Quotessence
Home / Quotes / Quote by Jaron Lanier

Quote by Jaron Lanier

“I was immediately obsessed with the potential for multiple people to share such a place, and to achieve a new type of consensus reality, and it seemed to me that a “social version” of the virtual world would have to be called virtual reality. This in turn required that people would have bodies in VR so that they could see each other, and so on, but all that would have to wait for computers to get better. I was fifteen years old and vibrating with excitement. I had to tell someone, anyone. I would find myself running out the library door so that I didn’t have to keep quiet; rushing up to strangers on the sidewalk out in the hard New Mexico sunshine. “You have to look at this! We’ll be able to put each other in dreams using computers! Anything you can imagine! It’s not just going to be in our heads anymore!” I’d then wave a picture of a cube in front of a random, poor soul, and that person would politely navigate around me. Why were people so blind to the most amazing thing happening in the world?”

Quote by Jaron Lanier

Work

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

“Paralyzed Reality (The Sonnet) Newspaper to smartphone, rabbit r1 to apple vision pro, social disconnection only changes face, nothing more. Nobody is busy enough to need VR while walking. People are meant to own tech, Yet the opposite is happening. Every tech has its place and purpose, How many reminders are enough reminder! First you buried your head in your phone, Now you walk around as donkeys with blinker. Companies are not to blame, Real culprit is consumer idiocy. In a world of unawareness, VR and AR make paralyzed reality.”

“Wings of passion She appears in flashes of past moments, In every feeling, in every emotion, in every sensation, but in segments, Where past always sails into the present, In ways surreal and sometimes too decadent, Until you feel you are leading a life that now belongs partly to the past, Where you felt her and kissed her the last, Then the present evaporates, leaving behind only the moments lived long ago, And the heart rushes there where the mind dares not to go, A past that has no end, because it always begins in the present, And then I feel covered in her scent, Now past too disappears and time does not appear to exist anywhere, Because now I feel just like her scent, everything and everywhere, And all feelings get recreated, giving birth to endless emotions and a new sensation, And from them I seek my moments of salvation, Because now she is the undying and never quitting sensation, Achieved after the ultimate act of emotional distillation, Where present disappears, past does not exist and only her memories appear as flashes of feelings, To become the mind’s refuge and the heart’s ever stretching wings, Leading it into the world where she is the sky, And in it and unto it, the heart loves to fly, And now she appears like the beauty’s self manifesting expression, In every feeling, in every emotion, in every sensation; as the heart spreads its wings of passion!”

“Pre-forty, you can wash your face with Tide and use Vaseline for moisturizer, toss on a little mascara and lip gloss, and you're a friggin' cover girl. Those of us on the slippery slope that is the Other Side of Forty can testify-- those days are so over. You pore over labels promising everything short of actual rebirth-- you will buy most of them for an average of $450 per quarter once-- and none of them will work. You will still be getting older and poorer with every passing purchase.”