy is always securable simply by making the cost of your personal data prohibitive.

So should we be excited or frightened by Lanier's vision? An economy of individuals who manufacture commercial products merely by existing has nightmarish implications, and, given his belief that commercialism should be celebrated for having driven the progress of modernity, Lanier isn't the best person to dispel them. "Advertising counterbalances the tendency of people to adhere to familiar habits," he claims. This hagiography of the billboard is a far cry from Orwell's dismissal of advertising as a stick rattling inside a swill-bucket  in Lanier's future the bucket will be hung around our necks.

What's more, his writing is infused with the caffeinated enthusiasm of Silicon Valley, and his technologist's bias shields him from angst over the social and psychological ramifications of saturating human experience with such chronic opportunities for data analysis as the real-time tracking of our royalties. After all, he has researched the possibility of "pixels grafted into your eyelashes so you could always look up at them". If you have trouble keeping your friends' attention in the era of the smartphone, imagine this culture of endless eye-rolling.

And yet one of the triumphs of Lanier's intelligent and subtle book is its inspiring portrait of the kind of people that a democratic information economy would produce. His vision implies that if we are allowed to lead absorbing, properly remunerated lives, we will likewise outgrow our addiction to consumerism and technology. Lanier's New World is founded on hard, fulfilling work. He concedes that such a radical reorganisation of worth will demand from us new levels of maturity, discipline and collective responsibility  but then who said dignity should be downloadable for free?