Top 120 Jaron Lanier Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “I think complexity is mostly sort of crummy stuff that is there because it’s too expensive to change the interface.”

— Jaron Lanier

52. “We cannot have a society, in which, if two people wish to communicate the only way that can happen is if it’s financed by a third person who wishes to manipulate them.”

— Jaron Lanier

53. “There will always be humans, lots of them, who provide the data that makes the networked realization of any technology better and cheaper.”

— Jaron Lanier

54. “If you get deep enough, you get trapped. Stop calling yourself a user. You are being used.”

— Jaron Lanier

55. “A digital sound sample in angry rap doesn’t correspond to the graffiti but the wall.”

— Jaron Lanier

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

— Jaron Lanier

57. “How can you find happiness without authentic self-esteem? How can you be authentic when everything you read, say, or do is being fed into a judgment machine.”

— Jaron Lanier

58. “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.”

— Jaron Lanier

59. “Anonymous blog comments, vapid video pranks and lightweight mash-ups may seem trivial and harmless, but as a whole, this widespread practice of fragmentary, impersonal communication has demeaned personal interaction.”

— Jaron Lanier

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

— Jaron Lanier

61. “We’re losing track of the vastness of the potential for computer science. We really have to revive the beautiful intellectual joy of it, as opposed to the business potential.”

— Jaron Lanier

62. “It’s as if you kneel to plant the seed of a tree and it grows so fast that it swallows your whole town before you can even rise to your feet.”

— Jaron Lanier

63. “I’m not in any sense anti-Facebook.”

— Jaron Lanier

64. “Our willingness to suffer for the sake of the perception of freedom is remarkable.”

— Jaron Lanier

65. “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.”

— Jaron Lanier

66. “Advertisers are not thinking radically enough – they look for technology to lead instead of trying the neuroscience approach and thinking about what parts of the brain haven’t been activated before. These new experiences bring new capabilities to the brain.”

— Jaron Lanier

67. “Web 2.0 ideas have a chirpy, cheerful rhetoric to them, but I think they consistently express a profound pessimism about humans, human nature and the human future.”

— Jaron Lanier

68. “Siren Servers are narcissists; blind to where value comes from, including the web of global interdependence that is at the core of their own value.”

— Jaron Lanier

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

— Jaron Lanier

70. “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.”

— Jaron Lanier

71. “Speaking through social media isn’t really speaking at all. Context is applied to what you say after you say it, for someone else’s purposes and profit.”

— Jaron Lanier

72. “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.”

— Jaron Lanier

73. “An intelligent person feels guilty for downloading music without paying the musician, but they use this free-open-culture ideology to cover it.”

— Jaron Lanier

74. “Trump supporters seem nuts to me, and they say liberals seem nuts to them. But it’s wrong to say we’ve grown apart and can’t understand each other. What’s really going on is that we see less than ever before of what others are seeing, so we have less opportunity to understand each other.”

— Jaron Lanier

75. “The damage to society comes because addiction makes people crazy. The addict gradually loses touch with the real world and real people.”

— Jaron Lanier

76. “My parents were kind of like me in that they had tons and tons of weird, amazing stuff.”

— Jaron Lanier

77. “A remarkable thing about the Silicon Valley culture is that its status structure is so based on technical accomplishment and prowess.”

— Jaron Lanier

78. “When developers of digital technologies design a program that requires you to interact with a computer as if it were a person, they ask you to accept in some corner of your brain that you might also be conceived of as a program.”

— Jaron Lanier

79. “Our times demand rejection of seven word bios.”

— Jaron Lanier

80. “Our early libertarian idealism resulted in gargantuan, global data monopsonies.”

— Jaron Lanier

81. “Style used to be an interaction between the human soul and tools that were limiting. In the digital era, it will have to come from the soul alone.”

— Jaron Lanier

82. “Of all the things you can spend a lot of money on, the only things you expect to fail frequently are software and medicine.”

— Jaron Lanier

83. “We have repeatedly demonstrated our species’s bottomless ability to lower our standards to make information technology look good.”

— Jaron Lanier

84. “It is exactly when others insist that it’s a sign of being free, fresh, and radical to do what everybody’s doing that you might want to take notice and think for yourself. Don’t be surprised if this is really hard to do.”

— Jaron Lanier

85. “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.”

— Jaron Lanier

86. “Your character is the most precious thing about you. Don’t let it degrade.”

— Jaron Lanier

87. “I mean, you can’t have advertising be the only official business of the information economy if the information economy is going to take over.”

— Jaron Lanier

88. “Each of us has an inner troll.”

— Jaron Lanier

89. “Humans change themselves through technology.”

— Jaron Lanier

90. “I felt the world needed a tool for the spontaneous invention of new virtual worlds that would express the stuff of the mind that was otherwise impenetrable. If you could conjure just the right virtual world, it would open up souls and math and love.”

— Jaron Lanier

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

— Jaron Lanier

92. “People try to treat technology as an object, and it can’t be. It can only be a channel.”

— Jaron Lanier

93. “As a Twitter addict, Trump has changed. He displays the snowflake pattern and sometimes loses control. He is not acting like the most powerful person in the world, because his addiction is more powerful. Whatever else he might be, whatever kind of victimizer, he is also a victim.”

— Jaron Lanier

94. “Evolution has never found a way to be any speed but very slow.”

— Jaron Lanier

95. “My choice is to be engaged even if that means I am tainted. I live with contradictions, in accordance with the human condition, but do my best not to forget what absurdities are involved.”

— Jaron Lanier

96. “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.”

— Jaron Lanier

97. “The inability to carve out a space in which to invent oneself without constant judgment; that is what makes me unhappy.”

— Jaron Lanier

98. “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.”

— Jaron Lanier

99. “The better analogy is paint that contains lead. When it became undeniable that lead was harmful, no one declared that houses should never be painted again. Instead after pressure and legislation, lead-free paints became the new standard. Smart people simply waited to buy paint until there was a safe version on sale. Similarly, smart people should delete their accounts until nontoxic varieties are available.”

— Jaron Lanier

100. “At the end of the road of the pursuit of technological sophistication appears to lie a playhouse in which humankind regresses to nursery school.”

— Jaron Lanier