Dawn of the New Everything Quotes

“I felt the world needed a tool for the spontaneous invention of new virtual worlds that would express the stuff of the mind that was otherwise impenetrable. If you could conjure just the right virtual world, it would open up souls and math and love.”
― Jaron Lanier, Dawn of the New Everything: Encounters with Reality and Virtual Reality

“Every time you believe in AI, you are reducing your belief in human agency and value. You are undoing yourself and everyone else.”
― Jaron Lanier, Dawn of the New Everything: Encounters with Reality and Virtual Reality

“Cyber” comes from the Greek and is related to navigation. When you sail, you must constantly adjust to changes in wind and surf.”
― Jaron Lanier, Dawn of the New Everything: Encounters with Reality and Virtual Reality

“Nothing about computers is inevitable. But we’ve put such a massive number of bits into place that it’s often too much work to remember how each brick of the edifice we live in is nothing but a peculiar obsession someone else put into place, once upon a time.”
― Jaron Lanier, Dawn of the New Everything: Encounters with Reality and Virtual Reality

“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?”
― Jaron Lanier, Dawn of the New Everything: Encounters with Reality and Virtual Reality

“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?”
― Jaron Lanier, Dawn of the New Everything: Encounters with Reality and Virtual Reality

“You’re wrong, it’s not like I’m from Marin. Those people believe in things without evidence. Like astrology.” “Um, maybe no one told you, but you can’t have sex—ever—if you make fun of astrology around here.”
― Jaron Lanier, Dawn of the New Everything: Encounters with Reality and Virtual Reality

“Like cowboys, hackers supposedly experienced freedom in a wild land that yielded only to our special prowess and expertise. We roamed as we pleased, inventing reality for everyone else. Normal people would wait helplessly as we blazed their new world. What surprised me over the next few decades is that all those alien, “normal” people, all over the globe, chose to buy into our myth. You let us reinvent your world! I’m still curious why.”
― Jaron Lanier, Dawn of the New Everything: Encounters with Reality and Virtual Reality

“My early experience was of the dominance of flavor over form, of qualia over explanation.”
― Jaron Lanier, Dawn of the New Everything: Encounters with Reality and Virtual Reality