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.
Sometimes, the Internet can feel like a middle-school playground populated by brats in ski masks who name-call and taunt with the fake bravery of the anonymous. But sometimes - thank goodness - it's nicer than real life.
Overnight the digital age had changed the course of history for our company. Everything that we thought was in our control no longer was. But within a year we had invested in social media and digital experts. Now Starbucks is the number one brand on Facebook.
There's so much innovation going on, and there are lots of people funding that innovation, but there's very little innovation on that infrastructure for innovation itself, so we like to do that ourselves to help companies create more tech companies.
What matters is 'Have you done a better job of making our experiences feel like home on Windows?' That's our real goal, and that's what we're going to stay focused on.
I am all for everyone having a voice; I just don't think everyone has earned the microphone. And that's what the Internet has done.
Rushing to optimize before the bottlenecks are known may be the only error to have ruined more designs than feature creep. From tortured code to incomprehensible data layouts, the results of obsessing about speed or memory or disk usage at the expense of transparency and simplicity are everywhere. They spawn innumerable bugs and cost millions of man-hours - often, just to get marginal gains in the use of some resource much less expensive than debugging time
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