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.
What would the infrastructure of the Internet look like if mass surveillance wasn't its business model?
The hope is that, in not too many years, human brains and computing machines will be coupled together very tightly, and that the resulting partnership will think as no human brain has ever thought and process data in a way not approached by the information-handling machines we know today.
I love what the Valley does. I love company building. I love startups. I love technology companies. I love new technology. I love this process of invention. Being able to participate in that as a founder and a product creator, or as an investor or a board member, I just find that hugely satisfying.
The illiterate of the future will not be the man who cannot read the alphabet, but the one who cannot take a photograph.
The only way to make software secure, reliable, and fast is to make it small.
Most of the good programmers do programming not because they expect to get paid or get adulation by the public, but because it is fun to program.
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