Jaron Lanier Quotes

If the social media platforms don't take the gatekeeping seriously they will kill the public sphere. If we don't get this right in 2020 you can open a decade or longer of a descent into fascism. And it will be global because platforms are global.

The Internet can empower groups whose aims are in fact antithetical to democracy.

The political danger of the Internet is that it becomes another tool for special interests.

Everything is accessible to everyone all the time, and I think there are wondrous things to treasure with what the Internet has made available to journalists. But I think it's also had some effects that are less pleasant. It has chipped away at a sense of privacy and secrecy.

Google has withdrawn from China, arguing that it is no longer willing to design its search engine to block information that the Chinese government does not wish its citizens to have. In liberal democracies around the world, this decision has generally been greeted with enthusiasm.

Increasingly, I'm finding myself uncomfortable about how the Internet's developing, who's influencing its development, and who is not.

The potential for the abuse of power through digital networks - upon which we the people now depend for nearly everything, including our politics - is one of the most insidious threats to democracy in the Internet age.

It's insane, the Internet. Totally craziness. Like a little cancer. People can just do whatever they want, say whatever they want, be totally anonymous. It's totally out of control.

The Internet is by the people, for the people.

When advertising is involved, you, the user, are the product.

It is not inevitable that the Internet will evolve in a manner compatible with democracy.

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.

Don't underestimate questions from the crowd; technology has made voters more informed than ever.

Web 2.0 is a grand utopian movement. It worships the creative amateur: the self-taught filmmaker, the dorm-room musician, the unpublished writer. It suggests that everyone--even the most poorly educated and inarticulate amongst us--can and should use digital media to express and realize themselves. Web 2.0 "empowers" our creativity, it "democratizes" media, it "levels the playing field" between experts and amateurs. The enemy of Web 2.0 is "elitist" traditional media.

Online censorship, mass and targeted surveillance and data collection, digital attacks on civil society and repression resulting from online expression force individuals around the world to seek security to hold opinions without interference and seek, receive and impart information and ideas of all kinds. Many seek to protect their security through encryption, the scrambling of data so only intended recipients may access it

Our movements and feelings are constantly monitored, because surveillance is the business model of the digital age.

The Internet freedom issue we need to focus on is network neutrality.

In our age of digital connection and constantly online life, you might say that two political regimes are evolving, one Chinese and one Western, which offer two kinds of relationships between the privacy of ordinary citizens and the newfound power of central authorities to track, to supervise, to expose and to surveil.

In addition to all the good things it's done, the Internet has empowered an awful lot of people who would have been best off disempowered, including quite a few bloggers on both sides.

Net neutrality is the right thing for our democracy, economy, and global competitiveness. And Americans support an open Internet.

If you put something online, it's essentially there forever. You don't know who's kept it, who's screenshotted it.

High quality, open, transparent, and uncensored data are needed to support democracy.

People say Facebook connects the world. Facebook has 5,000 Ph.D.s that think about how to make you click on ads you don't want to see. Their business model is about something that most people would not perceive as making the world better.

Facebook has become the richest and most powerful publisher in history by replacing editors with algorithms - shattering the public square into millions of personalised news feeds, shifting entire societies away from the open terrain of genuine debate and argument while they make billions from our valued attention.

There is a saying that if you get something for free, you should know that you're the product. It was never more true than in the case of Facebook and Gmail and YouTube. You get free social-media services, and you get free funny cat videos. In exchange, you give up the most valuable asset you have, which is your personal data.