Jaron Lanier Quotes
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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.
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Technologists provide tools that can improve people's lives. But I want to be clear that I don't think technology by itself improves people's lives, since often I'm criticized for being too pro-technology. Unless there's commensurate ethical and moral improvements to go along with it, it's for naught.
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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.
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Governments oppress people, but so do mobs. You need to avoid both to make progress.
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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.
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Advertisers are not thinking radically enough - they look for technology to lead instead of trying the neuroscience approach and thinking about what parts of the brain haven't been activated before. These new experiences bring new capabilities to the brain.
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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.
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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.
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People are demonstrably insane when it comes to assessing human sentience.
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I feel drawn to experiment with ways that technology can interact with notions of intimacy, because so much of technology is done in a way that's very cold and has such an opposite effect.
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My parents were kind of like me in that they had tons and tons of weird, amazing stuff.
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What does it mean to not be alone? I've approached that question through music, technology, writing and other means.
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There is nothing more gray, stultifying, or dreary than life lived inside the confines of a theory.
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After my mother's death, I had such difficulty relating to people.
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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.
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I think most of the dramatic new ideas come from little companies that then grow big.
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I'm not in any sense anti-Facebook.
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Wal-Mart impoverished its own customer base. Google is facing exactly the same issue long-term, although not yet.
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I view advertising as being this romanticizing element that helps us appreciate, understand and enjoy how remarkable it is that we've been able to do so much, and learn so much. I view it as really vital, even though sometimes it can be really annoying.
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An intelligent person feels guilty for downloading music without paying the musician, but they use this free-open-culture ideology to cover it.
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I'm astonished at how readily a great many people I know, young people, have accepted a reduced economic prospect and limited freedoms in any substantial sense, and basically traded them for being able to screw around online.
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Evolution has never found a way to be any speed but very slow.
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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.
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People try to treat technology as an object, and it can't be. It can only be a channel.