Jaron Lanier Quotes

Author Image

Jaron Lanier

Profession : Artist

Birth : May 3, 1960

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 make money from the system.

Jaron Lanier

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.

Jaron Lanier

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.

Jaron Lanier

The interesting thing about advertising is that the things that annoy us sometimes about it are really human. It's us looking at ourselves - and like all human endeavors it's imperfect.

Jaron Lanier

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.

Jaron Lanier

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.

Jaron Lanier

Technologists provide tools that can improve people's lives. But I want to be clear that I don't think technology by itself improves people's lives, since often I'm criticized for being too pro-technology. Unless there's commensurate ethical and moral improvements to go along with it, it's for naught.

Jaron Lanier

Services like Google and Facebook only exist because of the social acceptance of a mass amount of distributed volunteer labor from tons and tons of people.

Jaron Lanier

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

Jaron Lanier

I'm an advocate of human nature.

Jaron Lanier

What does it mean to not be alone? I've approached that question through music, technology, writing and other means.

Jaron Lanier

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 Lanier

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

Jaron Lanier

If we enter into the kind of world that Google likes, the world that Google wants, it's a world where information is copied so much on the Internet that nobody knows where it came from anymore, so there can't be any rights of authorship.

Jaron Lanier

People have to be able to make money off their brains and their hearts. Or else we're all going to starve, and it's the machines that'll get good.

Jaron Lanier

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 able to forget their former selves.

Jaron Lanier

Writing and thinking is not economically sustainable.

Jaron Lanier

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

Jaron Lanier

My parents were kind of like me in that they had tons and tons of weird, amazing stuff.

Jaron Lanier

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 Lanier