Making information free is survivable so long as only limited numbers of people are disenfranchised. As much as it pains me to say so, we can survive if we only destroy the middle classes of musicians, journalists, and photographers. What… — Jaron Lanier Copy Share Image
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… — Jaron Lanier Copy Share Image
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,… — Jaron Lanier Copy Share
Style used to be an interaction between the human soul and tools that were limiting. In the digital era, it will have to come… — Jaron Lanier Copy Share Image
We should talk about the ultimate cause of war. It's a question we should never stop asking, because if we do, there's a chance,… — Jaron Lanier Copy Share Image
There is nothing more gray, stultifying, or dreary than life lived inside the confines of a theory. — Jaron Lanier Copy Share Image
“There are at least two ways to believe in the idea of quality. You can believe there's something ineffable going on within the human mind, or you can believe we just don't understand what quality in a mind is yet, even though we might someday. Either of those opinions allows one to distinguish quantity and quality. In order to confuse… — Jaron Lanier Copy Share
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 Copy Share Image
“What these critics forget is that printing presses in themselves provide no guarantee of an enlightened outcome. People, not machines, made the Renaissance. The… — Jaron Lanier Copy Share Image
There were studies that asked people in different cultures to draw pictures of their enemies, and the pictures all looked remarkably the same. They… — Jaron Lanier Copy Share Image
“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… — Jaron Lanier Copy Share
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… — Jaron Lanier Copy Share Image
Of all the things you can spend a lot of money on, the only things you expect to fail frequently are software and medicine. — Jaron Lanier Copy Share Image
