I’ve always thought Jaron Lanier was an irritating douchebag, and here he goes again demonstrating just why.

“I’d had a career as a professional musician and what I started to see is that once we made information free, it wasn’t that we consigned all the big stars to the bread lines.” (They still had mega-concert tour profits.)

“Instead, it was the middle-class people who were consigned to the bread lines. And that was a very large body of people. And all of a sudden there was this weekly ritual, sometimes even daily: ‘Oh, we need to organize a benefit because so and so who’d been a manager of this big studio that closed its doors has cancer and doesn’t have insurance. We need to raise money so he can have his operation.’

Does he not see the problem is worship of corporations and lack of things such as public health care, worker protection, and regulation of the power of corporate entities? Can he really be that dumb?

That’s not the only stupid thing he says in the article (in fact, everything he says is symptomatic of severe brain damage), but I do know if I were a budding band or musician I’d be doing everything possible to get my music on every file sharing service I could possibly find – as really the only thing valuable to a musician early on is exposure.

And the numbers I’ve seen bear this out, and firmly oppose what Lanier is stating.

I’ve always hated the guy, ever since I remember reading about him in the late 80s. He’s always been a putz, so I expect nothing less of him than this sort of thing.