Funding a civilization through advertising is like trying to get nutrition by connecting a tube from one’s anus to one’s mouth.
Interpretation
This quote suggests that relying on advertising for societal support is both ineffective and harmful.
Jaron Lanier uses a provocative analogy to emphasize the absurdity of funding civilization through advertising. He implies that this method of support is not only misguided but also detrimental, much like the bodily harm that would result from attempting to derive nutrition through such an unnatural connection. By drawing this comparison, he critiques the commercialization of culture and the detrimental effects of advertising on human values and societal progress.
In practice
During a lecture on consumerism, you might use this quote to illustrate the pitfalls of modern society's reliance on advertisements.
Pop culture has entered into a nostalgic malaise. Online culture is dominated by trivial mashups of the culture that existed before the onset of mashups, and by fandom responding to the dwindling outposts of centralized mass media. It is a culture of reaction without action.
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.
Separation anxiety is assuaged by constant connection. Young people announce every detail of their lives on services like Twitter not to show off, but to avoid the closed door at bedtime, the empty room, the screaming vacuum of an isolated mind.
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.
Facebook says, 'Privacy is theft,' because they're selling your lack of privacy to the advertisers who might show up one day.
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.
But you see, our society is still trapped in this binary, black/white logic and that has had some very positive implications for our generation. It's had some very negative ones as well and one of the negative ones is that it creates enormous identity problems for people who have one black ancestor and all white ancestors for example.
What he could bear in the waking world he could not by night and he sat awake for fear the dream would return.
I insist that men shall have the right to work out their lives in their own way, always allowing to others the right to work out their lives in their own way, too.
There seems to be something in the human soul that causes us to think less of ourselves every time we do something wrong... And maybe it is good for us to feel that way. It may make us more sensitive to what we do wrong and move us to repent and grow.
Wonder is the feeling of the philosopher, and philosophy begins in wonder.
And just as there are no crimes so detestable that they can prevent the gift of grace, so too there can be no works so eminent that they are owed in condign [deserved] judgment that which is given freely. Would it not be a debasement of redemption in Christ’s blood, and would not God’s mercy be made secondary to human works, if justification, which is through grace, were owed in view of preceding merits, so that it were not the gift of a Donor, but the wages of a laborer?
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