daniel splittgerber - what I read online

In our conversation about Facebook’s face-recognition software, he added, “It’ll just create a more paranoid society with a fakey-fakey social life—much like what happened in Communist countries, where people had a fake social life that the Stasi could see, and then this underground life.” (…)

Lanier’s desire to shun convention, even while he longs for acceptance, has deep roots. “My dad has sometimes felt that I grew up a little lacking in sufficient eccentricity—in the sense that I’m willing to live as an adult in a house with walls that are parallel to each other, that sort of thing,” Lanier told me. Then he spoke about his mother. “Had she lived, I think I would have been more conventionally successful,” he said. “I think I would be, like, a Harvard Med School professor or something. My dad was more into ‘Be the Buckminster Fuller or the Frank Lloyd Wright’—be the weird outsider who becomes influential. Which is kind of where I ended up.”