211 Quotes by 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.

The basic problem is that web 2.0 tools are not supportive of democracy by design. They are tools designed to gather spy-agency-like data in a seductive way, first and foremost, but as a side effect they tend to provide software support for mob-like phenomena.

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.

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.

Our times demand rejection of seven word bios.

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

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.

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.

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