Jaron Lanier – 21 Quotes

21 Quotes by Jaron Lanier

Style used to be an interaction between the human soul and tools that were limiting. In the digital era, it will have to come from the soul alone.

– Jaron Lanier

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

– Jaron Lanier

My parents were kind of like me in that they had tons and tons of weird, amazing stuff.

– 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

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.

– 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

After my mother’s death, I had such difficulty relating to people.

– Jaron Lanier

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.

– Jaron Lanier

The wisdom of crowds works when the crowd is choosing the price of an ox, when there’s a single numeric average. But if it’s a design or something that matters, the decision is made by committee, and that’s crap. You want people and groups who are able to think thoughts before they share.

– Jaron Lanier

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.

– 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

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

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

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.

– Jaron Lanier

Advertisers are not thinking radically enough – they look for technology to lead instead of trying the neuroscience approach and thinking about what parts of the brain haven’t been activated before. These new experiences bring new capabilities to the brain.

– 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 complexity is mostly sort of crummy stuff that is there because it’s too expensive to change the interface.

– Jaron Lanier

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.

– Jaron Lanier

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

– Jaron Lanier

People try to treat technology as an object, and it can’t be. It can only be a channel.

– Jaron Lanier

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.

– Jaron Lanier