Jaron Lanier Quotes - Page 4

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

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.

There's no question that males are more violent and more prone to the type of hierarchical organizations that lead to war. War is largely a male activity. In fact, there is some correlation [between making war and] having an excess of males in the population.

In fact, one reason I am interested in developing things in virtual reality is that they're so fascinating. I can come up with problems that are harder than warfare to take up people's time.

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.

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.

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.

I think that one can seek a way to eliminate war, and still agree that fighting the Nazis was a good thing.

It's possible, without taking sides or playing the statesman game, to reduce destruction simply by reducing the development of technology of destruction.

If you're old enough to have a job and to have a life, you use Facebook exactly as advertised, you look up old friends.

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

The cloud is driven by statistics, and even in the worst individual cases of personal ignorance, dullness, idleness, or irrelevance, every person is constantly feeding data into the cloud these days. The value of such information could be treated as genuine, but it is not. Instead, the blindness of our standards of accounting to all that value is gradually breaking capitalism.

The great thing about crummy software is the amount of employment it generates.

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.

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.

External reality is sort of an affectation of the nervous system.

I've occasionally been wrong about certain things, which is in a way more delightful than being right.

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.

A digital sound sample in angry rap doesn't correspond to the graffiti but the wall.

What does it mean to not be alone? I've approached that question through music, technology, writing and other means.

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

I'm hoping the reader can see that artificial intelligence is better understood as a belief system instead of a technology.

I'm not in any sense anti-Facebook.

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.