Jaron Lanier Quotes

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

Information is alienated experience.

After my mother's death, I had such difficulty relating to people.

The most important thing about a technology is how it changes people.

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.

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.

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.

To me, to say that war isn't evil is to say that nothing is evil.

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

I think that one can seek a way to eliminate war, and still agree that fighting the Nazis was a good thing.

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

A file-sharing service and a hedge fund are essentially the same things. In both cases, there's this idea that whoever has the biggest computer can analyze everyone else to their advantage and concentrate wealth and power. It's shrinking the overall economy. I think it's the mistake of our age.

Our willingness to suffer for the sake of the perception of freedom is remarkable.

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

Google's thing is not advertising because it's not a romanticizing operation. It doesn't involve expression. It's a link. What they're doing is selling access.

Of all the things you can spend a lot of money on, the only things you expect to fail frequently are software and medicine.

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.

There is nothing more gray, stultifying, or dreary than life lived inside the confines of a theory.

Humans change themselves through technology.

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.

I'm hoping the reader can see that artificial intelligence is better understood as a belief system instead of a technology.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

Funding a civilization through advertising is like trying to get nutrition by connecting a tube from one’s anus to one’s mouth.

Chemotherapy is a good thing even though it kills healthy cells. But we still hope for something better. We'd like to prevent cancer in the first place.

What does it mean to not be alone? I've approached that question through music, technology, writing and other means.

Eliminating wickedness is a different project from eliminating violence. Eliminating violence - the destruction associated with wickedness - is a practical program that I'm very willing to pursue.

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.

Criticism is always easier than constructive solutions.

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.

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

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

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

The great thing about crummy software is the amount of employment it generates.

The most effective young Facebook users, however -- the ones who will probably be winners if Facebook turns out to be a model of the future they will inhabit as adults -- are the ones who create successful online fictions about themselves.

I'm an advocate of human nature.

Human beings either function as individuals or as members of a pack. There's a switch inside us, deep in our spirit, that you can turn one way or the other. It's almost always the case that our worst behaviour comes out when we're switched to the mob setting. The problem with a lot of software designs is that they switch us to that setting.

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.

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

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.

Here’s a current example of the challenge we face. At the height of its power, the photography company Kodak employed more than 140,000 people and was worth $28 billion. They even invented the first digital camera. But today Kodak is bankrupt, and the new face of digital photography has become Instagram. When Instagram was sold to Facebook for a billion dollars in 2012, it employed only thirteen people. Where did all those jobs disappear to? And what happened to the wealth that all those middle-class jobs created?

We should talk about the ultimate cause of war. It's a question we should never stop asking, because if we do, there's a chance, however remote, that we might miss an opportunity to reduce the occurrence of war.

There will always be humans, lots of them, who provide the data that makes the networked realization of any technology better and cheaper.

I do real paintings, you know. I'm a little messy in the studio, so I'm a bit of a danger. But I just adore it.