S Lanier Quotes & Sayings

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 designs is that they switch us to that setting. — Jaron Lanier

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

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

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

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

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

If someone reuses your video snippet, and that person's work incorporating yours is reused by yet a third party, you still get a micropayment from that third party. — 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

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

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

Rama's experiments suggest that some metaphors can be understood as mild forms of synesthesia. In — Jaron Lanier

When I work with experimental gadgets, like new variations on virtual reality, in a lab environment, I am always reminded of how small changes in the details of a digital design can have profound unforeseen effects on the experiences of the humans who are playing with it. The slightest change in something as seemingly trivial as the use of a button can sometimes completely alter behavior patterns.
For instance, Stanford University researcher Jeremy Bailenson has demonstrated that changing the height of one's avatar in immersive virtual reality transforms self-esteem and social self-perception. Technologies are extensions of ourselves, and, like the avatars in Jeremy's lab, our identities can be shifted by the quirks of gadgets. It is impossible to work with information technology without also engaging in social engineering. — Jaron Lanier

That you will become entrapped in someone else's recent careless thoughts. — Jaron Lanier

If you love a medium made of software, there's a danger that you will become entrapped in someone else's recent careless thoughts. Struggle against that. — Jaron Lanier

The wisdom of crowds works when the crowd is choosing the price of an ox, when there's a single numeric average. But if it's a design or something that matters, the decision is made by committee, and that's crap. You want people and groups who are able to think thoughts before they share. — Jaron Lanier

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

Every power-seeking entity in the world, whether it's a government, a business, or an informal group, has gotten wise to the idea that if you can assemble information about other people, that information makes you powerful. — 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

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

If there's any object in human experience that's a precedent for what a computer should be like, it's a musical instrument: a device where you can explore a huge range of possibilities through an interface that connects your mind and your body, allowing you to be emotionally authentic and expressive. — Jaron Lanier

Don't worry: It's not excessively expensive or a threat to the efficiency of the Internet to keep track of where information came from. It will actually make the Internet faster and more efficient. — Jaron Lanier

This digital revolutionary still believes in most of the lovely deep ideals that energized our work so many years ago. At the core was a sweet faith in human nature. If we empowered individuals, we believed, more good than harm would result.
The way the internet has gone sour since then is truly perverse. The central faith of the web's early design has been superseded by a different faith in the centrality of imaginary entities epitomized by the idea that the internet as a whole is coming alive and turning into a superhuman creature.
The designs guided by this new, perverse kind of faith put people back in the shadows. The fad for anonymity has undone the great opening-of-everyone's-windows of the 1990s. While that reversal has empowered sadists to a degree, the worst effect is a degradation of ordinary people. — Jaron Lanier

It is exactly when others insist that it's a sign of being free, fresh, and radical to do what everybody's doing that you might want to take notice and think for yourself. Don't be surprised if this is really hard to do. — Jaron Lanier

We have repeatedly demonstrated our species's bottomless ability to lower our standards to make information technology look good. — Jaron Lanier

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

The beauty of HTML was that one-way linking made it very simple to spread because you could put something up and take no responsibility whatsoever. And that creates a society in which people display no responsibility whatsoever. That's the problem. — 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

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 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

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

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

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

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

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

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 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

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

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