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.
Jaron LanierRead
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.
Interpretation
What this quote means
The quote critiques the current state of pop culture as reactive and lacking originality.
Jaron Lanier comments on the dominance of nostalgia in pop culture, highlighting how current online culture primarily consists of trivial rehashes of previous artistic expressions. He suggests that this trend leads to a culture that is more about reaction than proactive creation, with audiences passively consuming reprocessed material rather than engaging with new ideas.
Themes
Pop CultureNostalgiaReactionCreativityMedia
In practice
Example use cases
During a panel discussion on the future of media, this quote highlights concerns about the lack of innovation.
More from Jaron Lanier
All quotes →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.
Jaron LanierRead
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.
Jaron LanierRead
Facebook says, 'Privacy is theft,' because they're selling your lack of privacy to the advertisers who might show up one day.
Jaron LanierRead
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.
Jaron LanierRead
When you have a global mush, people lose their identity, they become pseudonyms, they have no investment and no consequence in what they do.
Jaron LanierRead
Similar quotes
Even though I spent the first five years of my life in Nagasaki, going to Japan can be really difficult. Even if they know I've been brought up in the West, they still expect me to understand all the subtleties of their culture, and if I get it wrong, it matters much more than if a British person gets it wrong. I find it intimidating.
Kazuo IshiguroRead
Ours is a culture based on excess, on overproduction; the result is a steady loss of sharpness in our sensory experience. All the conditions of modern life - its material plenitude, its sheer crowdedness - conjoin to dull our sensory faculties
Susan SontagRead
That's beautiful: the hurrah game! well — it's our game: that's the chief fact in connection with it: America's game: has the snap, go fling, of the American atmosphere — belongs as much to our institutions, fits into them as significantly, as our constitutions, laws: is just as important in the sum total of our historic life.
Walt WhitmanRead
Listen, you know this: If there's not a rebellious youth culture, there's no culture at all. It's absolutely essential. It is the future. This is what we're supposed to do as a species, is advance ideas.
John LydonRead
...people will go for anything they don't understand if it's got enough hype. They want to be hip, want always to be in on the new thing so they don't look unhip. White people are especially like that, particularly when a black person is doing something they don't understand...That's what I thought was happening when Ornette hit town.
Miles DavisRead
The gitano is the most distinguished, profound and aristocratic element in my country, the one that most represents its Way of being and best preserves the fire, the blood and the alphabet of Andalusian and universal truth.
Federico Garcia LorcaRead