Jaron Lanier

I view advertising as being this romanticizing element that helps us appreciate, understand and enjoy how remarkable it is that we've been able to do so much, and learn so much. I view it as really vital, even though sometimes it can be really annoying.

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.

An intelligent person feels guilty for downloading music without paying the musician, but they use this free-open-culture ideology to cover it.

I think most of the dramatic new ideas come from little companies that then grow big.

Advertisers are not thinking radically enough - they look for technology to lead instead of trying the neuroscience approach and thinking about what parts of the brain haven't been activated before. These new experiences bring new capabilities to the brain.

Writing and thinking is not economically sustainable.

We're losing track of the vastness of the potential for computer science. We really have to revive the beautiful intellectual joy of it, as opposed to the business potential.

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.

When you have a global mush, people lose their identity, they become pseudonyms, they have no investment and no consequence in what they do.

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.

Create a website that expresses something about who you are that won't fit into the template available to you on a social networking site.

Services like Google and Facebook only exist because of the social acceptance of a mass amount of distributed volunteer labor from tons and tons of people.