Jaron Lanier Quotes

Our times demand rejection of seven word bios.

I fear that we are beginning to design ourselves to suit digital models of us, and I worry about a leaching of empathy and humanity in that process.

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

Chemotherapy is a good thing even though it kills healthy cells. But we still hope for something better. We'd like to prevent cancer in the first place.

The great thing about crummy software is the amount of employment it generates.

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.

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.

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

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

Google's thing is not advertising because it's not a romanticizing operation. It doesn't involve expression. It's a link. What they're doing is selling access.

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

The network by itself is meaningless. Only the people were ever meaningful.

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.

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

A market economy cannot thrive absent the well-being of average people, even in a gilded age.

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.

If you love a medium made of software, there's a danger that you will become entrapped in someone else's recent careless thoughts. Struggle against that.

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

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.

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

Information is alienated experience.

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

Eliminating wickedness is a different project from eliminating violence. Eliminating violence - the destruction associated with wickedness - is a practical program that I'm very willing to pursue.

To me, to say that war isn't evil is to say that nothing is evil.

Of all the things you can spend a lot of money on, the only things you expect to fail frequently are software and medicine.

I think that one can seek a way to eliminate war, and still agree that fighting the Nazis was a good thing.

It's possible, without taking sides or playing the statesman game, to reduce destruction simply by reducing the development of technology of destruction.

In fact, one reason I am interested in developing things in virtual reality is that they're so fascinating. I can come up with problems that are harder than warfare to take up people's time.

I'm an advocate of human nature.

The only hope for social networking sites from a business point of view is for a magic formula to appear in which some method of violating privacy and dignity becomes acceptable.

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

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

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

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

When we ask people to live their lives through our models, we are potentially reducing life itself. How can we ever know what we might be losing?