Jaron Lanier famous quotes

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

#Real #Unexpected #Weirdness

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.
-- Jaron Lanier

#Mind #Musical #Body

It is impossible to work in information technology without also engaging in social engineering.
-- Jaron Lanier

#Technology #Engineering #Information

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

#Book #Writing #Kind

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
-- Jaron Lanier

#Struggle #Artist #Deception

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.
-- Jaron Lanier

#Children #Kids #Technology

Pop culture has entered into a nostalgic malaise. Online culture is dominated by trivial mashups of the culture that existed before the onset of mashups, and by fandom responding to the dwindling outposts of centralized mass media. It is a culture of reaction without action.
-- Jaron Lanier

#Media #Culture #Fandoms

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.
-- Jaron Lanier

#Games #Ideas #Profound

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

#Responsibility #Differences #Machines

Evolution has never found a way to be any speed but very slow.
-- Jaron Lanier

#Way #Evolution #Speed

If you want to know what's really going on in a society or ideology, follow the money. If money is flowing to advertising instead of musicians, journalists, and artists, then a society is more concerned with manipulation than truth or beauty.
-- Jaron Lanier

#Money #Artist #Musician

The upheavals [of artificial intelligence] can escalate quickly and become scarier and even cataclysmic,” the New York Times tech columnist once wrote. “Imagine how a medical robot, originally programmed to rid cancer, could conclude that the best way to obliterate cancer is to exterminate humans who are genetically prone to the disease.
-- Jaron Lanier

#New York #Cancer #Robots

The cloud is driven by statistics, and even in the worst individual cases of personal ignorance, dullness, idleness, or irrelevance, every person is constantly feeding data into the cloud these days. The value of such information could be treated as genuine, but it is not. Instead, the blindness of our standards of accounting to all that value is gradually breaking capitalism.
-- Jaron Lanier

#Ignorance #Irrelevance #Clouds

The nerd flavor of masculinity has overwhelmed the macho kind in real-life power dynamics, and therefore in popular culture.
-- Jaron Lanier

#Real #Nerd #Culture

Some of the fantasy objects arising from cybernetic totalism (like the noosphere, which is a supposed global brain formed by the sum of all the human brains connected through the internet) happen to motivate infelicitous technological designs. For instance, designs that celebrate the noosphere tend to energize the inner troll, or bad actor, within humans.
-- Jaron Lanier

#Design #Brain #Actors

Spirituality is committing suicide. Consciousness is attempting to will itself out of existence.
-- Jaron Lanier

#Suicide #Spirituality #Consciousness

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

#Perception #Suffering #Sake

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

#Civilization #Trying #Mouths

I think seeking perfection in human affairs is a perfect way to destroy them.
-- Jaron Lanier

#Thinking #Perfect #Way

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

#Theory #Gray

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.
-- Jaron Lanier

#Tests #Earning #Insult

We imagine "pure" cybernetic systems, but we can prove only that we know how to build fairly dysfunctional ones. We kid ourselves when we think we understand something, even a computer, merely because we can model or digitize it.
-- Jaron Lanier

#Kids #Thinking #Computer

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.
-- Jaron Lanier

#Design #Way #Behaviour

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

#One Day #Might #Privacy

We have repeatedly demonstrated our species's bottomless ability to lower our standards to make information technology look good.
-- Jaron Lanier

#Technology #Looks #Information

Back in the 1980s, when the internet was only available to a small number of pioneers, I was often confronted by people who feared that the strange technologies I was working on, like virtual reality, might unleash the demons of human nature. For instance, would people become addicted to virtual reality as if it were a drug? Would they become trapped in it, unable to escape back to the physical world where the rest of us live? Some of the questions were silly, and others were prescient.
-- Jaron Lanier

#Silly #Technology #Reality

Software breaks before it bends, so it demands perfection in a universe that prefers statistics.
-- Jaron Lanier

#Perfection #Demand #Statistics

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

#Technology #Data #Realization

Digital technologies are setting down the new grooves of how people live, how we do business, how we do everything--and they're doing it according to the expectations of foolish utopian scenarios. We want free online experiences so badly that we are happy to not be paid for information that comes from us now or ever. That sensibility also implies that the more dominant information becomes in our economy, the less most of us will be worth.
-- Jaron Lanier

#Technology #People #Expectations

We should treat computers as fancy telephones, whose purpose is to connect people.... As long as we remember that we ourselves are the source of our value, our creativity, our sense of reality, then all of our work with computers will be worthwhile and beautiful.
-- Jaron Lanier

#Beautiful #Creativity #Reality

At the turn of the [21st] century it was really Sergey Brin at Google who just had the thought of, well, if we give away all the information services, but we make money from advertising, we can make information free and still have capitalism. But the problem with that is it reneges on the social contract where people still participate in the formal economy. And it's a kind of capitalism that's totally self-defeating because it's so narrow. It's a winner-take-all capitalism that's not sustaining.
-- Jaron Lanier

#Self #People #Giving

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.
-- Jaron Lanier

#Sirens #Blind #Narcissist

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.
-- Jaron Lanier

#Successful #Adults #Fiction

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.
-- Jaron Lanier

#Mistake #Thinking #Ideas

As information technology becomes millions of times more powerful, any particular use of it becomes correspondingly cheaper. Thus, it has become commonplace to expect online services (not just news, but 21st century treats like search or social networking) to be given for free, or rather, in exchange for acquiescence to being spied on.
-- Jaron Lanier

#Powerful #Technology #Networking

The beauty of HTML was that one-way linking made it very simple to spread because you could put something up and take no responsibility whatsoever. And that creates a society in which people display no responsibility whatsoever. That's the problem.
-- Jaron Lanier

#Responsibility #Simple #Html

The problem I have with socialist utopias is there's some kind of committees trying to soften outcomes for people. I think that imposes models of outcomes for other people's lives. So in a spiritual sense there's some bit of libertarian in me. But the critical thing for me is moderation. And if you let that go far you do end up with a winner-take-all society that ultimately crushes everybody even worse.
-- Jaron Lanier

#Crush #Spiritual #Thinking

Information is alienated experience.
-- Jaron Lanier

#Experience #Information

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.
-- Jaron Lanier

#Heart #People #Brain

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.
-- Jaron Lanier

#Networking #Fit #Social

Governments oppress people, but so do mobs. You need to avoid both to make progress.
-- Jaron Lanier

#Government #People #Progress

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.
-- Jaron Lanier

#Real #Littles #Painting

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.
-- Jaron Lanier

#Mean #Information #Advertising

I think complexity is mostly sort of crummy stuff that is there because it's too expensive to change the interface.
-- Jaron Lanier

#Change #Technology #Thinking

I think most of the dramatic new ideas come from little companies that then grow big.
-- Jaron Lanier

#Thinking #Ideas #Littles

I'm an advocate of human nature.
-- Jaron Lanier

#Human Nature #Humans

I'm not in any sense anti-Facebook.
-- Jaron Lanier

An intelligent person feels guilty for downloading music without paying the musician, but they use this free-open-culture ideology to cover it.
-- Jaron Lanier

#Intelligent #Musician #Culture

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

#Mother #People #Difficulty