When you have a global mush, people lose their identity, they become pseudonyms, they have no investment and no consequence in what they do.
Interpretation
A homogenized global culture can diminish individual identity and accountability.
Jaron Lanier's quote highlights the dangers of a globalized culture that blurs individual identities. In such a context, people may become mere representations or 'pseudonyms' rather than authentic individuals, leading to a lack of personal investment and responsibility for their actions.
In practice
During a lecture on the impact of technology on society, one might quote Lanier to emphasize the loss of individuality.
Pop culture has entered into a nostalgic malaise. Online culture is dominated by trivial mashups of the culture that existed before the onset of mashups, and by fandom responding to the dwindling outposts of centralized mass media. It is a culture of reaction without action.
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.
Separation anxiety is assuaged by constant connection. Young people announce every detail of their lives on services like Twitter not to show off, but to avoid the closed door at bedtime, the empty room, the screaming vacuum of an isolated mind.
Web 2.0 ideas have a chirpy, cheerful rhetoric to them, but I think they consistently express a profound pessimism about humans, human nature and the human future.
Facebook says, 'Privacy is theft,' because they're selling your lack of privacy to the advertisers who might show up one day.
I mean, you can't have advertising be the only official business of the information economy if the information economy is going to take over.
Solitude is a necessary protest to the incursions and the false alarms of society's hysteria, a period of cure and recovery.
As a nuclear power - as the only nuclear power to have used a nuclear weapon - the United States has a moral responsibility to act.
Morality [or ethics] is not a subject; it is a life put to the test in dozens of moments.
The U.S. - the idea that the U.S. has introduced and imposed principles of international law, that's hardly even a joke. The United States has even gone so far as to veto Security Council resolutions calling on all states to observe international law. That was in the 1980s under Reagan.
The world is ruled only by consideration of advantages.
To insult someone we call him 'bestial. For deliberate cruelty and nature, 'human' might be the greater insult.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.