211 Quotes by Jaron Lanier

The most effective young Facebook users, however – the ones who will probably be winners if Facebook turns out to be a model of the future they will inhabit as adults – are the ones who create successful online fictions about themselves.

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

Memes might seem to amplify what you are saying, but that is always an illusion. You might launch an infectious meme about a political figure, and you might be making a great point, but in the larger picture, you are reinforcing the idea that virality is truth. Your point will be undone by whatever other point is more viral. That is by design. The architects of BUMMER were meme believers.

Every power-seeking entity in the world, whether it is 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. By glorifying the tools that enable this trend as our channels of complaint, we are only amplifying our own predicament.

Empathy2 is the fuel that runs a decent society. Without it, only dry rules and competitions for power are left.

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.

Here’s a non-geeky framing of the same idea: What if listening to an inner voice or heeding a passion for ethics or beauty were to lead to more important work in the long term, even if it measured as less successful in the moment? What if deeply reaching a small number of people matters more than reaching everybody with nothing?

After my mother’s death, I had such difficulty relating to people.

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.