Jaron Lanier says a lot of things about social media that are correct in
this interview, but they're things I'm already familiar with. This statement jumped out at me, though:
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.
I'm impressed that he's going to stay and fight and think maybe I should stay and fight. The problem is that the fight may be futile, especially if the problem is Americans, not the various very real systems tricking and oppressing them. I have to acknowledge that that's a possibility at this point.
If it is futile, the reasonable thing to do is to escape the country, as
brownpau had the foresight to do two years ago. I've often said that, while I stall on this decision, I feel like a frog sitting in water that is steadily boiling.