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Quote by Jaron Lanier

“If you want to know what's really going on in a society or ideology, follow the money. If money is flowing to advertising instead of musicians, journalists, and artists, then a society is more concerned with manipulation than truth or beauty.”

Quote by Jaron Lanier

Book:You Are Not a Gadget

Work

You Are Not a Gadget

This book delves into the relationship between technology and human nature, questioning the role of gadgets in shaping our lives and challenging the notion of a gadget-centric society. more

Author

Jaron Lanier is a writer, musician, and computer scientist. He is renowned for his pioneering work in the field of virtual reality (VR) and is recognized for his critical analysis of network culture in his book 'You Are Not a Gadget'. more

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“The problem I have with socialist utopias is there's some kind of committees trying to soften outcomes for people. I think that imposes models of outcomes for other people's lives. So in a spiritual sense there's some bit of libertarian in me. But the critical thing for me is moderation. And if you let that go far you do end up with a winner-take-all society that ultimately crushes everybody even worse.”

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“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.”

People Way Made Problem Simple Responsibility Spread Made It One Way Display Html

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“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.”

Source: Who Owns the Future?

“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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“If now isn't a good time for the truth I don't see when we'll get to it.”

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Book:Gemini: an extended autobiographical statement on my first twenty-five years of being a Black poet

Source: Gemini: an extended autobiographical statement on my first twenty-five years of being a Black poet

“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.”

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Book:You Are Not A Gadget: A Manifesto

Source: You Are Not A Gadget: A Manifesto

“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.”

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Book:Who Owns the Future?

Source: Who Owns the Future?

“At the turn of the [21st] century it was really Sergey Brin at Google who just had the thought of, well, if we give away all the information services, but we make money from advertising, we can make information free and still have capitalism. But the problem with that is it reneges on the social contract where people still participate in the formal economy. And it's a kind of capitalism that's totally self-defeating because it's so narrow. It's a winner-take-all capitalism that's not sustaining.”