More than two decades ago, WIRED ran its first profile of VR pioneer and author Jaron Lanier. We wrote "Yea, though he has walked through the valley of silicon, he fears no evil. His music and his software comfort him, and having survived reasonably intact he can only revel in the exquisite wonder of it all." Since then, Lanier has been a fierce critic of Silicon Valley and a fierce critic of where technology has gone—and it always comes back to music and spirituality. We sat down with him at our WIRED 25 festival in October.

(This interview has been condensed and edited.)

Nicholas Thompson: Jaron, for you it's not about product, it's not about efficiency, it's never about money. It always comes down to music and spirituality. And reading some of your recent writings, it seems like you're actually a little worried about what technology has done to our spiritual health as humans. So why don't we start with your critique of social media.

Jaron Lanier: To me, criticism and optimism are the same thing. When you criticize things, it's because you think they can be improved. It's the complacent person or the fanatic who's the true pessimist, because they feel they already have the answer. It's the people who think that things are open-ended, that things can still be changed through thought, through creativity---those are the true optimists. So I worry, sure, but it's optimistic worry.

Also, to me, a sense of the world being open-ended is absolutely core to being a good scientist, a good technologist, a good writer, a good artist, or just a good human being. We're surrounded by a sea of mystery.

I used to imagine this tightrope that you have to walk: On one side you fall into a kind of excessive, nerd-supremacy reductionism, and then everything becomes kind of meaningless, because you've made yourself blind with some abstraction that you think explains everything. And on the other side is superstition, where you start to say, "Well, we don't really understand how quantum field theory and general relativity connect, so it must mean that my mind can talk to plants." And it’s about finding this point in between. There is mystery, and the way to address that mystery is with rigor. It's with self-doubt, with intellectual modesty, where you don't assume narratives that are really beyond your reach. But at the same time, you believe in a destination and a quest for meaning that's totally beyond your reach. And you quest for it incrementally. That tightrope, I think, is where technology can improve. It's where beauty can happen and where relationships can be real.

NT: Well let's let's talk about the technology part of walking that tightrope, and particularly about social media platforms. What is the role that they should play in keeping society at the right point as we progress on the tightrope?

JL: That’s an interesting way to phrase it. It’s a top-down assumption that they have a role in keeping society a certain way.

NT: Well, they do. They have a role in influencing where we are.

"They use this weird business model where, any time two people connect, it's financed by a third person whose only motive is to manipulate those two in a sneaky way."

JL: I've always believed that people connecting using information technology can and should be beautiful and even essential. It’s actually a matter of survival, because we couldn't even understand what the climate's doing without connected devices on an internet.

So it's not even a question that the internet is something we need. When we use the term "social media," what we tend to mean is these giant platforms that have effectively taken over the internet for almost everybody, almost all the time. And they do so using this weird business model where, any time two people connect, it's financed by a third person whose only motive is to manipulate those two in a sneaky way. So this whole architecture is on every level based on sneakiness and manipulation, often using weird behaviorist, hypnotic, unacknowledged techniques to get people more and more engaged or addicted and persuaded, or to get them into compulsive behavior patterns that aren't necessarily in their own interest. That's the thing I criticize.