Jaron Lanier Quotes

You have to be somebody before you can share yourself.

The basic problem is that web 2.0 tools are not supportive of democracy by design. They are tools de...

The wisdom of crowds works when the crowd is choosing the price of an ox, when there's a single nume...

The most important thing about a technology is how it changes people.

We're losing track of the vastness of the potential for computer science. We really have to revive t...

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

Advertisers are not thinking radically enough - they look for technology to lead instead of trying t...

The reason [James Clerk] Maxwell's Demon cannot exist is that it does take resources to perform an a...

enduring at the time played in his formulation of the test.

Technologists provide tools that can improve people's lives. But I want to be clear that I don't thi...

One good test of whether an economy is humanistic or not is the plausibility of earning the ability ...

about: Don’t post anonymously unless you really might be in danger.

that you will become entrapped in someone else’s recent careless thoughts.

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

An imaginary circle of empathy is drawn by each person. It circumscribes the person at some distance...

The intentions of the cybernetic totalist tribe are good. They are simply following a path that was ...

I've always felt that the human-centered approach to computer science leads to more interesting, mor...

If there's any object in human experience that's a precedent for what a computer should be like, it'...

Anonymous blog comments, vapid video pranks and lightweight mash-ups may seem trivial and harmless, ...

Style used to be an interaction between the human soul and tools that were limiting. In the digital ...

What does it mean to not be alone? I've approached that question through music, technology, writing ...

Musicians and journalists are the canaries in the coalmine, but, eventually, as computers get more a...

It will not suffer if it doesn’t get what it wants.

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

Web 2.0 ideas have a chirpy, cheerful rhetoric to them, but I think they consistently express a prof...

A file on a hard disk does indeed contain information of the kind that objectively exists. The fact ...

A fashionable idea in technical circles is that quantity not only turns into quality at some extreme...

People degrade themselves in order to make machines seem smart all the time.

An endless series of gambits backed by gigantic investments encouraged young people entering the onl...

When we ask people to live their lives through our models, we are potentially reducing life itself. ...

But the Turing test cuts both ways. You can't tell if a machine has gotten smarter or if you've just...

This digital revolutionary still believes in most of the lovely deep ideals that energized our work ...

Something like missionary reductionism has happened to the internet with the rise of web 2.0. The st...

A digital sound sample in angry rap doesn't correspond to the graffiti but the wall.

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

There are at least two ways to believe in the idea of quality. You can believe there's something ine...

The only hope for social networking sites from a business point of view is for a magic formula to ap...

Turing presented his new offering in the form of a thought experiment, based on a popular Victorian ...

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

The approach to digital culture I abhor would indeed turn all the world's books into one book, just ...

What these critics forget is that printing presses in themselves provide no guarantee of an enlighte...

When I work with experimental gadgets, like new variations on virtual reality, in a lab environment,...

Zombies are familiar characters in philosophical thought experiments. They are like people in every ...

Communication is now often experienced as a superhuman phenomenon that towers above individuals. A n...

Linux is a superbly polished copy of an antique - shinier than the original, perhaps, but still defi...

Emphasizing the crowd means de-emphasizing individual humans in the design of society, and when you ...

The attribution of intelligence to machines, crowds of fragments, or other nerd deities obscures mor...

Information wants to be free.' So goes the saying. Stewart Brand, the founder of the Whole Earth Cat...