Quotes from Jaron Lanier

I view advertising as being this romanticizing element that helps us appreciate, understand and enjoy how remarkable it is that we've been able to do so much, and learn so much. I view it as really vital, even though sometimes it can be really annoying.

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.

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

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.

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

An intelligent person feels guilty for downloading music without paying the musician, but they use this free-open-culture ideology to cover it.

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

The most important thing about a technology is how it changes people.

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

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

I think complexity is mostly sort of crummy stuff that is there because it's too expensive to change the interface.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.