American writer & computer scientist (1960- )
Back in the 1980s, when the internet was only available to a small number of pioneers, I was often confronted by people who feared that the strange technologies I was working on, like virtual reality, might unleash the demons of human nature. For instance, would people become addicted to virtual reality as if it were a drug? Would they become trapped in it, unable to escape back to the physical world where the rest of us live? Some of the questions were silly, and others were prescient.
JARON LANIER
You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto
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
Who Owns the Future?
You have to remember that virtual reality won't be mature for everyday use for decades perhaps, and we don't know what the real situation will be like then. It will undoubtedly be different, so to talk about how it can help, we have to talk about the present and talk about computers. I'll tell you how I think about the economic role of computers, and this might be a little cynical, but I think it's actually pretty accurate. In the industrial revolution, which is still continuing in less developed parts of the world, machines were created that replaced human labor and created free time for people. But our economic system is based on earned capital, so that if you have this free time, you also don't earn any money to buy food. And this creates a crisis. The question is, if you're going to create all this leisure time with all these industrial machines, how do you justify paying people within a capitalist system so that they can survive? I think computers are the answer. I think computers are this sort of massive work program that keeps everybody busy manipulating information, and thus able to earn their bread.
JARON LANIER
Spin Magazine, November 1995
Once you can understand something in a way that you can shove it into a computer, you have cracked its code, transcended any particularity it might have at a given time. It was as if we had become the gods of vision and had effectively created all possible images, for they would merely be reshufflings of the bits in the computers we had before us, completely under our control.
JARON LANIER
"One Half of a Manifesto", The New Humanists: Science at the Edge
We have repeatedly demonstrated our species's bottomless ability to lower our standards to make information technology look good.
JARON LANIER
You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto
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
You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto
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
"One Half of a Manifesto", The New Humanists: Science at the Edge
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
"What Turned Jaron Lanier Against the Web?", Smithsonian Magazine, January 2013
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
You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto
As information technology becomes millions of times more powerful, any particular use of it becomes correspondingly cheaper. Thus, it has become commonplace to expect online services (not just news, but 21st century treats like search or social networking) to be given for free, or rather, in exchange for acquiescence to being spied on.
JARON LANIER
Who Owns the Future?
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.
JARON LANIER
You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto
There is no difference between machine autonomy and the abdication of human responsibility.
JARON LANIER
"One Half of a Manifesto", The New Humanists: Science at the Edge
You have to be somebody before you can share yourself.
JARON LANIER
You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto
There is nothing more gray, stultifying, or dreary than life lived inside the confines of a theory.
JARON LANIER
"One Half of a Manifesto", The New Humanists: Science at the Edge
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.
JARON LANIER
Who Owns the Future?
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
You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto
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
Who Owns the Future?
Software breaks before it bends, so it demands perfection in a universe that prefers statistics.
JARON LANIER
"One Half of a Manifesto", The New Humanists: Science at the Edge
I don't hate anything about e-books or e-book readers or tablets. There's a lot of discussion about that, and I think it's misplaced. The problem I have is whether we believe in the book itself. To me a book is not just a particular file. It's connected with personhood. Books are really, really hard to write. They represent a kind of summit of grappling with what one really has to say. And what I'm concerned with is when Silicon Valley looks at books, they often think of them as really differently as just data points that you can mush together. They're divorcing books from their role in personhood.
JARON LANIER
"Jaron Lanier: The Internet Destroyed the Middle Class", Salon, May 12, 2013
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
You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto