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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

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Jaron Lanier
Age: 64
Born: 1960
Born: May 3
Artificial Intelligence Researcher
Businessperson
Composer
Computer Scientist
Essayist
Programmer
University Teacher
Writer
New York City
New York
Allow
Distract
Technology
Adoration
Lost
Agenda
Self
Agendas
Originals
Original
Contact
Somehow
Congratulatory

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An intelligent person feels guilty for downloading music without paying the musician, but they use this free-open-culture ideology to cover it.
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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.
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There were studies that asked people in different cultures to draw pictures of their enemies, and the pictures all looked remarkably the same. They always had exaggerated canine teeth and a certain sort of expression. That led to speculation about whether at an earlier stage in the human experience we were hunted by some sort of carnivore.
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A remarkable thing about the Silicon Valley culture is that its status structure is so based on technical accomplishment and prowess.
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When you have a global mush, people lose their identity, they become pseudonyms, they have no investment and no consequence in what they do.
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The great thing about crummy software is the amount of employment it generates.
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Governments oppress people, but so do mobs. You need to avoid both to make progress.
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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.
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Is war an inevitable outcome of competing interests in a complex society? In other words, would war be the same even if human nature were very different? There are mathematical models of large groups working together that lead to conflict on a reliable basis. So there's a whole other view of war that is not psychological at all.
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There will always be humans, lots of them, who provide the data that makes the networked realization of any technology better and cheaper.
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Chemotherapy is a good thing even though it kills healthy cells. But we still hope for something better. We'd like to prevent cancer in the first place.
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Humans change themselves through technology.
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To me, to say that war isn't evil is to say that nothing is evil.
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There's no question that males are more violent and more prone to the type of hierarchical organizations that lead to war. War is largely a male activity. In fact, there is some correlation [between making war and] having an excess of males in the population.
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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.
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Separation anxiety is assuaged by constant connection. Young people announce every detail of their lives on services like Twitter not to show off, but to avoid the closed door at bedtime, the empty room, the screaming vacuum of an isolated mind.
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Linux is a superbly polished copy of an antique - shinier than the original, perhaps, but still defined by it.
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What does it mean to not be alone? I've approached that question through music, technology, writing and other means.
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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
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Pop culture has entered into a nostalgic malaise. 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.
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