Quotes from Jaron Lanier

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

We already knew that kids learned computer technology more easily than adults, It is as if children were waiting all these centuries for someone to invent their native language.

Humans change themselves through technology.

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.

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

It's possible, without taking sides or playing the statesman game, to reduce destruction simply by reducing the development of technology of destruction.

I'm hoping the reader can see that artificial intelligence is better understood as a belief system instead of a technology.

If we enter into the kind of world that Google likes, the world that Google wants, it's a world where information is copied so much on the Internet that nobody knows where it came from anymore, so there can't be any rights of authorship.

There is nothing more gray, stultifying, or dreary than life lived inside the confines of a theory.

The nerd flavor of masculinity has overwhelmed the macho kind in real-life power dynamics, and therefore in popular culture.

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.

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

I'm an advocate of human nature.

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.

In fact, one reason I am interested in developing things in virtual reality is that they're so fascinating. I can come up with problems that are harder than warfare to take up people's time.

It's as if you kneel to plant the seed of a tree and it grows so fast that it swallows your whole town before you can even rise to your feet.

The interesting thing about advertising is that the things that annoy us sometimes about it are really human. It's us looking at ourselves - and like all human endeavors it's imperfect.

An economy where advertisers thrive while journalists and artists struggle, reflects the values of a society more interested in deception and manipulation than in truth and beauty

If you love a medium made of software, there's a danger that you will become entrapped in someone else's recent careless thoughts. Struggle against that.

When you have a global mush, people lose their identity, they become pseudonyms, they have no investment and no consequence in what they do.

I'm astonished at how readily a great many people I know, young people, have accepted a reduced economic prospect and limited freedoms in any substantial sense, and basically traded them for being able to screw around online.

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.

Every time we give a musician the advice to give away the music and sell the T-shirt, we're saying, 'Don't make your living in this more elevated way. Instead, reverse this social progress, and choose a more physical way to make a living.' We're sending them to peasanthood, very much like the Maoists have.