Top 120 Jaron Lanier Quotes (2024 Update)

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

— Jaron Lanier

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

— Jaron Lanier

3. “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

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

— Jaron Lanier

5. “Criticism is always easier than constructive solutions.”

— Jaron Lanier

6. “I’m an advocate of human nature.”

— Jaron Lanier

7. “You have to be somebody before you can share yourself.”

— Jaron Lanier

8. “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.”

— Jaron Lanier

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

— Jaron Lanier

10. “If we allow our self-congratulatory adoration of technology to distract us from our own contact with each other, then somehow the original agenda has been lost.”

— Jaron Lanier

11. “Social media is biased, not to the Left or the Right, but downward.”

— Jaron Lanier

12. “Musicians and journalists are the canaries in the coalmine, but, eventually, as computers get more and more powerful, it will kill off all middle-class professions.”

— Jaron Lanier

13. “We already knew that kids learned computer technology more easily than adults, It is as if children were waiting all these centuries for someone to invent their native language.”

— Jaron Lanier

14. “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

15. “I think most of the dramatic new ideas come from little companies that then grow big.”

— Jaron Lanier

16. “Here is yet another statement of the core idea of this book, that data concerning people is best thought of as people in disguise, and they’re usually up to something.”

— Jaron Lanier

17. “If you want to know what’s really going on in a society or ideology, follow the money. If money is flowing to advertising instead of musicians, journalists, and artists, then a society is more concerned with manipulation than truth or beauty.”

— Jaron Lanier

18. “One of the main reasons to delete your social media accounts is that there isn’t a real choice to move to different social media accounts. Quitting entirely is the only option for change. If you don’t quit, you are not creating the space in which Silicon Valley can act to improve itself.”

— Jaron Lanier

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

— Jaron Lanier

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

— Jaron Lanier

21. “Software breaks before it bends, so it demands perfection in a universe that prefers statistics.”

— Jaron Lanier

22. “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.”

— Jaron Lanier

23. “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.”

— Jaron Lanier

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

— Jaron Lanier

25. “If you love a medium made of software, there’s a danger that you will become entrapped in someone else’s recent careless thoughts. Struggle against that.”

— Jaron Lanier

26. “The interesting thing about advertising is that the things that annoy us sometimes about it are really human. It’s us looking at ourselves – and like all human endeavors it’s imperfect.”

— Jaron Lanier

27. “Advertisers and marketers should be looking to bring new experiences to different parts of the brain. It’s a more profound idea than just dropping a billboard into a video game.”

— Jaron Lanier

28. “One good test of whether an economy is humanistic or not is the plausibility of earning the ability to drop out of it for a while without incident or insult.”

— Jaron Lanier

29. “We imagine “pure” cybernetic systems, but we can prove only that we know how to build fairly dysfunctional ones. We kid ourselves when we think we understand something, even a computer, merely because we can model or digitize it.”

— Jaron Lanier

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

— Jaron Lanier

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

— Jaron Lanier

32. “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

33. “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

34. “There is no difference between machine autonomy and the abdication of human responsibility.”

— Jaron Lanier

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

— Jaron Lanier

36. “Information is alienated experience.”

— Jaron Lanier

37. “What might once have been called advertising must now be understood as continuous behavior modification on a titanic scale.”

— Jaron Lanier

38. “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

39. “We have given up our connection to context. Social media mashes up meaning. Whatever you say will be contextualized and given meaning by the way algorithms, crowds, and crowds of fake people who are actually algorithms mash it up with what other people say.”

— Jaron Lanier

40. “If anything, there’s a reverse Moore’s Law observable in software: As processors become faster and memory becomes cheaper, software becomes correspondingly slower and more bloated, using up all available resources.”

— Jaron Lanier

41. “The nerd flavor of masculinity has overwhelmed the macho kind in real-life power dynamics, and therefore in popular culture.”

— Jaron Lanier

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

— Jaron Lanier

43. “Linux is a superbly polished copy of an antique – shinier than the original, perhaps, but still defined by it.”

— Jaron Lanier

44. “Spirituality is committing suicide. Consciousness is attempting to will itself out of existence.”

— Jaron Lanier

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

— Jaron Lanier

46. “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

47. “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.”

— Jaron Lanier

48. “External reality is sort of an affectation of the nervous system.”

— Jaron Lanier

49. “Go to where you are kindest.”

— Jaron Lanier

50. “If you listen first, and write later, then what you write will have had time to filter through your brain and you’ll be in what you say. This is what makes you exist. If you are only a reflector of information, are you really there?”

— Jaron Lanier