PERSON
Jaron Lanier
American computer scientist, composer, and author (b. 1960) who coined the term 'virtual reality,' founded
VPL Research in 1984, and then spent the subsequent decades becoming the technology industry's most structurally uncomfortable critic — an insider whose authority makes his critique impossible to dismiss.
Jaron Lanier's career has two acts, separated by a turn so pronounced that it has become the organizing feature of his public identity. In the first act — roughly 1984 to 2000 — he built virtual reality. He founded
VPL Research, coined the term 'virtual reality,' sold immersive systems to NASA and the military, appeared on magazine covers, and became for a moment the public face of computing's most ambitious
promise. In the second act — roughly 2000 to the present — he turned around. Not away from technology, but toward the industry's internal workings, asking questions about whose labor built the systems and who was paid. The turn produced three books —
You Are Not a Gadget (2010),
Who Owns the Future? (2013), and
Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now (2018) — that have become foundational texts of contemporary technology criticism. Throughout the second act, Lanier