Communication is now often experienced as a superhuman phenomenon that towers above individuals. A new generation has come of age with a reduced expectation of what a person can be, and of whom each person might become.

— Jaron Lanier

Emphasizing the crowd means de-emphasizing individual humans in the design of society, and when you ask people not to be people, they revert too bad, mob-like behaviors.

— Jaron Lanier

Enduring at the time played in his formulation of the test.

— Jaron Lanier

If there's any object in human experience that's a precedent for what a computer should be like, it's a musical instrument: a device where you can explore a huge range of possibilities through an interface that connects your mind and your body, allowing you to be emotionally authentic and expressive.

— Jaron Lanier

Information wants to be free.' So goes the saying. Stewart Brand, the founder of the Whole Earth Catalog, seems to have said it first. I say that information doesn't deserve to be free. Cybernetic totalists love to think of the stuff as if it were alive and had its own ideas and ambitions. But what if information is inanimate? What if it's even less than inanimate, a mere artifact of human thought? What if only humans are real, and information is not?... Information is alienated experience.

— Jaron Lanier

I think complexity is mostly sort of crummy stuff that is there because it's too expensive to change the interface.

— Jaron Lanier

It is impossible to work in information technology without also engaging in social engineering.

— Jaron Lanier

It will not suffer if it doesn’t get what it wants.

— Jaron Lanier

I've always felt that the human-centered approach to computer science leads to more interesting, more exotic, more wild, and more heroic adventures than the machine-supremacy approach, where information is the highest goal.

— Jaron Lanier

Linux is a superbly polished copy of an antique - shinier than the original, perhaps, but still defined by it.

— Jaron Lanier