“Information wants to be free.' So goes the saying. Stewart Brand, the founder of the Whole Earth Catalog, seems to have said… — Jaron Lanier Copy Share Image
I think seeking perfection in human affairs is a perfect way to destroy them. — Jaron Lanier Copy Share Image
The problem I have with socialist utopias is there's some kind of committees trying to soften outcomes for people. I think that… — Jaron Lanier Copy Share Image
Web 2.0 ideas have a chirpy, cheerful rhetoric to them, but I think they consistently express a profound pessimism about humans, human… — Jaron Lanier Copy Share Image
In history, in most cultures, and at most points in time, if you want to find the most advanced technologies, you can… — Jaron Lanier Copy Share Image
A fashionable idea in technical circles is that quantity not only turns into quality at some extreme of scale, but also does… — Jaron Lanier Copy Share Image
Advertisers are not thinking radically enough - they look for technology to lead instead of trying the neuroscience approach and thinking about… — Jaron Lanier Copy Share Image
I think that one can seek a way to eliminate war, and still agree that fighting the Nazis was a good thing. — Jaron Lanier Copy Share Image
I think complexity is mostly sort of crummy stuff that is there because it's too expensive to change the interface. — Jaron Lanier Copy Share Image
I think most of the dramatic new ideas come from little companies that then grow big. — Jaron Lanier Copy Share Image
The wisdom of crowds works when the crowd is choosing the price of an ox, when there's a single numeric average. But… — Jaron Lanier Copy Share Image
A file-sharing service and a hedge fund are essentially the same things. In both cases, there's this idea that whoever has the… — Jaron Lanier Copy Share Image
We imagine "pure" cybernetic systems, but we can prove only that we know how to build fairly dysfunctional ones. We kid ourselves… — 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… — Jaron Lanier Copy Share Image
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… — Jaron Lanier Copy Share Image
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… — Jaron Lanier Copy Share Image
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
