Jaron Lanier Quotes

Funding a civilization through advertising is like trying to get nutrition by connecting a tube from one's anus to one's mouth.

— Jaron Lanier

“Emphasizing the crowd means de-emphasizing individual humans in the design of society, and when you ask people not to be people, they revert to bad, mob-like behaviors.”

— Jaron Lanier

“Individual web pages as they first appeared in the early 1990s had the flavour of person-hood. MySpace preserved some of that flavour, though a process of regularized formatting had begun. Facebook went further, organizing people into multiple-choice identities while Wikipedia seeks to erase point of view entirely. If a church or government were doing these things, it would feel authoritarian, but when technologists are the culprits, we seem hip, fresh, and inventive. People accept ideas presented in technological form that would be abhorrent in any other forms”

— Jaron Lanier

“Spirituality is committing suicide. Consciousness is attempting to will itself out of existence.”

— Jaron Lanier

“Our willingness to suffer for the sake of the perception of freedom is remarkable.”

— Jaron Lanier

“Turing presented his new offering in the form of a thought experiment, based on a popular Victorian parlor game. A man and a woman hide, and a judge is asked to determine which is which by relying only on the texts of notes passed back and forth.
Turing replaced the woman with a computer. Can the judge tell which is the man? If not, is the computer conscious? Intelligent? Does it deserve equal rights?
It's impossible for us to know what role the torture Turing was enduring at the time played in his formulation of the test. But it is undeniable that one of the key figures in the defeat of fascism was destroyed, by our side, after the war, because he was gay. No wonder his imagination pondered the rights of strange creatures.”

— Jaron Lanier

“Information doesn't deserve to be free. It is an abstract tool; a useful
fantasy, a nothing. It is nonexistent until and unless a person experiences
it in a useful way.”

— Jaron Lanier

“The attribution of intelligence to machines, crowds of fragments, or other nerd deities obscures more than it illuminates. When people are told that a computer is intelligent, they become prone to changing themselves in order to make the computer appear to work better, instead of demanding that the computer be changed to become more useful.”

— Jaron Lanier

Zombies are familiar characters in philosophical thought experiments. They are like people in every way except they have no internal experience ...
If there are enough zombies recruited into our world, I worry about the potential for a self-fulfilling prophecy. Maybe if people pretend they are not conscious or do not have free will - or that the cloud of online people is a person; if they pretend there is nothing special about the perspective of the individual - then perhaps we have the power to make it so. We might be able to collectively achieve antimagic.
Humans are free. We can commmit suicide for the benefit of a Singularity. We can engineer our genes to better support an imaginary hive mind. We can make culture and journalism into second-rate activities and spend centuries remixing the detritus of the 1960s and other eras from before individual creativity went out of fashion.
Or we can believe in ourselves. By chance, it might turn out we are real.

— Jaron Lanier

“My choice is to be engaged even if that means I am tainted. I live with contradictions, in accordance with the human condition, but do my best not to forget what absurdities are involved.”

— Jaron Lanier

“About: Don't post anonymously unless you really might be in danger.”

— Jaron Lanier

“That you will become entrapped in someone else's recent careless thoughts.”

— Jaron Lanier

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

“Here is yet another statement of the core idea of this book, that data concerning people is best thought of as people in disguise, and they're usually up to something.”

— Jaron Lanier

“When machines get incredibly cheap to run, people seem correspondingly expensive.”

— Jaron Lanier

“What if only humans are real, and information is not?”

— Jaron Lanier

“The decision reduction service would use its particular style and competence to create bundles of decisions you could accept or reject en masse.”

— Jaron Lanier

When I work with experimental gadgets, like new variations on virtual reality, in a lab environment, I am always reminded of how small changes in the details of a digital design can have profound unforeseen effects on the experiences of the humans who are playing with it. The slightest change in something as seemingly trivial as the use of a button can sometimes completely alter behavior patterns.
For instance, Stanford University researcher Jeremy Bailenson has demonstrated that changing the height of one's avatar in immersive virtual reality transforms self-esteem and social self-perception. Technologies are extensions of ourselves, and, like the avatars in Jeremy's lab, our identities can be shifted by the quirks of gadgets. It is impossible to work with information technology without also engaging in social engineering.

— Jaron Lanier

“What did you think would happen? We in Silicon Valley undermined copyright to make commerce become more about services instead of content: more about our code instead of their files.”

— Jaron Lanier

“You don't need to remind me how easy it is to slough off and become lazy. Oh, I know how sweet the temptation is.
So modernity has brought with it an endless internal mental conflict between stern, rather parental inner voices and lazy childish ones. Unfortunately, these two voices, which have functioned as opposites, checking each other for centuries, have been confounded into idiotic agreement and collusion with the appearance of digital network technology.”

— Jaron Lanier

“On the ground rules of life are changed, you no longer have the ability to understand what you might have forgotten from a previous incarnation. No adult really knows what was lost in the process of growing up, because the adult brain cannot quite realize the mentality in which childhood memories are fully meaningful. With that level of change comes a kind of partial death.”

— Jaron Lanier

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

“When you have a global mush, people lose their identity, they become pseudonyms, they have no investment and no consequence in what they do.”

— Jaron Lanier

“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

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.

— Jaron Lanier

“After my mother's death, I had such difficulty relating to people.”

— 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

“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.”

— Jaron Lanier

“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.”

— Jaron Lanier

“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.”

— Jaron Lanier

“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.”

— Jaron Lanier

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

— Jaron Lanier

“Writing and thinking is not economically sustainable.”

— Jaron Lanier

“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.”

— Jaron Lanier

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

“A remarkable thing about the Silicon Valley culture is that its status structure is so based on technical accomplishment and prowess.”

— Jaron Lanier

“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.”

— Jaron Lanier

“I think most of the dramatic new ideas come from little companies that then grow big.”

— Jaron Lanier

I'm not in any sense anti-Facebook.

— Jaron Lanier

“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.”

— Jaron Lanier

“I think seeking perfection in human affairs is a perfect way to destroy them.”

— Jaron Lanier

“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

“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

“At a minimum if we can just have enough distribution of clout in society so it isn't run by a tiny minority, then at the very least it gives us some room to breathe.”

— Jaron Lanier

“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

“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

“Evolution has never found a way to be any speed but very slow.”

— Jaron Lanier

“Once you can understand something in a way that you can shove it into a computer, you have cracked its code, transcended any particularity it might have at a given time. It was as if we had become the gods of vision and had effectively created all possible images, for they would merely be reshufflings of the bits in the computers we had before us, completely under our control.”

— Jaron Lanier

“Why do people deserve a penny when they update their Facebook status? Because they'll spend some of it on you.”

— Jaron Lanier

“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