Words matter. These are the best Jaron Lanier Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
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.
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.
What does it mean to not be alone? I’ve approached that question through music, technology, writing and other means.
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.
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.
It is impossible to work in information technology without also engaging in social engineering.
Mobs and dictators were made for each other, and when mobs appear, dictators will soon flourish.
Governments oppress people, but so do mobs. You need to avoid both to make progress.
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.
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.
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.
I’ve always felt that the human-centered approach to computer science leads to more interesting, more exotic, more wild, and more heroic adventures than the machine-supremacy approach, where information is the highest goal.
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.
Writing and thinking is not economically sustainable.
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.
I think most of the dramatic new ideas come from little companies that then grow big.
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.
My parents were kind of like me in that they had tons and tons of weird, amazing stuff.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Facebook says, ‘Privacy is theft,’ because they’re selling your lack of privacy to the advertisers who might show up one day.
The basic problem is that web 2.0 tools are not supportive of democracy by design. They are tools designed to gather spy-agency-like data in a seductive way, first and foremost, but as a side effect they tend to provide software support for mob-like phenomena.
I’m not in any sense anti-Facebook.
After my mother’s death, I had such difficulty relating to people.
I think complexity is mostly sort of crummy stuff that is there because it’s too expensive to change the interface.
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.
