211 Quotes by Jaron Lanier

I'm an advocate of human nature.

I'm not in any sense anti-Facebook.

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

I do real paintings, you know. I'm a little messy in the studio, so I'm a bit of a danger. But I just adore it.

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.

There is nothing more gray, stultifying, or dreary than life lived inside the confines of a theory.

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.

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.

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.