Jaron Lanier Quotes
-
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.
-
I'd much rather see a world where, when you make some quirky comment on a blog or news story or you upload a video clip, instead of just a moment of fame for your pseudonym, you'll get 50 bucks. The first time that happens, you'll realise that you're a full-class citizen. You have the potential to make money from the system.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
There is nothing more gray, stultifying, or dreary than life lived inside the confines of a theory.
-
My parents were kind of like me in that they had tons and tons of weird, amazing stuff.
-
Governments oppress people, but so do mobs. You need to avoid both to make progress.
-
What does it mean to not be alone? I've approached that question through music, technology, writing and other means.
-
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.
-
Wal-Mart impoverished its own customer base. Google is facing exactly the same issue long-term, although not yet.
-
After my mother's death, I had such difficulty relating to people.
-
People are demonstrably insane when it comes to assessing human sentience.
-
An intelligent person feels guilty for downloading music without paying the musician, but they use this free-open-culture ideology to cover it.
-
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.
-
I think most of the dramatic new ideas come from little companies that then grow big.
-
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.
-
The problem is that in every example we know, a layer that can change fast also can't change very much.
-
Evolution has never found a way to be any speed but very slow.
-
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.
-
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.
-
The mass culture of childhood right now is astonishingly technical. Little kids know their Unix path punctuation so they can get around the Web, and they know their HTML and stuff. It's pretty shocking to me.