Jaron Lanier

“The most important thing about a technology is how it changes people.”

“There are at least two ways to believe in the idea of quality. You can believe there's something ineffable going on within the human mind, or you can believe we just don't understand what qu...”

“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 anymo...”

“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 bu...”

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

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

“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...”

“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 deme...”

“It is impossible to work in information technology without also engaging in social engineering.”

“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 Cl...”

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

“Mobs and dictators were made for each other, and when mobs appear, dictators will soon flourish.”

“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 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 throu...”

“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...”

“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.”

“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 commi...”

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

“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 pret...”

“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.”