Jaron Lanier Quotes
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A remarkable thing about the Silicon Valley culture is that its status structure is so based on technical accomplishment and prowess.
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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.
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The quest to rationally prove the possibility of sentience in a computer (or perhaps in the Internet) is the modern version of proving God's existence. ...eventually a cybernetically minded twenty-first century version of Kant will appear in order to present a tedious 'proof' that such adventures are futile.
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I mean, you can't have advertising be the only official business of the information economy if the information economy is going to take over.
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If we enter into the kind of world that Google likes, the world that Google wants, it's a world where information is copied so much on the Internet that nobody knows where it came from anymore, so there can't be any rights of authorship.
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Advertising is the edge of what people know how to do and of human experience and it explains the latest ways progress has changed us to ourselves.
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It is impossible to work in information technology without also engaging in social engineering.
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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.
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Facebook says, 'Privacy is theft,' because they're selling your lack of privacy to the advertisers who might show up one day.
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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.
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The great thing about crummy software is the amount of employment it generates.
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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.
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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.
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Writing and thinking is not economically sustainable.
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If anything, there's a reverse Moore's Law observable in software: As processors become faster and memory becomes cheaper, software becomes correspondingly slower and more bloated, using up all available resources.
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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.
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The greatest crime of Marxism wasn't simply that much of what it claimed was false but that it claimed to be the sole and utterly complete path to understanding life and reality.
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I think complexity is mostly sort of crummy stuff that is there because it's too expensive to change the interface.
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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.
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My dad has sometimes felt that I grew up a little lacking in sufficient eccentricity - in the sense that I'm willing to live as an adult in a house with walls that are parallel to each other, that sort of thing.
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When you have a global mush, people lose their identity, they become pseudonyms, they have no investment and no consequence in what they do.
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Software breaks before it bends, so it demands perfection in a universe that prefers statistics.
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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.
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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.