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.
Jaron LanierRead
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.
Interpretation
What this quote means
The quote critiques the current state of pop culture as reactive and lacking originality.
Jaron Lanier comments on the dominance of nostalgia in pop culture, highlighting how current online culture primarily consists of trivial rehashes of previous artistic expressions. He suggests that this trend leads to a culture that is more about reaction than proactive creation, with audiences passively consuming reprocessed material rather than engaging with new ideas.
Themes
Pop CultureNostalgiaReactionCreativityMedia
In practice
Example use cases
During a panel discussion on the future of media, this quote highlights concerns about the lack of innovation.
More from Jaron Lanier
All quotes →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.
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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.
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Facebook says, 'Privacy is theft,' because they're selling your lack of privacy to the advertisers who might show up one day.
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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.
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When you have a global mush, people lose their identity, they become pseudonyms, they have no investment and no consequence in what they do.
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