211 Quotes by Jaron Lanier

Usually Google has had a way of coming up with the creepier statements, but Facebook has pulled ahead: A recent revision in its statement of purpose includes directives like assuring that “every single person has a sense of purpose and community.”5 A single company is going to see to it that every single person has a purpose, because it presumes that was lacking before. If that is not a new religion, I don’t know what is.

Cyber” comes from the Greek and is related to navigation. When you sail, you must constantly adjust to changes in wind and surf.

I’m an advocate of human nature.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Facebook says, ‘Privacy is theft,’ because they’re selling your lack of privacy to the advertisers who might show up one day.

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.