Every time we give a musician the advice to give away the music and sell the T-shirt, we're saying, "Don't make your living in this more elevated way. Instead, reverse this social progress, and choose a more physical way to make a living." We're sending them to peasanthood, very much like the Maoists have.

Jaron Lanier

Categorized in : Giving Advice Progress

A real friendship ought to introduce each person to unexpected weirdness in the other.

Jaron Lanier

weirdness unexpected real

If there's any object in human experience that's a precedent for what a computer should be like, it's a musical instrument: a device where you can explore a huge range of possibilities through an interface that connects your mind and your body, allowing you to be emotionally authentic and expressive.

Jaron Lanier

musical body mind

It is impossible to work in information technology without also engaging in social engineering.

Jaron Lanier

engineering information technology

All over the world today people have a very strong desire to find a sense of identity, and at the same time that's coupled with the rise of absolutely absurd wars that relate to ethnic identity. Perhaps there is something deeply ingrained in people that relates to a sense of belonging, and without that, identity doesn't seem as real as it should.

Jaron Lanier

strong real war

Books are really, really hard to write. They represent a kind of a summit of grappling with what one really has to say

Jaron Lanier

kind writing book

An economy where advertisers thrive while journalists and artists struggle, reflects the values of a society more interested in deception and manipulation than in truth and beauty

Jaron Lanier

deception artist struggle

Funding a civilization through advertising is like trying to get nutrition by connecting a tube from one’s anus to one’s mouth.

Jaron Lanier

trying inspirational civilization

Is war an inevitable outcome of competing interests in a complex society? In other words, would war be the same even if human nature were very different? There are mathematical models of large groups working together that lead to conflict on a reliable basis. So there's a whole other view of war that is not psychological at all.

Jaron Lanier

views together war

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.

Jaron Lanier

volunteer acceptance people

Individual web pages as they first appeared in the early 1990s had the flavour of person-hood. MySpace preserved some of that flavour, though a process of regularized formatting had begun. Facebook went further, organizing people into multiple-choice identities while Wikipedia seeks to erase point of view entirely. If a church or government were doing these things, it would feel authoritarian, but when technologists are the culprits, we seem hip, fresh, and inventive. People accept ideas presented in technological form that would be abhorrent in any other forms

Jaron Lanier

multiple-choice government views

Pop culture has entered into a nostalgic malaise. Online culture is dominated by trivial mashups of the culture that existed before the onset of mashups, and by fandom responding to the dwindling outposts of centralized mass media. It is a culture of reaction without action.

Jaron Lanier

fandoms media culture

What is extraordinary is that in the United States the current culture desires feelings of machismo and power, but at the same time has absolutely no taste whatsoever for even the slightest loss or bloodshed or ickiness. That's a fascinating combination.

Jaron Lanier

loss desire feelings

Create a website that expresses something about who you are that won't fit into the template available to you on a social networking site.

Jaron Lanier

networking fit social

Mobs and dictators were made for each other, and when mobs appear, dictators will soon flourish.

Jaron Lanier

made-for-each-other dictator made

America's Facebook generation shows a submission to standardization that I haven't seen before. The American adventure has always been about people forgetting their former selves - Samuel Clemens became Mark Twain, Jack Kerouac went on the road. If they had a Facebook page, they wouldn't have been able to forget their former selves.

Jaron Lanier

self adventure america

To me, to say that war isn't evil is to say that nothing is evil.

Jaron Lanier

evil war

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

Jaron Lanier

average people thinking

I think seeking perfection in human affairs is a perfect way to destroy them.

Jaron Lanier

perfect way thinking

Humans change themselves through technology.

Jaron Lanier

technology humans

Eliminating wickedness is a different project from eliminating violence. Eliminating violence - the destruction associated with wickedness - is a practical program that I'm very willing to pursue.

Jaron Lanier

wickedness violence different