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.
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
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.
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.
Mobs and dictators were made for each other, and when mobs appear, dictators will soon flourish.
A digital sound sample in angry rap doesn't correspond to the graffiti but the wall.
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.
I think complexity is mostly sort of crummy stuff that is there because it's too expensive to change the interface.
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.
When you have a global mush, people lose their identity, they become pseudonyms, they have no investment and no consequence in what they do.
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.
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.
A remarkable thing about the Silicon Valley culture is that its status structure is so based on technical accomplishment and prowess.
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.
Linux is a superbly polished copy of an antique - shinier than the original, perhaps, but still defined by it.
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.
Why do people deserve a penny when they update their Facebook status? Because they'll spend some of it on you.
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.
There is no difference between machine autonomy and the abdication of human responsibility.
People try to treat technology as an object, and it can't be. It can only be a channel.
Individuals achieve optimal stupidity when they're given substantial powers while being insulated from the results of their actions.
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.
Spirituality is committing suicide. Consciousness is attempting to will itself out of existence.
One good test of whether an economy is humanistic or not is the plausibility of earning the ability to drop out of it for a while without incident or insult.
People degrade themselves in order to make machines seem smart all the time.
What does it mean to not be alone? I've approached that question through music, technology, writing and other means.
Our willingness to suffer for the sake of the perception of freedom is remarkable.
Web 2.0 ideas have a chirpy, cheerful rhetoric to them, but I think they consistently express a profound pessimism about humans, human nature and the human future.
Emphasizing the crowd means de-emphasizing individual humans in the design of society, and when you ask people not to be people, they revert to bad, mob-like behaviors.
I've occasionally been wrong about certain things, which is in a way more delightful than being right.
Software breaks before it bends, so it demands perfection in a universe that prefers statistics.
If you get deep enough, you get trapped. Stop calling yourself a user. You are being used.
I'm hoping the reader can see that artificial intelligence is better understood as a belief system instead of a technology.
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.
The interesting thing about advertising is that the things that annoy us sometimes about it are really human. It's us looking at ourselves - and like all human endeavors it's imperfect.
