Jaron Lanier People Quotations

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

The attribution of intelligence to machines, crowds of fragments, or other nerd deities obscures more than it illuminates. When people are told that a computer is intelligent, they become prone to changing themselves in order to make the computer appear to work better, instead of demanding that the computer be changed to become more useful.

People degrade themselves in order to make machines seem smart all the time.

Separation anxiety is assuaged by constant connection. Young people announce every detail of their lives on services like Twitter not to show off, but to avoid the closed door at bedtime, the empty room, the screaming vacuum of an isolated mind.

Why do people deserve a penny when they update their Facebook status? Because they'll spend some of it on you.

Advertising is the edge of what people know how to do and of human experience and it explains the latest ways progress has changed us to ourselves.

The network by itself is meaningless. Only the people were ever meaningful.

When you have a global mush, people lose their identity, they become pseudonyms, they have no investment and no consequence in what they do.

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

Emphasizing the crowd means de-emphasizing individual humans in the design of society, and when you ask people not to be people, they revert to bad, mob-like behaviors.

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.

People try to treat technology as an object, and it can't be. It can only be a channel.

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

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

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.

At the turn of the [21st] century it was really Sergey Brin at Google who just had the thought of, well, if we give away all the information services, but we make money from advertising, we can make information free and still have capitalism. But the problem with that is it reneges on the social contract where people still participate in the formal economy. And it's a kind of capitalism that's totally self-defeating because it's so narrow. It's a winner-take-all capitalism that's not sustaining.

Digital technologies are setting down the new grooves of how people live, how we do business, how we do everything--and they're doing it according to the expectations of foolish utopian scenarios. We want free online experiences so badly that we are happy to not be paid for information that comes from us now or ever. That sensibility also implies that the more dominant information becomes in our economy, the less most of us will be worth.

I'm astonished at how readily a great many people I know, young people, have accepted a reduced economic prospect and limited freedoms in any substantial sense, and basically traded them for being able to screw around online.

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 committee, and that's crap. You want people and groups who are able to think thoughts before they share