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.
Interpretation
The quote emphasizes the need to appreciate the intellectual beauty of computer science beyond its commercial value.
Jaron Lanier expresses concern that society is becoming overly focused on the financial benefits of computer science, neglecting the inherent beauty and intellectual joy that can be found within the discipline. He calls for a revival of appreciation for the creative and exploratory aspects of technology, urging a balance between understanding its vast potential and recognizing its artistic and scientific value.
In practice
This quote can be used in a technology conference to inspire attendees to appreciate the creative aspects of programming.
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.
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.
When you have a global mush, people lose their identity, they become pseudonyms, they have no investment and no consequence in what they do.
We are now spending half a trillion dollars on foreign oil, importing 62 percent of the oil we use, and we haven't had the leadership in D.C. to do anything about it. We've got to move to other sources of energy. But we've gotten way behind, and will continue to pay the fiddler. It's not a good future.
No matter how invasive the technologies at their disposal, marketers and pollsters never come to terms with the living process through which people choose products or candidates; they are looking at what people just bought or thought, and making calculations based on that after-the-fact data.
Take Google Maps or Waze. On the one hand, they amplify human ability - you are able to reach your destination faster and more easily. But at the same time, you are shifting the authority to the algorithm and losing your ability to find your own way.
You know, I'm a big believer in touch and digital reading, but I still think that some mixture of voice, the pen and a real keyboard - in other words a netbook - will be the mainstream on that.
Allowing a handful of broadband carriers to determine what people see and do online would fundamentally undermine the features that have made the Internet such a success, and could permanently compromise the Internet as a platform for the free exchange of information, commerce, and ideas.
You can get it in any color, as long as it is black
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