Lanier Quotes & Sayings

If anything, there's a reverse Moore's Law observable in software: As processors become faster and memory becomes cheaper, software becomes correspondingly slower and more bloated, using up all available resources. — Jaron Lanier

We imagine "pure" cybernetic systems, but we can prove only that we know how to build fairly dysfunctional ones. We kid ourselves when we think we understand something, even a computer, merely because we can model or digitize it. — Jaron Lanier

Individuals achieve optimal stupidity when they're given substantial powers while being insulated from the results of their actions. — Jaron Lanier

Well: Love and Pain
Be kinfolks twain;
Yet would, Oh would I could Love again. — Sidney Lanier

Trying to create an overly flattened society inevitably and unintentionally creates new centers of power. A revolution might dethrone the old rich, but only at the expense of empaneling an unchallenged communist party, along with a politburo and legions of clever schemers and ass kissers who turn into a new privileged class. The right way to deal with concentrations of power is not to try to vaporize them, but to balance them. — Jaron Lanier

The problem I have with socialist utopias is there's some kind of committees trying to soften outcomes for people. I think that imposes models of outcomes for other people's lives. So in a spiritual sense there's some bit of libertarian in me. But the critical thing for me is moderation. And if you let that go far you do end up with a winner-take-all society that ultimately crushes everybody even worse. — Jaron Lanier

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

When we ask people to live their lives through our models, we are potentially reducing life itself. How can we ever know what we might be losing? — Jaron Lanier

My dad has sometimes felt that I grew up a little lacking in sufficient eccentricity - in the sense that I'm willing to live as an adult in a house with walls that are parallel to each other, that sort of thing. — Jaron Lanier

If you listen first, and write later, then what you write will have had time to filter through your brain and you'll be in what you say. This is what makes you exist. If you are only a reflector of information, are you really there? — Jaron Lanier

A market economy cannot thrive absent the well-being of average people, even in a gilded age. — Jaron Lanier

Money forgets ... Money allows blood enemies to collaborate; when money changes hands we forget for at least a moment the history of conflict and the potential for revenge. — Jaron Lanier

Communication is now often experienced as a superhuman phenomenon that towers above individuals. A new generation has come of age with a reduced expectation of what a person can be, and of who each person might become. — Jaron Lanier

Evolution has never found a way to be any speed but very slow. — 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

We had the kind of team that didn't back down from anybody. If they wanted to intimidate us, we could intimidate as well as they could. Our team was too big and too good to intimidate. — Willie Lanier

I've occasionally been wrong about certain things, which is in a way more delightful than being right. — Jaron Lanier

Here is yet another statement of the core idea of this book, that data concerning people is best thought of as people in disguise, and they're usually up to something. — Jaron Lanier

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 Lanier

(Lake) Lanier is a good fishing lake. Everybody tells me I put my dock on the best fishing hole in the lake. In fact, I've sat on the dock and caught a 12 pound bass. I saw another guy catch about a 40 pound and 26 pound striper one morning In front of my dock, and I used to catch a lot of 8 to 9 pound largemouth around it. — Luke Appling

To state it as clearly as I can: I am part of what I criticize. I benefit from time to time by actively participating in the schemes I would like to see ended; it happens as a side effect of doing the things I love to do. However, I don't want to become an academic or remote observer of tech events. My choice is to be engaged even if that means I am tainted. I live with contradictions, in accordance with the human condition, but do my best not to forget what absurdities are involved. What I can offer is being open about what I think. — Jaron Lanier

Funding a civilization through advertising is like trying to get nutrition by connecting a tube from one's anus to one's mouth. — Jaron Lanier

Into the woods, my Master went, Clean forspent, forspent, Into the woods my Master came, Forspent with love and shame. But the olives they were not blind to Him, The little gray leaves were kind to Him: The thorn-tree had a mind to Him, When into the woods He came. — Sidney Lanier

As the woodpecker taps in a spiral quest
From the root to the top of the tree,
Then flies to another tree,
So have I bored into life to find what lay therein,
And now it is time to die,
And I will fly to another tree. — Sidney Lanier

Not Eve, whose fault was only too much love, Which made her give this present to her dear, That what she tasted he likewise might prove, Whereby his knowledge might become more clear; He never sought her weakness to reprove With those sharp words which he of God did hear; Yet men will boast of knowledge, which he took From Eve's fair hand, as from a learned book. — Emilia Lanier

A wonderful bird is the pelican His bill will hold more than his belican. He can take in his beak Food enough for a week, But I'm damned if I see how the helican. — Dixon Lanier Merritt

Music is love searching for a word. — Sidney Lanier

the farmer's almanac, pieces of stick candy, and Grandma's snuff box. I saw him reach into the fireplace once with his bare hand, remove a live coal, and light his pipe. He must have had leather for skin. One day, I looked out to the field to the east of the house and saw a cloud of dust rising from a thrashing machine. Men were gathered around with wagons, pitch — Lanier Davis

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

Here's a current example of the challenge we face. At the height of its power, the photography company Kodak employed more than 140,000 people and was worth $28 billion. They even invented the first digital camera. But today Kodak is bankrupt, and the new face of digital photography has become Instagram. When Instagram was sold to Facebook for a billion dollars in 2012, it employed only thirteen people. Where did all those jobs disappear to? And what happened to the wealth that those middle-class jobs created? This book is built to answer questions like these, which will only become more common as digital networking hollows out every industry, from media to medicine to manufacturing. — Jaron Lanier

A digital sound sample in angry rap doesn't correspond to the graffiti but the wall. — Jaron Lanier

Then let us have our libertyagain, And challenge to yourselves no sovereignty. You came not in the world without our pain, Make that a bar against your cruelty; Your fault being greater, why should you disdain Our being your equals, free from tyranny? — Emilia Lanier

But I cannot bring myself to believe that I was intended for a musician, because it seems so small a business in comparison with other things which, it seems to me, I might do. Question here: 'What is the province of music in the economy of the world?' — Sidney Lanier

Let my name perish,
the poetry is good poetry and the music is good music,
and beauty dieth not, and the heart that needs it will find it. — Sidney Lanier

Out of the hills of Habersham, Down the valleys of Hall, I hurry amain to reach the plain; Run the rapid and leap the fall, Split at the rock, and together again Accept my bed, or narrow or wide, And flee from folly on every side With a lover's pain to attain the plain, Far from the hills of Habersham, Far from the valleys of Hall. — Sidney Lanier

Back in the 1980s, when the internet was only available to a small number of pioneers, I was often confronted by people who feared that the strange technologies I was working on, like virtual reality, might unleash the demons of human nature. For instance, would people become addicted to virtual reality as if it were a drug? Would they become trapped in it, unable to escape back to the physical world where the rest of us live? Some of the questions were silly, and others were prescient. — Jaron Lanier

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

With an eBook, however, you are not a first-class commercial citizen. Instead, you have only purchased tenuous rights within someone else's company store. You cannot resell, nor can you do anything else to treat your purchase as an investment. — Jaron Lanier

Information doesn't deserve to be free. It is an abstract tool; a useful
fantasy, a nothing. It is nonexistent until and unless a person experiences
it in a useful way. — Jaron Lanier

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. — 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 file-sharing service and a hedge fund are essentially the same things. In both cases, there's this idea that whoever has the biggest computer can analyze everyone else to their advantage and concentrate wealth and power. It's shrinking the overall economy. I think it's the mistake of our age. — Jaron Lanier

Unfortunately, by forcing more and more value off the books as the world economy turns into an information economy, the ideal of "free" information could erode economic interdependencies between nations. — 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

What these critics forget is that printing presses in themselves provide no guarantee of an enlightened outcome. People, not machines, made the Renaissance. The printing that takes place in North Korea today, for instance, is nothing more than propaganda for a personality cult. What is important about printing presses is not the mechanism, but the authors. — Jaron Lanier

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 Lanier

Turing presented his new offering in the form of a thought experiment, based on a popular Victorian parlor game. A man and a woman hide, and a judge is asked to determine which is which by relying only on the texts of notes passed back and forth.
Turing replaced the woman with a computer. Can the judge tell which is the man? If not, is the computer conscious? Intelligent? Does it deserve equal rights?
It's impossible for us to know what role the torture Turing was enduring at the time played in his formulation of the test. But it is undeniable that one of the key figures in the defeat of fascism was destroyed, by our side, after the war, because he was gay. No wonder his imagination pondered the rights of strange creatures. — Jaron Lanier

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

Our mother Eve, who tasted of the tree, Giving to Adam what she held most dear, Was simply good, and had no power to see. — Emilia Lanier

External reality is sort of an affectation of the nervous system. — Jaron Lanier

When developers of digital technologies design a program that requires you to interact with a computer as if it were a person, they ask you to accept in some corner of your brain that you might also be conceived of as a program. — 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

I fear that we are beginning to design ourselves to suit digital models of us, and I worry about a leaching of emphaty and humanity in that process. — Jaron Lanier

We already knew that kids learned computer technology more easily than adults, It is as if children were waiting all these centuries for someone to invent their native language. — Jaron Lanier

Once a critical mass of conversation is on Facebook, then it's hard to get conversation going elsewhere. What might have started out as a choice is no longer a choice after a network effect causes a phase change. — Jaron Lanier

A real friendship ought to introduce each person to unexpected weirdness in the other. — Jaron Lanier

At the end of the day, even the magic of machine translation is like Facebook, a way of taking free contributions from people and regurgitating them as bait for advertisers or others who hope to take advantage of being close to a top server. — Jaron Lanier

pulled into a dark tunnel. I found myself hurtling down an almost vertical dirt path, skipping over rocks and dirt patches like Indiana Jones until I hit bottom with a thud. Six years as a private investigator and I'd never fallen down a tree before. I caught my breath, got to my feet and dusted myself off. Good thing I never dress up for work. My old jeans and boots were none the worse for wear. I was wondering how I'd get back up to the surface when I noticed the flicker of golden sconces on — Linsey Lanier

What if only humans are real, and information is not? — Jaron Lanier

Making information free is survivable so long as only limited numbers of people are disenfranchised. As much as it pains me to say so, we can survive if we only destroy the middle classes of musicians, journalists, and photographers. What is not survivable is the additional destruction of the middle classes in transportation, manufacturing, energy, office work, education, and health care. And all that destruction will come surely enough if the dominant idea of an information economy isn't improved. — Jaron Lanier

You don't need to remind me how easy it is to slough off and become lazy. Oh, I know how sweet the temptation is.
So modernity has brought with it an endless internal mental conflict between stern, rather parental inner voices and lazy childish ones. Unfortunately, these two voices, which have functioned as opposites, checking each other for centuries, have been confounded into idiotic agreement and collusion with the appearance of digital network technology. — Jaron Lanier

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. — Jaron Lanier

I will fly in the greatness of God as the marsh-hen flies,
In the freedom that fills all the space 'twixt the marsh and the skies. — Sidney Lanier

Information wants to be free.' So goes the saying. Stewart Brand, the founder of the Whole Earth Catalog, seems to have said it first.
I say that information doesn't deserve to be free.
Cybernetic totalists love to think of the stuff as if it were alive and had its own ideas and ambitions. But what if information is inanimate? What if it's even less than inanimate, a mere artifact of human thought? What if only humans are real, and information is not?
...
Information is alienated experience. — Jaron Lanier

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

Software breaks before it bends, so it demands perfection in a universe that prefers statistics. — Jaron Lanier

I'm an advocate of human nature. — Jaron Lanier

Spirituality is committing suicide. Consciousness is attempting to will itself out of existence. — Jaron Lanier

The decision reduction service would use its particular style and competence to create bundles of decisions you could accept or reject en masse. — Jaron Lanier

Leap through the Mystery of death as the circus-rider leaps through the papered hoop ... find Life ambling along beneath us on the Other Side. — Sidney Lanier

It is this same "central personal vision" that is crucial for Nietzsche, who goes so far as to say, "Whether this taste was good or bad is less important than one might suppose, if only it was a single taste!" It is precisely the "central personal vision" of Lanier and "single taste" of Nietzsche that is lacking in most chatbots. — Brian Christian

Mobs and dictators were made for each other, and when mobs appear, dictators will soon flourish. — Jaron Lanier

An endless series of gambits backed by gigantic investments encouraged young people entering the online world for the first time to create standardized presences on sites like Facebook. Commercial interests promoted the widespread adoption of standardized designs like the blog, and these designs encouraged pseudonymity in at least some aspects of their designs, such as comments, instead of the proud extroversion that characterized the first wave of web culture.
Instead of people being treated as the sources of their own creativity, commercial aggregation and abstraction sites presented anonymized fragments of creativity as products that might have fallen from the sky or been dug up from the ground, obscuring the true sources. — Jaron Lanier

And yet shall Love himself be heard,Though long deferred, though long deferred:O'er the modern waste a dove hath whirred:Music is Love in search of a word. — Sidney Lanier

The mass culture of childhood right now is astonishingly technical. Little kids know their Unix path punctuation so they can get around the Web, and they know their HTML and stuff. It's pretty shocking to me. — Jaron Lanier

It's as if you kneel to plant the seed of a tree and it grows so fast that it swallows your whole town before you can even rise to your feet. — Jaron Lanier

You have to be somebody before you can share yourself. — Jaron Lanier

One good test of whether an economy is humanistic or not is the plausibility of earning the ability to drop out of it for a while without incident or insult. — Jaron Lanier

Enduring at the time played in his formulation of the test. — Jaron Lanier

One might ask why big business data is still so often used on faith, even after it has failed spectacularly. The answer is of course that big business data happens to facilitate superquick and vast near-term accumulations of wealth and influence. — Jaron Lanier

We must learn to see the full picture, and not just the treats before our eyes. Our trendy gadgets, such as smartphones and tablets, have given us new access to the world. We regularly communicate with people we would never even have been aware of before the networked age. We can find information about almost anything at any time. But we have learned how much our gadgets and out idealistically motivated digital networks are being used to spy on us by ultrapowerful, remote organizations. We are being dissected more than we dissect. — Jaron Lanier

Wal-Mart impoverished its own customer base. Google is facing exactly the same issue long-term, although not yet. — Jaron Lanier

I'm not in any sense anti-Facebook. — Jaron Lanier

Sometimes I do feel a little pressure, but not that much because we play different positions. — Willie Lanier

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. — Jaron Lanier

At the turn of the [21st] century it was really Sergey Brin at Google who just had the thought of, well, if we give away all the information services, but we make money from advertising, we can make information free and still have capitalism. But the problem with that is it reneges on the social contract where people still participate in the formal economy. And it's a kind of capitalism that's totally self-defeating because it's so narrow. It's a winner-take-all capitalism that's not sustaining. — Jaron Lanier

A fashionable idea in technical circles is that quantity not only turns into quality at some extreme of scale, but also does so according to principles we already understand. Some of my colleagues think a million, or perhaps a billion, fragmentary insults will eventually yield wisdom that surpasses that of any well-thought-out essay, so long as sophisticated secret statistical algorithms recombine the fragments. I disagree. A trope from the early days of computer science comes to mind: garbage in, garbage out. — Jaron Lanier

But surely Adam cannot be excused; Her fault though great, yet he was most to blame; What weakness offered, strength might have refused, Being lord of all, the greater was the shame. — Emilia Lanier

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. — Jaron Lanier

My choice is to be engaged even if that means I am tainted. I live with contradictions, in accordance with the human condition, but do my best not to forget what absurdities are involved. — Jaron Lanier

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. — Jaron Lanier

When machines get incredibly cheap to run, people seem correspondingly expensive. — 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

The upheavals [of artificial intelligence] can escalate quickly and become scarier and even cataclysmic," the New York Times tech columnist once wrote. "Imagine how a medical robot, originally programmed to rid cancer, could conclude that the best way to obliterate cancer is to exterminate humans who are genetically prone to the disease. — Jaron Lanier

Of all the things you can spend a lot of money on, the only things you expect to fail frequently are software and medicine. — Jaron Lanier

The great thing about crummy software is the amount of employment it generates. — Jaron Lanier

There will always be humans, lots of them, who provide the data that makes the networked realization of any technology better and cheaper. — Jaron Lanier

I'm hoping the reader can see that artificial intelligence is better understood as a belief system than as a technology. — 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

The attribution of intelligence to machines, crowds of fragments, or other nerd deities obscures more than it illuminates. When people are told that a computer is intelligent, they become prone to changing themselves in order to make the computer appear to work better, instead of demanding that the computer be changed to become more useful. — Jaron Lanier