Explore Quotes by 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.

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

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

I'm an advocate of human nature.

I mean, you can't have advertising be the only official business of the information economy if the information economy is going to take over.

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.

I've occasionally been wrong about certain things, which is in a way more delightful than being right.

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.

I do real paintings, you know. I'm a little messy in the studio, so I'm a bit of a danger. But I just adore it.

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

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

I think most of the dramatic new ideas come from little companies that then grow big.

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.

I'm not in any sense anti-Facebook.

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

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

A remarkable thing about the Silicon Valley culture is that its status structure is so based on technical accomplishment and prowess.

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.

Advertisers are not thinking radically enough - they look for technology to lead instead of trying the neuroscience approach and thinking about what parts of the brain haven't been activated before. These new experiences bring new capabilities to the brain.

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.

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.