Jaron Lanier
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
Jaron Lanier

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

Jaron Lanier
Jaron Lanier

Create a website that expresses something about who you are that won't fit into the template available to you on a social networking site.

Jaron Lanier
Jaron Lanier

Human beings either function as individuals or as members of a pack. There's a switch inside us, deep in our spirit, that you can turn one way or the other. It's almost always the case that our worst behaviour comes out when we're switched to the mob setting. The problem with a lot of software designs is that they switch us to that setting.

Jaron Lanier
Jaron Lanier

America's Facebook generation shows a submission to standardization that I haven't seen before. The American adventure has always been about people forgetting their former selves - Samuel Clemens became Mark Twain, Jack Kerouac went on the road. If they had a Facebook page, they wouldn't have been able to forget their former selves.

Jaron Lanier
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
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
Jaron Lanier

Mobs and dictators were made for each other, and when mobs appear, dictators will soon flourish.

Jaron Lanier
Jaron Lanier

Criticism is always easier than constructive solutions.

Jaron Lanier
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
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
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
Jaron Lanier

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

Jaron Lanier
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
Jaron Lanier

I'd much rather see a world where, when you make some quirky comment on a blog or news story or you upload a video clip, instead of just a moment of fame for your pseudonym, you'll get 50 bucks. The first time that happens, you'll realise that you're a full-class citizen. You have the potential to make money from the system.

Jaron Lanier
Jaron Lanier

Services like Google and Facebook only exist because of the social acceptance of a mass amount of distributed volunteer labor from tons and tons of people.

Jaron Lanier
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
Jaron Lanier

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

Jaron Lanier
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
Jaron Lanier

Wal-Mart impoverished its own customer base. Google is facing exactly the same issue long-term, although not yet.