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.
Interpretation
The quote criticizes the willingness of young people to sacrifice their economic potential and personal freedoms for online distractions.
Jaron Lanier expresses his astonishment at the acceptance among many young individuals of a diminished economic future and restricted freedoms, which they seem to willingly trade for the ephemeral pleasures and distractions of the online world. This observation sheds light on how modern technology, particularly social media and online entertainment, can have a significant impact on people's values and choices, leading them to prioritize immediate online gratification over more substantial life opportunities.
In practice
Use this quote in a discussion about the impact of social media on youth and their future.
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.
Historically, privacy was almost implicit, because it was hard to find and gather information. But in the digital world, whether it's digital cameras or satellites or just what you click on, we need to have more explicit rules - not just for governments but for private companies.
I believe 3D is inevitable because it's about aligning our entertainment systems to our sensory system. We all have two eyes; we all see the world in 3D. And it's natural for us to want our entertainment in 3D as well. It's just getting the technology - it's really more the business model than the technology piece. We've solved the technology.
You don't have to be young to learn about technology. You have to feel young.
With 'The Social Network,' I got into it at first because frankly I thought there was a cool courtroom drama to be had with the intellectual properties. And then what further drew me in was that the most extraordinary social networking device ever created was created by the world's most antisocial person. I liked that story.
Technology is destructive only in the hands of people who do not realize that they are one and the same process as the universe.
The nature of business and government has been to build a surplus and self-perpetuate, but the Internet fosters and rewards smaller, more fluid organizations.
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