I'm astonished at how readily a great many people I know, young people, have accepted a reduced economic prospect and limited freedoms in any substantial sense, and basically traded them for being able to screw around online.
Interpretation
The quote criticizes the willingness of young people to sacrifice their economic potential and personal freedoms for online distractions.
Jaron Lanier expresses his astonishment at the acceptance among many young individuals of a diminished economic future and restricted freedoms, which they seem to willingly trade for the ephemeral pleasures and distractions of the online world. This observation sheds light on how modern technology, particularly social media and online entertainment, can have a significant impact on people's values and choices, leading them to prioritize immediate online gratification over more substantial life opportunities.
In practice
Use this quote in a discussion about the impact of social media on youth and their future.
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.
What makes the IoT a disruptive technology in the way we organize economic life is that it helps humanity reintegrate itself into the complex choreography of the biosphere, and by doing so, dramatically increases productivity without compromising the ecological relationships that govern the planet.
We don't need to reject or disparage technology. We need to put it in its place.
Innovation has nothing to do with how many R & D dollars you have. When Apple came up with the Mac, IBM was spending at least 100 times more on R & D. It's not about money. It's about the people you have, how you're led, and how much you get it.
Our enthusiasm for digital technology about which we have little understanding and over which we have little control leads us not toward greater agency, but toward less...We have surrendered the unfolding of a new technological age to a small elite who have seized the capability on offer. But while Renaissance kings maintained their monopoly over the printing press by force, today's elite is depending on little more than our own disinterest.
Digital presentation is just television in public; we're all just getting together and watching TV without pointing the remote control at the screen.
Without big data analytics, companies are blind and deaf, wandering out onto the Web like deer on a freeway.
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