PERSON
Jaron Lanier
The virtual-reality pioneer turned inside critic who argues that AI systems built on uncredited human data are committing a slow theft against the very people whose creativity they consume—and that paying for that data is the only path to a digital economy that doesn't eat its own future.
Before almost anyone else in the technology industry, Jaron Lanier saw the machine clearly. He had helped build it: in 1984 he co-founded VPL Research, coined the term “virtual reality,” and sold immersive systems to NASA and the military. Then, in the early 2000s, he turned around and looked at what the industry was actually constructing—and the image troubled him. The platforms designed to liberate expression were concentrating wealth; the networks meant to connect people were isolating them; the AI systems trained on
large language models were ingesting oceans of human creativity and returning the proceeds to a handful of
siren servers rather than to the humans whose insight had made the ingestion possible. His response was not to quit—Lanier remains a working technologist—but to insist that the extraction model is both unjust and self-defeating, and that
data dignity offers a practical way out. Where
surveillance capitalism treats