Jaron Lanier Quotes

Services like Google and Facebook only exist because of the social acceptance of a mass amount of distributed volunteer labor from tons and tons of people.

A real friendship ought to introduce each person to unexpected weirdness in the other.

If there's any object in human experience that's a precedent for what a computer should be like, it's a musical instrument: a device where you can explore a huge range of possibilities through an interface that connects your mind and your body, allowing you to be emotionally authentic and expressive.

It is impossible to work in information technology without also engaging in social engineering.

Books are really, really hard to write. They represent a kind of a summit of grappling with what one really has to say

An economy where advertisers thrive while journalists and artists struggle, reflects the values of a society more interested in deception and manipulation than in truth and beauty

Anonymous blog comments, vapid video pranks and lightweight mash-ups may seem trivial and harmless, but as a whole, this widespread practice of fragmentary, impersonal communication has demeaned personal interaction.

Create a website that expresses something about who you are that won't fit into the template available to you on a social networking site.

We already knew that kids learned computer technology more easily than adults, It is as if children were waiting all these centuries for someone to invent their native language.

I think seeking perfection in human affairs is a perfect way to destroy them.

Humans change themselves through technology.

Pop culture has entered into a nostalgic malaise. Online culture is dominated by trivial mashups of the culture that existed before the onset of mashups, and by fandom responding to the dwindling outposts of centralized mass media. It is a culture of reaction without action.

Individual web pages as they first appeared in the early 1990s had the flavour of person-hood. MySpace preserved some of that flavour, though a process of regularized formatting had begun. Facebook went further, organizing people into multiple-choice identities while Wikipedia seeks to erase point of view entirely. If a church or government were doing these things, it would feel authoritarian, but when technologists are the culprits, we seem hip, fresh, and inventive. People accept ideas presented in technological form that would be abhorrent in any other forms

Mobs and dictators were made for each other, and when mobs appear, dictators will soon flourish.

All over the world today people have a very strong desire to find a sense of identity, and at the same time that's coupled with the rise of absolutely absurd wars that relate to ethnic identity. Perhaps there is something deeply ingrained in people that relates to a sense of belonging, and without that, identity doesn't seem as real as it should.

America's Facebook generation shows a submission to standardization that I haven't seen before. The American adventure has always been about people forgetting their former selves - Samuel Clemens became Mark Twain, Jack Kerouac went on the road. If they had a Facebook page, they wouldn't have been able to forget their former selves.

Style used to be an interaction between the human soul and tools that were limiting. In the digital era, it will have to come from the soul alone.

Advertisers and marketers should be looking to bring new experiences to different parts of the brain. It's a more profound idea than just dropping a billboard into a video game.

I think most of the dramatic new ideas come from little companies that then grow big.

I think complexity is mostly sort of crummy stuff that is there because it's too expensive to change the interface.

A digital sound sample in angry rap doesn't correspond to the graffiti but the wall.

When you have a global mush, people lose their identity, they become pseudonyms, they have no investment and no consequence in what they do.

We're losing track of the vastness of the potential for computer science. We really have to revive the beautiful intellectual joy of it, as opposed to the business potential.

Making information free is survivable so long as only limited numbers of people are disenfranchised. As much as it pains me to say so, we can survive if we only destroy the middle classes of musicians, journalists, and photographers. What is not survivable is the additional destruction of the middle classes in transportation, manufacturing, energy, office work, education, and health care. And all that destruction will come surely enough if the dominant idea of an information economy isn't improved.

The wisdom of crowds works when the crowd is choosing the price of an ox, when there's a single numeric average. But if it's a design or something that matters, the decision is made by committee, and that's crap. You want people and groups who are able to think thoughts before they share

External reality is sort of an affectation of the nervous system.

If we allow our self-congratulatory adoration of technology to distract us from our own contact with each other, then somehow the original agenda has been lost.

An intelligent person feels guilty for downloading music without paying the musician, but they use this free-open-culture ideology to cover it.

My parents were kind of like me in that they had tons and tons of weird, amazing stuff.

A remarkable thing about the Silicon Valley culture is that its status structure is so based on technical accomplishment and prowess.

Every time we give a musician the advice to give away the music and sell the T-shirt, we're saying, "Don't make your living in this more elevated way. Instead, reverse this social progress, and choose a more physical way to make a living." We're sending them to peasanthood, very much like the Maoists have.

Musicians and journalists are the canaries in the coalmine, but, eventually, as computers get more and more powerful, it will kill off all middle-class professions.

We should treat computers as fancy telephones, whose purpose is to connect people.... As long as we remember that we ourselves are the source of our value, our creativity, our sense of reality, then all of our work with computers will be worthwhile and beautiful.

There were studies that asked people in different cultures to draw pictures of their enemies, and the pictures all looked remarkably the same. They always had exaggerated canine teeth and a certain sort of expression. That led to speculation about whether at an earlier stage in the human experience we were hunted by some sort of carnivore.

If you want to know what's really going on in a society or ideology, follow the money. If money is flowing to advertising instead of musicians, journalists, and artists, then a society is more concerned with manipulation than truth or beauty.

Linux is a superbly polished copy of an antique - shinier than the original, perhaps, but still defined by it.

Back in the 1980s, when the internet was only available to a small number of pioneers, I was often confronted by people who feared that the strange technologies I was working on, like virtual reality, might unleash the demons of human nature. For instance, would people become addicted to virtual reality as if it were a drug? Would they become trapped in it, unable to escape back to the physical world where the rest of us live? Some of the questions were silly, and others were prescient.

Why do people deserve a penny when they update their Facebook status? Because they'll spend some of it on you.

There is no difference between machine autonomy and the abdication of human responsibility.

It's as if you kneel to plant the seed of a tree and it grows so fast that it swallows your whole town before you can even rise to your feet.

Information doesn’t deserve to be free. It is an abstract tool; a useful fantasy, a nothing. It is nonexistent until and unless a person experiences it in a useful way.

If you listen first, and write later, then what you write will have had time to filter through your brain and you'll be in what you say. This is what makes you exist. If you are only a reflector of information, are you really there?

Individuals achieve optimal stupidity when they're given substantial powers while being insulated from the results of their actions.

If war stems from unmet needs related to male adolescent ritual, that's something that we need to examine. I'm interested in the possibility of simply getting rid of war. I'd be no more willing to let go of that than to let go of the possibility of eradicating cancer. That's not to say I'm certain we can, but I am willing to use any energy at all in the quest.

If you're old enough to have a job and to have a life, you use Facebook exactly as advertised, you look up old friends.

People try to treat technology as an object, and it can't be. It can only be a channel.

You have to be somebody before you can share yourself.

Facebook says, 'Privacy is theft,' because they're selling your lack of privacy to the advertisers who might show up one day.

The network by itself is meaningless. Only the people were ever meaningful.

People have to be able to make money off their brains and their hearts. Or else we're all going to starve, and it's the machines that'll get good.