Jaron Lanier

Foreword

By Edo Segal

The person who unsettled me most was the one who had built the thing first.

Not a philosopher peering in from the outside. Not a journalist summarizing what they'd been told. A computer scientist who coined the term "virtual reality," who built the first commercial headsets with his own hands, who sold the dream of immersive digital worlds to NASA and the military and anyone who would listen — and who then spent the next two decades explaining, with the patience of someone correcting the same error for the thousandth time, that the dream had been hijacked.

Jaron Lanier bothered me because I could not dismiss him. I have spent my career dismissing critics who do not build. It is easy. They lack the scars. They do not know