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.
Interpretation
The quote critiques the overly optimistic language used to describe Web 2.0 while hinting at a deeper skepticism regarding humanity's trajectory.
Jaron Lanier's quote highlights a paradox within the discourse surrounding Web 2.0 technologies. While the rhetoric used to promote these ideas often sounds positive and uplifting, it belies a deeper sense of pessimism about human nature and our future. Lanier suggests that, despite the appealing surface, there is an underlying doubt about the capacity of these technologies to enhance human experience and relationships.
In practice
In a technology conference when discussing the impact of social media.
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.
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.
When you have a global mush, people lose their identity, they become pseudonyms, they have no investment and no consequence in what they do.
Social media has allowed groups, such as ISIL, to use the Internet to spot and assess potential recruits. With the widespread horizontal distribution of social media, terrorists can identify vulnerable individuals of all ages in the United States - spot, assess, recruit, and radicalize - either to travel or to conduct a homeland attack.
People thought I was crazy thinking about a phone you can just put in your pocket.
In those days [batch processing] programmers never even documented their programs, because it was assumed that nobody else would ever use them. Now, however, time-sharing had made exchanging software trivial: you just stored one copy in the public repository and therby effectively gave it to the world. Immediately people began to document their programs and to think of them as being usable by others. They started to build on each other's work.
I love what the Valley does. I love company building. I love startups. I love technology companies. I love new technology. I love this process of invention. Being able to participate in that as a founder and a product creator, or as an investor or a board member, I just find that hugely satisfying.
The danger of the Internet is cocooning with the like-minded online - of sending an email or Twitter and confusing that with action - while the real corporate and military and government centers of power go right on.
Now anybody can make music at home, and you can hear music on any computer without having to buy it. Everything is apparently better with all the machines we have now, but at the same time, the quality of life is not improving.
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