Jaron Lanier's Interview Pretty Much Sums Why I left Silicon Valley & More

Social media was in some ways “worse than cigarettes,” in that cigarettes don't degrade you. They kill you, but you're still you.

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Silicon Valley is a strange place; Lanier occupies an even stranger place within it. There are those, like Mark Zuckerberg, who likely wish he would go away entirely. There are others who think he should have done a better job of cashing out, given his Zelig-like drift through the Valley and his connection to its most influential ideas and characters. “Some of the people I know,” Lanier told me, “will say, you know, ‘You're truly foolish for not having made more money—what is wrong with you?’ ”

The pandemic had only complicated his relationship with his peers, he said. Many people in Silicon Valley were fleeing, to panic bunkers and second homes and survival compounds in New Zealand. Some of them were even inviting Lanier along. “A few people have called me from time to time and said, ‘Hey, you have to get in on our New Zealand thing,’ ” Lanier confided. “I'm like, ‘No.…’ I just feel like, if we can fuck it up here, why can't we fuck up New Zealand? What's better about New Zealand than here? It's even riskier for earthquakes, so the only thing about it that's inviting is we haven't fucked it up yet. This idea that you can fuck up the world, but then there'll be some part of it that you haven't fucked up, is wrong. If you fuck up the world, you fuck up the whole world, you know?”

Lanier had no intention of going anywhere. He was going to ride it out in his carnival house, pay taxes, and try to fix what he could, he said. We were floating in our video chat again. Side by side. Shoulder to shoulder. Okay, I said. So what about the future? I asked. The thing I'd come to talk about. Was the future going to be okay?

Lanier, in effect, said: Maybe.

- Read the interview with Jaron Lanier here