Jaron Lanier Quotes

I'm an advocate of human nature.

I'd much rather see a world where, when you make some quirky comment on a blog or news story or you upload a video clip, instead of just a moment of fame for your pseudonym, you'll get 50 bucks. The first time that happens, you'll realise that you're a full-class citizen. You have the potential to m

I view advertising as being this romanticizing element that helps us appreciate, understand and enjoy how remarkable it is that we've been able to do so much, and learn so much. I view it as really vital, even though sometimes it can be really annoying.

I think most of the dramatic new ideas come from little companies that then grow big.

I think complexity is mostly sort of crummy stuff that is there because it's too expensive to change the interface.

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.

I feel drawn to experiment with ways that technology can interact with notions of intimacy, because so much of technology is done in a way that's very cold and has such an opposite effect.

I do real paintings, you know. I'm a little messy in the studio, so I'm a bit of a danger. But I just adore it.

Governments oppress people, but so do mobs. You need to avoid both to make progress.

Google's thing is not advertising because it's not a romanticizing operation. It doesn't involve expression. It's a link. What they're doing is selling access.

Facebook says, 'Privacy is theft,' because they're selling your lack of privacy to the advertisers who might show up one day.

Every time we give a musician the advice to give away the music and sell the T-shirt, we're saying, 'Don't make your living in this more elevated way. Instead, reverse this social progress, and choose a more physical way to make a living.' We're sending them to peasanthood, very much like the Maoist

Criticism is always easier than constructive solutions.

Create a website that expresses something about who you are that won't fit into the template available to you on a social networking site.

Anonymous blog comments, vapid video pranks and lightweight mash-ups may seem trivial and harmless, but as a whole, this widespread practice of fragmentary, impersonal communication has demeaned personal interaction.

An intelligent person feels guilty for downloading music without paying the musician, but they use this free-open-culture ideology to cover it.

America's Facebook generation shows a submission to standardization that I haven't seen before. The American adventure has always been about people forgetting their former selves - Samuel Clemens became Mark Twain, Jack Kerouac went on the road. If they had a Facebook page, they wouldn't have been a

After my mother's death, I had such difficulty relating to people.

Advertisers and marketers should be looking to bring new experiences to different parts of the brain. It's a more profound idea than just dropping a billboard into a video game.

A remarkable thing about the Silicon Valley culture is that its status structure is so based on technical accomplishment and prowess.

Advertisers are not thinking radically enough - they look for technology to lead instead of trying the neuroscience approach and thinking about what parts of the brain haven't been activated before. These new experiences bring new capabilities to the brain.

Advertising is the edge of what people know how to do and of human experience and it explains the latest ways progress has changed us to ourselves.

Human beings either function as individuals or as members of a pack. There's a switch inside us, deep in our spirit, that you can turn one way or the other. It's almost always the case that our worst behaviour comes out when we're switched to the mob setting. The problem with a lot of software desig

When you have a global mush, people lose their identity, they become pseudonyms, they have no investment and no consequence in what they do.

If you're old enough to have a job and to have a life, you use Facebook exactly as advertised, you look up old friends.