Jaron Quotes

The foundation of the search for truth must be the ability to notice one's own ignorance. Acknowledging ignorance is a beautiful feature that science and spirituality hold in common. BUMMER rejects it.

Lanier, Jaron. Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now (Posición en Kindle1755-1757). Henry Holt and Co.. Edición de Kindle. ~ Lanier, Jaron

Wal-Mart impoverished its own customer base. Google is facing exactly the same issue long-term, although not yet. ~ Jaron Lanier

Writing and thinking is not economically sustainable. ~ Jaron Lanier

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

You don't need to remind me how easy it is to slough off and become lazy. Oh, I know how sweet the temptation is.
So modernity has brought with it an endless internal mental conflict between stern, rather parental inner voices and lazy childish ones. Unfortunately, these two voices, which have functioned as opposites, checking each other for centuries, have been confounded into idiotic agreement and collusion with the appearance of digital network technology. ~ Jaron Lanier

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

Individuals achieve optimal stupidity when they're given substantial powers while being insulated from the results of their actions. ~ Jaron Lanier

Digital technologies are setting down the new grooves of how people live, how we do business, how we do everything
and they're doing it according to the expectations of foolish utopian scenarios. We want free online experiences so badly that we are happy to not be paid for information that comes from us now or ever. That sensibility also implies that the more dominant information becomes in our economy, the less most of us will be worth. ~ Jaron Lanier

No offense, Jaron, but I don't want your life. Even locked away behind closed doors I got a taste for how awful it can be."
"Did anyone try to kill you while I was gone?"
"No."
"Then you didn't even get a taste. ~ Jennifer A. Nielsen

Some of the fantasy objects arising from cybernetic totalism (like the noosphere, which is a supposed global brain formed by the sum of all the human brains connected through the
internet) happen to motivate infelicitous technological designs.
For instance, designs that celebrate the noosphere tend to energize the inner troll, or bad actor, within humans. ~ Jaron Lanier

The problem isn't any particular technology, but the use of technology to manipulate people, to concentrate power in a way that is so nuts and creepy that it becomes a threat to the survival of civilization.

Lanier, Jaron. Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now (Posición en Kindle528-529). Henry Holt and Co.. Edición de Kindle. ~ Lanier, Jaron

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

People try to treat technology as an object, and it can't be. It can only be a channel. ~ Jaron Lanier

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

Enduring at the time played in his formulation of the test. ~ Jaron Lanier

I am commanded by the king of Avenia to give you one last order and so I shall. Hear me now and always. Be loyal to the thing you know is right. Never bend to weakness, never yield to a false crown. Right will always triumph in the end, and you will want to be on that side when it does. ~ Jennifer A. Nielsen

Spirituality is committing suicide. Consciousness is attempting to will itself out of existence. ~ Jaron Lanier

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

Erick had underestimated the distance, both to the ground and the cliff above me, yet the texture of the cliff wall was better than I'd hoped for. Vines and plants grew dense and well rooted, and there were many rocks and missing chunks of earth. I didn't know whether I could make it to the top on one leg or not, but I thought it was a great day to try. ~ Jennifer A. Nielsen

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

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

That you will become entrapped in someone else's recent careless thoughts. ~ Jaron Lanier

The most difficult time to be hungry is when the pangs first start. When the body realizes it's missed a meal and signals that it wants food. But after a while, it gives up asking; it gives up expecting anything. The will return, of course, and the hunger never goes away. ~ Jennifer A. Nielsen

Around the turn of the century Amazon was caught up in a controversy about "differential pricing." Essentially this means that an online site might charge you more for given items than it charges other people, like your neighbors.2 Amazon stated at the time that it was not really discrimination, but experimentation. It was offering different prices to different people to see what they would pay. There is nothing special about Amazon in this regard. Another example is the travel site Orbitz, which was found to be directing users of more expensive computers to more expensive travel options.3 Who could be surprised? It is natural for a business to take ~ Jaron Lanier

In order to make tech into something that empowers people, people have to be willing to act as if we can handle being powerful. ~ Jaron Lanier

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

When machines get incredibly cheap to run, people seem correspondingly expensive. ~ Jaron Lanier

Right now it might seem draconian to charge for access to information we have come to expect for free, but it would feel very different if you knew what other people were also paying you at the same time for information service you have fractionally contributed to in the course of your life. ~ Jaron Lanier

An imaginary circle of empathy is drawn by each person. It circumscribes the person at some distance, and corresponds to those things in the world that deserve empathy. I like the term "empathy" because it has spiritual overtones. A term like "sympathy" or "allegiance" might be more precise, but I want the chosen term to be slightly mystical, to suggest that we might not be able to fully understand what goes on between us and others, that we should leave open the possibility that the relationship can't be represented in a digital database.

If someone falls within your circle of empathy, you wouldn't want to see him or her killed. Something that is clearly outside the circle is fair game. For instance, most people would place all other people within the circle, but most of us are willing to see bacteria killed when we brush our
teeth, and certainly don't worry when we see an inanimate rock tossed aside to keep a trail clear.

The tricky part is that some entities reside close to the edge of the circle. The deepest controversies often involve whether something or someone should lie just inside or just outside the circle. For instance, the idea of slavery depends on the placement of the slave outside the circle, to make some people nonhuman. Widening the circle to include all people and end slavery has been one of the epic strands of the human story - and it isn't quite over yet.

A great many other controversies fit well in the model. The ~ Jaron Lanier

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

Long live king Jaron. If he leads us half as well as he entertains us, then Carthya has a truly great future ahead. ~ Jennifer A. Nielsen

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

Our willingness to suffer for the sake of the perception of freedom is remarkable. ~ Jaron Lanier

What these critics forget is that printing presses in themselves provide no guarantee of an enlightened outcome. People, not machines, made the Renaissance. The printing that takes place in North Korea today, for instance, is nothing more than propaganda for a personality cult. What is important about printing presses is not the mechanism, but the authors. ~ Jaron Lanier

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

There is no difference between machine autonomy and the abdication of human responsibility. ~ Jaron Lanier

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

Villains and plots and enemies are simple things to me. But friendships are complicated, and love is harder still. It has wounded me deeper than a sword ever could. ~ Jennifer A. Nielsen

Why do people deserve a penny when they update their Facebook status? Because they'll spend some of it on you. ~ Jaron Lanier

To free yourself, to be more authentic, to be less addicted, to be less manipulated, to be less paranoid … for all these marvelous reasons, delete your accounts. ~ Lanier, Jaron

What if only humans are real, and information is not? ~ Jaron Lanier

A fashionable idea in technical circles is that quantity not only turns into quality at some extreme of scale, but also does so according to principles we already understand. Some of my colleagues think a million, or perhaps a billion, fragmentary insults will eventually yield wisdom that surpasses that of any well-thought-out essay, so long as sophisticated secret statistical algorithms recombine the fragments. I disagree. A trope from the early days of computer science comes to mind: garbage in, garbage out. ~ Jaron Lanier

Communication is now often experienced as a superhuman phenomenon that towers above individuals. A new generation has come of age with a reduced expectation of what a person can be, and of who each person might become. ~ Jaron Lanier

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

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

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

A market economy cannot thrive absent the well-being of average people, even in a gilded age. ~ Jaron Lanier

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

Facebook says, 'Privacy is theft,' because they're selling your lack of privacy to the advertisers who might show up one day. ~ Jaron Lanier

With an eBook, however, you are not a first-class commercial citizen. Instead, you have only purchased tenuous rights within someone else's company store. You cannot resell, nor can you do anything else to treat your purchase as an investment. ~ Jaron Lanier

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

Kippenger suppressed a grin
I could've sworn he did. Without looking at anyone, he said, "Jargon wrote, 'You'll get nothing from me, ever, you dog-breath, rotted corpse of a king.'"
Vargas flowered at me. In return, I smiled and looked around the room, rather proud of myself for that. ~ Jennifer A. Nielsen

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

Human beings either function as individuals or as members of a pack. There's a switch inside us, deep in our spirit, that you can turn one way or the other. It's almost always the case that our worst behaviour comes out when we're switched to the mob setting. The problem with a lot of software designs is that they switch us to that setting. ~ Jaron Lanier

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

Software breaks before it bends, so it demands perfection in a universe that prefers statistics. ~ Jaron Lanier

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.

They tend their doppelgängers fastidiously. They must manage offhand remarks and track candid snapshots at parties as carefully as a politician. Insincerity is rewarded, while sincerity creates a lifelong taint. Certainly, some version of this principle existed in the lives of teenagers before the web came along, but not with such unyielding, clinical precision. ~ Jaron Lanier

I view advertising as being this romanticizing element that helps us appreciate, understand and enjoy how remarkable it is that we've been able to do so much, and learn so much. I view it as really vital, even though sometimes it can be really annoying. ~ Jaron Lanier

Turing presented his new offering in the form of a thought experiment, based on a popular Victorian parlor game. A man and a woman hide, and a judge is asked to determine which is which by relying only on the texts of notes passed back and forth.
Turing replaced the woman with a computer. Can the judge tell which is the man? If not, is the computer conscious? Intelligent? Does it deserve equal rights?
It's impossible for us to know what role the torture Turing was enduring at the time played in his formulation of the test. But it is undeniable that one of the key figures in the defeat of fascism was destroyed, by our side, after the war, because he was gay. No wonder his imagination pondered the rights of strange creatures. ~ Jaron Lanier

Kerwyn pulled me aside as the last of the supplies were being loaded. "Please, Jaron, don't go."
Despite his pleas, I could only shake my head. "There's no other choice now."
"I thought a little sleep would change your mind."
Placing my hand on Kerwyn's shoulder, I said, "I had the same concern, so I kept myself awake. ~ Jennifer A. Nielsen

This digital revolutionary still believes in most of the lovely deep ideals that energized our work so many years ago. At the core was a sweet faith in human nature. If we empowered individuals, we believed, more good than harm would result.
The way the internet has gone sour since then is truly perverse. The central faith of the web's early design has been superseded by a different faith in the centrality of imaginary entities epitomized by the idea that the internet as a whole is coming alive and turning into a superhuman creature.
The designs guided by this new, perverse kind of faith put people back in the shadows. The fad for anonymity has undone the great opening-of-everyone's-windows of the 1990s. While that reversal has empowered sadists to a degree, the worst effect is a degradation of ordinary people. ~ Jaron Lanier

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

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

A Nelsonian solution provides a simple, predictable way to share without limit or hassle over digital networks, and yet doesn't destroy middle classes in the long term. ~ Jaron Lanier

Jonathon stretched his arms, like he was reading himself for exercise. He leaned back and asked, "Why are you doing this?"
Robin was a bit surprised by the blunt question. "Doing what? Laying here, strapped to this table? I'll be honest, I've asked myself the same question. ~ Jaron Lee Knuth

A file on a hard disk does indeed contain information of the kind that objectively exists. The fact that the bits are discernible instead of being scrambled into mush - the way heat scrambles things - is what makes them bits.

But if the bits can potentially mean something to someone, they can only do so if they are experienced. When that happens, a commonality of culture is enacted between the storer and the retriever of the bits. Experience is the only process that can de-alienate information.

Information of the kind that purportedly wants to be free is nothing but a shadow of our own minds, and wants nothing on its own. It will not suffer if it doesn't get what it wants.

But if you want to make the transition from the old religion, where you hope God will give you an afterlife, to the new religion, where you hope to become immortal by getting uploaded into a computer, then you have to believe information is real and alive. So for you, it will be important to redesign human institutions like art, the economy, and the law to reinforce the perception that information is alive. You demand that the rest of us live in your new conception of a state religion. You need us to deify information to reinforce your faith. ~ Jaron Lanier

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

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

The network by itself is meaningless. Only the people were ever meaningful. ~ Jaron Lanier

Here's a current example of the challenge we face. At the height of its power, the photography company Kodak employed more than 140,000 people and was worth $28 billion. They even invented the first digital camera. But today Kodak is bankrupt, and the new face of digital photography has become Instagram. When Instagram was sold to Facebook for a billion dollars in 2012, it employed only thirteen people. Where did all those jobs disappear to? And what happened to the wealth that those middle-class jobs created? This book is built to answer questions like these, which will only become more common as digital networking hollows out every industry, from media to medicine to manufacturing. ~ Jaron Lanier

If you hurt deeply, then it means you love deeply too. love is powerful thing, Jaron. In the end, love will help you win this war."
I chuckled, "that'd be a fine new strategy, I think. When the enemy wields a sword against me, I'll simply express my love for them. They'll be so shocked, they'll collapse on the spot and the victory will be mine."
"I daresay you will be the first to claim victory that way ~ Jennifer A. Nielsen

External reality is sort of an affectation of the nervous system. ~ Jaron Lanier

We have repeatedly demonstrated our species's bottomless ability to lower our standards to make information technology look good. ~ Jaron Lanier

With a grin, I told her, I'll have more than ten minutes' notice that this battle is coming. In that way, this might be the most prepared I've ever been. ~ Jennifer A. Nielsen

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

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

There are at least two ways to believe in the idea of quality. You can believe there's something ineffable going on within the human mind, or you can believe we just don't understand what quality in a mind is yet, even though we might someday. Either of those opinions allows one to distinguish quantity and quality. In order to confuse quantity and quality, you have to reject both possibilities. The mere possibility of there being something ineffable about personhood is what drives many technologists to reject the notion of quality. They want to live in an airtight reality that resembles an idealized computer program, in which everything is understood and there are no fundamental mysteries. They recoil from even the hint of a potential zone of mystery or an unresolved seam in one's worldview. This desire for absolute order usually leads to tears in human affairs, so there is a historical reason to distrust it. Materialist extremists have long seemed determined to win a race with religious fanatics: Who can do the most damage to the most people? ~ Jaron Lanier

Information wants to be free.' So goes the saying. Stewart Brand, the founder of the Whole Earth Catalog, seems to have said it first.
I say that information doesn't deserve to be free.
Cybernetic totalists love to think of the stuff as if it were alive and had its own ideas and ambitions. But what if information is inanimate? What if it's even less than inanimate, a mere artifact of human thought? What if only humans are real, and information is not?
...
Information is alienated experience. ~ Jaron Lanier

The only hope for social networking sites from a business point of view is for a magic formula to appear in which some method of violating privacy and dignity becomes acceptable. ~ Jaron Lanier

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

The most important thing about a technology is how it changes people. ~ Jaron Lanier

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

You have to be somebody before you can share yourself. ~ Jaron Lanier

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

Governments oppress people, but so do mobs. You need to avoid both to make progress. ~ Jaron Lanier

I do real paintings, you know. I'm a little messy in the studio, so I'm a bit of a danger. But I just adore it. ~ Jaron Lanier

Something like missionary reductionism has happened to the internet with the rise of web 2.0. The strangeness is being leached away by the mush-making process. Individual web pages as they first appeared in the early 1990S had the flavor of personhood. MySpace preserved some of that flavor, 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 will accept ideas presented in technological form that would be abhorrent in any other form. It is utterly strange to hear my many old friends in the world of digital culture claim to be the true sons of the Renaissance without realizing that using computers to reduce individual expression is a primitive, retrograde activity, no matter how sophisticated your tools are. ~ Jaron Lanier

This is for you." i pressed the stone in Kerwyn's hand.
Kerwyn turned it over in his hands, unimpressed. "imatator's gold? It's worthless."
"No, it's real gold. I am real Kerwyn."
...
He pulled a creased and worn paper from his pocket and unfolded it. His hands shook increasingly as he read it. Then he turned to the audience and said,
"This note was given to me by King Eckbert
...
to read it only if someone ever came forward claiming to be the prince. This is what it says." He read aloud,
"'Many may one day claim to be the lost prince of Carthya.
...
You will know the Prince Jaron by one sign alone. He will give you the humblest of rocks and tell you it's gold.'"
...
"Lords and ladies of Carthya, I present to you the son of King Eckbert and Queen Erin. He is the lost royal of Carthya, who lives and stands before you. Hail, Prince Jaron. ~ Jennifer A. Nielsen

Rama's experiments suggest that some metaphors can be understood as mild forms of synesthesia. In ~ Jaron Lanier

As the familiar quote usually attributed to Supreme Court justice Louis D. Brandeis goes, We can have democracy in this country, or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can't have both. ~ Jaron Lanier

Nobody gives you respect in this life. You must take it, you must earn it, and then you must hold it sacred, because no matter how hard respect is to attain, it can be lost in an instant. ~ Jennifer A. Nielsen

Mobs and dictators were made for each other, and when mobs appear, dictators will soon flourish. ~ Jaron Lanier

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

It's not really fun listening to an insane person. Do you realize that? You're only entertaining yourself. Not much of a host, if you don't mind my critique. ~ Jaron Lee Knuth

There is nothing more gray, stultifying, or dreary than life lived inside the confines of a theory. ~ Jaron Lanier

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

Don't make this a fight."
"I won't, but you make everything a fight. ~ Jennifer A. Nielsen

This is real, then?" Jaron's heart pounded, though he couldn't tell whether it was from sadness or fear for his future. "When you leave, I'm no longer Prince Jaron. I'll be nothing but a commoner. An orphan. ~ Jennifer A. Nielsen

But the Turing test cuts both ways. You can't tell if a machine has gotten smarter or if you've just lowered your own standards of intelligence to such a degree that the machine seems smart. If you can have a conversation with a simulated person presented by an AI program, can you tell how far you've let your sense of personhood degrade in order to make the illusion work for you?

People degrade themselves in order to make machines seem smart all the time. Before the crash, bankers believed in supposedly intelligent algorithms that could calculate credit risks before making bad loans. We ask teachers to teach to standardized tests so a student will look good to an algorithm. We have repeatedly demonstrated our species' bottomless ability to lower our standards to make information technology look good. Every instance of intelligence in a machine is ambiguous.

The same ambiguity that motivated dubious academic AI projects in the past has been repackaged as mass culture today. Did that search engine really know what you want, or are you playing along, lowering your standards to make it seem clever? While it's to be expected that the human perspective will be changed by encounters with profound new technologies, the exercise of treating machine intelligence as real requires people to reduce their mooring to reality. ~ Jaron Lanier

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