American - Artist | May 3, 1960 - 3
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
TechnologyLostContactOwnOriginal
Mobs and dictators were made for each other, and when mobs appear, dictators will soon flourish.
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People have to be able to make money off their brains and their hearts. Or else we're all going to starve, and it's the machines that'll get good.
GoodMoneyPeopleBrainsGoingGet
America's Facebook generation shows a submission to standardization that I haven't seen before. The American adventure has always been about people forgetting their former selves - Samuel Clemens became Mark Twain, Jack Kerouac went on the road. If they had a Facebook page, they wouldn't have been able to forget their former selves.
AdventurePeopleRoadGeneration
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.
PathCultureChildhoodMeKnowNow
When you have a global mush, people lose their identity, they become pseudonyms, they have no investment and no consequence in what they do.
IdentityPeopleYouLoseInvestment
Facebook says, 'Privacy is theft,' because they're selling your lack of privacy to the advertisers who might show up one day.
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I think complexity is mostly sort of crummy stuff that is there because it's too expensive to change the interface.
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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.
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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.
ComputersMusiciansPowerfulWill
Every time we give a musician the advice to give away the music and sell the T-shirt, we're saying, 'Don't make your living in this more elevated way. Instead, reverse this social progress, and choose a more physical way to make a living.' We're sending them to peasanthood, very much like the Maoists have.
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I'd much rather see a world where, when you make some quirky comment on a blog or news story or you upload a video clip, instead of just a moment of fame for your pseudonym, you'll get 50 bucks. The first time that happens, you'll realise that you're a full-class citizen. You have the potential to make money from the system.
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