You Are Not A Gadget

by Jaron Lanier

We shouldn’t seek to make the pack mentality as efficient as possible. We should instead seek to inspire the phenomenon of individual intelligence.

Emphasizing the crowd means deemphasizing individual humans in the design of society, and when you ask people not to be people, they revert to bad moblike behaviors. This leads not only to empowered trolls, but to a generally unfriendly and unconstructive online world.

Spirituality is committing suicide. Consciousness is attempting to will itself out of existence.

The first tenet of this new culture is that all of reality, including humans, is one big information system.

We are happy to enshrine into engineering designs mere hypotheses—and vague ones at that—about the hardest and most profound questions faced by science, as if we already possess perfect knowledge.

are the ones who create successful online fictions about themselves.

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. If content is worthless, then people will start to become empty-headed and contentless.