Quotessence
Home / Quotes / Quote by Jaron Lanier

Quote by 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.”

Quote by Jaron Lanier

Work

Who Owns the Future?

This book delves into the potential consequences of automation and digitalization on employment, income inequality, and the overall structure of the economy. It examines how technological progress might reshape the landscape of work and the distribution of resources, offering insights into the challenges and opportunities that lie ahead. more

Author

Jaron Lanier
Jaron Lanier

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

You May Also Like

“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.”

“The cloud is driven by statistics, and even in the worst individual cases of personal ignorance, dullness, idleness, or irrelevance, every person is constantly feeding data into the cloud these days. The value of such information could be treated as genuine, but it is not. Instead, the blindness of our standards of accounting to all that value is gradually breaking capitalism.”

“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.”