#compute

Emphasizing the crowd means de-emphasizing individual humans in the design of society, and when you ask people not to be people, they revert to bad, mob-like behaviors. ↗

— Jaron Lanier

#crowd #individuality #internet #mob #technology

Something like missionary reductionism has happened to the internet with the rise of web 2.0. The strangeness is being leached away by the mush-making process. Individual web pages as they first appeared in the early 1990S had the flavor of personhood. MySpace preserved some of that flavor, though a process of regularized formatting had begun. Facebook went further, organizing people into multiple-choice identities, while Wikipedia seeks to erase point of view entirely. If a church or government were doing these things, it would feel authoritarian, but when technologists are the culprits, we seem hip, fresh, and inventive. People will accept ideas presented in technological form that would be abhorrent in any other form. It is utterly strange to hear my many old friends in the world of digital culture claim to be the true sons of the Renaissance without realizing that using computers to reduce individual expression is a primitive, retrograde activity, no matter how sophisticated your tools are. ↗

— Jaron Lanier

#facebook #internet #myspace #technology #web

It’s great that a song now costs exactly the same as a pack of gum and lasts exactly the same amount of time before it loses its flavour and you have to spend another buck. ↗

— Jonathan Franzen

#mp #music

People are so bad at driving cars that computers don't have to be that good to be much better. Any time you stand in line at the D.M.V. and look around, you're like, Oh, my God, I wish all these people were replaced by computer drivers. ↗

— Marc Andreessen

#around #bad #better #cars #computer

We have never lived in a time with the opportunity to put a computer in the pocket of 5 billion people. ↗

— Marc Andreessen

#computer #lived #never #opportunity #people

Here's where I luck out: I'm really computer illiterate. ↗

— Jennifer Aniston

#here #i #illiterate #luck #out

One of the most feared expressions in modern times is 'The computer is down.' ↗

— Norman Ralph Augustine

#computer #down #expressions #feared #modern

One thing I was thinking about the other day was you can't even conceive of the kinds of things you can do in movies today. The idea that you could draw, in a computer, dinosaurs and have them running around was totally impossible. ↗

— John Badham

#around #computer #conceive #could #day

The computer offers another kind of creativity. You cannot ignore the creativity that computer technology can bring. But you need to be able to move between those two different worlds. ↗

— Tadao Ando

#another #between #bring #cannot #computer

Part of the inhumanity of the computer is that, once it is competently programmed and working smoothly, it is completely honest. ↗

— Isaac Asimov

#completely #computer #honest #inhumanity #once