Top 100 Lanier Quotes
#1. Our times demand rejection of seven word bios.
Jaron Lanier
#2. Our mother Eve, who tasted of the tree, Giving to Adam what she held most dear, Was simply good, and had no power to see.
Emilia Lanier
#3. I'm hoping the reader can see that artificial intelligence is better understood as a belief system than as a technology.
Jaron Lanier
#4. 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
#5. 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
#6. I think complexity is mostly sort of crummy stuff that is there because it's too expensive to change the interface.
Jaron Lanier
#7. Into the woods, my Master went, Clean forspent, forspent, Into the woods my Master came, Forspent with love and shame. But the olives they were not blind to Him, The little gray leaves were kind to Him: The thorn-tree had a mind to Him, When into the woods He came.
Sidney Lanier
#8. There are no sweeter words in the English language (or any other) than husband and wife.
Lanier Ivester
#9. Money forgets ... Money allows blood enemies to collaborate; when money changes hands we forget for at least a moment the history of conflict and the potential for revenge.
Jaron Lanier
#10. 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
#11. I feel drawn to experiment with ways that technology can interact with notions of intimacy, because so much of technology is done in a way that's very cold and has such an opposite effect.
Jaron Lanier
#12. 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
#13. 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
#14. That you will become entrapped in someone else's recent careless thoughts.
Jaron Lanier
#15. Every power-seeking entity in the world, whether it's a government, a business, or an informal group, has gotten wise to the idea that if you can assemble information about other people, that information makes you powerful.
Jaron Lanier
#16. 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
#17. A market economy cannot thrive absent the well-being of average people, even in a gilded age.
Jaron Lanier
#18. We have repeatedly demonstrated our species's bottomless ability to lower our standards to make information technology look good.
Jaron Lanier
#19. A digital sound sample in angry rap doesn't correspond to the graffiti but the wall.
Jaron Lanier
#20. Rama's experiments suggest that some metaphors can be understood as mild forms of synesthesia. In
Jaron Lanier
#21. 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
#22. Our willingness to suffer for the sake of the perception of freedom is remarkable.
Jaron Lanier
#23. A real friendship ought to introduce each person to unexpected weirdness in the other.
Jaron Lanier
#24. Unfortunately, by forcing more and more value off the books as the world economy turns into an information economy, the ideal of "free" information could erode economic interdependencies between nations.
Jaron Lanier
#25. 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
#26. 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
#27. Writing and thinking is not economically sustainable.
Jaron Lanier
#28. 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
#29. If you get deep enough, you get trapped. Stop calling yourself a user. You are being used.
Jaron Lanier
#30. As the woodpecker taps in a spiral quest
From the root to the top of the tree,
Then flies to another tree,
So have I bored into life to find what lay therein,
And now it is time to die,
And I will fly to another tree.
Sidney Lanier
#31. What did you think would happen? We in Silicon Valley undermined copyright to make commerce become more about services instead of content: more about our code instead of their files.
Jaron Lanier
#32. People try to treat technology as an object, and it can't be. It can only be a channel.
Jaron Lanier
#33. Virtues are acquired through endeavor, which rests wholly upon yourself.
Sidney Lanier
#34. 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
#35. We should treat computers as fancy telephones, whose purpose is to connect people ... As long as we remember that we ourselves are the source of our value, our creativity, our sense of reality, then all of our work with computers will be worthwhile and beautiful.
Jaron Lanier
#36. 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
#37. 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
#38. 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
#39. 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
#40. Evolution has never found a way to be any speed but very slow.
Jaron Lanier
#41. Why do people deserve a penny when they update their Facebook status? Because they'll spend some of it on you.
Jaron Lanier
#42. You have to be somebody before you can share yourself.
Jaron Lanier
#43. 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
#44. 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
#45. The nerd flavor of masculinity has overwhelmed the macho kind in real-life power dynamics, and therefore in popular culture.
Jaron Lanier
#46. Software breaks before it bends, so it demands perfection in a universe that prefers statistics.
Jaron Lanier
#47. Linux is a superbly polished copy of an antique - shinier than the original, perhaps, but still defined by it.
Jaron Lanier
#48. If you want to be found stand where the seeker seeks.
Sidney Lanier
#49. I think most of the dramatic new ideas come from little companies that then grow big.
Jaron Lanier
#50. A remarkable thing about the Silicon Valley culture is that its status structure is so based on technical accomplishment and prowess.
Jaron Lanier
#51. 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
#52. The sun is a-wait at the ponderous gate of the West.
Sidney Lanier
#53. My priciple is, the artist shall put forth, humbly & lovingly, without bitterness, the very best & highest that is within him,utterly regardless of contemporary criticism.
Sidney Lanier
#54. Once a critical mass of conversation is on Facebook, then it's hard to get conversation going elsewhere. What might have started out as a choice is no longer a choice after a network effect causes a phase change.
Jaron Lanier
#55. The network by itself is meaningless. Only the people were ever meaningful.
Jaron Lanier
#56. There is nothing more gray, stultifying, or dreary than life lived inside the confines of a theory.
Jaron Lanier
#57. Manet also had an argument with Degas, the end result being that they each returned paintings that they had previous given to each other.
Doris Lanier
#58. 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
#59. But I cannot bring myself to believe that I was intended for a musician, because it seems so small a business in comparison with other things which, it seems to me, I might do. Question here: 'What is the province of music in the economy of the world?'
Sidney Lanier
#60. 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.
Jaron Lanier
#61. The great thing about crummy software is the amount of employment it generates.
Jaron Lanier
#62. 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
#63. There is no difference between machine autonomy and the abdication of human responsibility.
Jaron Lanier
#64. I've always felt that the human-centered approach to computer science leads to more interesting, more exotic, more wild, and more heroic adventures than the machine-supremacy approach, where information is the highest goal.
Jaron Lanier
#65. My parents were kind of like me in that they had tons and tons of weird, amazing stuff.
Jaron Lanier
#66. Criticism is always easier than constructive solutions.
Jaron Lanier
#67. At the end of the day, even the magic of machine translation is like Facebook, a way of taking free contributions from people and regurgitating them as bait for advertisers or others who hope to take advantage of being close to a top server.
Jaron Lanier
#68. At a minimum if we can just have enough distribution of clout in society so it isn't run by a tiny minority, then at the very least it gives us some room to breathe.
Jaron Lanier
#69. After my mother's death, I had such difficulty relating to people.
Jaron Lanier
#70. My reality was that if there was a defenseless player, if that person didn't touch the ball, I would not hit them. I was not going to strike you if you didn't have an opportunity to get the ball.
Willie Lanier
#71. Information doesn't deserve to be free. It is an abstract tool; a useful
fantasy, a nothing. It is nonexistent until and unless a person experiences
it in a useful way.
Jaron Lanier
#72. Let my name perish,
the poetry is good poetry and the music is good music,
and beauty dieth not, and the heart that needs it will find it.
Sidney Lanier
#73. When we ask people to live their lives through our models, we are potentially reducing life itself. How can we ever know what we might be losing?
Jaron Lanier
#74. There is no way that I could have survived if I had not changed my style of play.
Willie Lanier
#75. The most important thing about a technology is how it changes people.
Jaron Lanier
#76. 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
#77. The mass culture of childhood right now is astonishingly technical. Little kids know their Unix path punctuation so they can get around the Web, and they know their HTML and stuff. It's pretty shocking to me.
Jaron Lanier
#78. Music means harmony, harmony means love. Love means God.
Sidney Lanier
#79. 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
#80. One might ask why big business data is still so often used on faith, even after it has failed spectacularly. The answer is of course that big business data happens to facilitate superquick and vast near-term accumulations of wealth and influence.
Jaron Lanier
#81. 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
#82. 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
#83. 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
#84. 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
#85. Wal-Mart impoverished its own customer base. Google is facing exactly the same issue long-term, although not yet.
Jaron Lanier
#86. Ye marshes, how candid and simple and nothing-withholding and free, Ye publish yourselves to the sky and offer yourselves to the sea.
Sidney Lanier
#87. If someone reuses your video snippet, and that person's work incorporating yours is reused by yet a third party, you still get a micropayment from that third party.
Jaron Lanier
#88. Leap through the Mystery of death as the circus-rider leaps through the papered hoop ... find Life ambling along beneath us on the Other Side.
Sidney Lanier
#89. It will not suffer if it doesn't get what it wants.
Jaron Lanier
#90. Wouldn't it be easier just to treat the information space as a public resource and tax or charge companies somehow for the benefit of using it?
Jaron Lanier
#91. 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
#92. I will fly in the greatness of God as the marsh-hen flies,
In the freedom that fills all the space 'twixt the marsh and the skies.
Sidney Lanier
#93. Gradually I find that my whole soul is merging itself into this business of writing, and especially of writing poetry. I am going to try it; and am going to test, in the most rigid way I know, the awful question whether it is my vocation.
Sidney Lanier
#94. Enduring at the time played in his formulation of the test.
Jaron Lanier
#96. Sometimes I do feel a little pressure, but not that much because we play different positions.
Willie Lanier
#97. If a man made himself an expert in any particular branch of human activity, there would result the strong tendency that a peculiar aptitude towards the same branch would be found among some of his descendants.
Sidney Lanier
#98. Out of the woods my Master came,
Content with death and shame.
When Death and Shame would woo Him last,
From under the trees they drew Him last:
'Twas on a tree they slew Him
last
When out of the woods He came.
Sidney Lanier
#99. O Trade, O Trade! Would thou wert dead!The time needs heart - 'tis tired of head.
Sidney Lanier
#100. I've occasionally been wrong about certain things, which is in a way more delightful than being right.
Jaron Lanier
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