“ 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
“ 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
“ 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 informati… Jaron Lanier
“ What does it mean to not be alone? I've approached that question through music, technology, writing and other means. Jaron Lanier
“ The basic problem is that web 2.0 tools are not supportive of democracy by design. They are tools designed to gather spy-agency-like data in a seductive way, first and foremost, but as a side effect t… Jaron Lanier
“ 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 perso… Jaron Lanier
“ It is impossible to work in information technology without also engaging in social engineering. Jaron Lanier
“ I think complexity is mostly sort of crummy stuff that is there because it's too expensive to change the interface. Jaron Lanier
“ If there's any object in human experience that's a precedent for what a computer should be like, it's a musical instrument: a device where you can explore a huge range of possibilities through an inte… Jaron Lanier
“ 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… Jaron Lanier
“ 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
“ People try to treat technology as an object, and it can't be. It can only be a channel. Jaron Lanier
“ My dad has sometimes felt that I grew up a little lacking in sufficient eccentricity - in the sense that I'm willing to live as an adult in a house with walls that are parallel to each other, that sor… Jaron Lanier
“ 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. T… Jaron Lanier
“ 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
“ My parents were kind of like me in that they had tons and tons of weird, amazing stuff. Jaron Lanier
“ Technologists provide tools that can improve people's lives. But I want to be clear that I don't think technology by itself improves people's lives, since often I'm criticized for being too pro-techno… 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 tot… Jaron Lanier
