Education Quote by Jaron Lanier

Lanier is taking a scalpel to Silicon Valley's favorite bedtime story: that "the crowd" is inherently smart. He concedes the narrow case where aggregation shines - markets, estimates, anything that collapses into a single number. Pricing an ox is a neat little parable because it flatters data logic: many imperfect guesses converge on something usable. It's also a reminder that crowds do best when the problem is already defined, the criteria agreed upon, and the output measurable.

Then he pivots to where the ideology breaks: design, taste, ethics, meaning. These are not averaging problems; they're argument problems. "Committee" becomes a slur here, not because collaboration is bad, but because committee-thinking often turns creative work into negotiated mush, optimized for least offense rather than most insight. Calling it "crap" is deliberate vulgarity: he's puncturing a technocratic pretension with the language of someone who's watched too many bold ideas die in meeting notes.

The key line is the quiet one: "think thoughts before they share". That's not just about introversion; it's about incubation. Networked culture rewards instant reactions, performative consensus, and the dopamine of being first. Lanier's subtext is that constant sharing doesn't produce collective intelligence; it produces collective reflexes. Coming from an artist who helped build early VR - someone deeply inside the machinery of digital culture - the warning lands as insider critique: platforms can aggregate signals, but they can't manufacture judgment, and they often corrode the solitude that judgment requires.