Science & Tech Quote by Steve Buyer

There is a politician's tell in the phrase "we got it wrong": it flatters the listener with candor while quietly reclaiming credit for the arc of progress. Steve Buyer is not confessing failure so much as narrating a hard-earned lesson about how technological futures actually arrive: not as single-purpose revolutions, but as messy convergences. By anchoring the memory in "1996" and "compression technology", he invokes a specific, wonky moment in telecom history when bandwidth was scarce and voice looked like the killer app. The date functions like a receipt. It signals expertise, not nostalgia.

The pivot to "voice, video, and data" is doing political work. It's a triplet that sounds inevitable, comprehensive, and bipartisan - a tidy taxonomy that turns the chaotic internet into something governable. In that sense, the line is less about cell phones than about the legitimacy of policy and regulatory decisions that either anticipated or enabled the multi-service mobile world. Buyer frames the present as the logical endpoint of earlier debates, implying that institutions (and the people who staffed them) mattered.

The closing gesture, "and that is what we have today on these cell phones", lands as a pocket-sized civic myth: technological abundance as proof of national competence. It compresses a decade-plus of corporate bets, standards fights, spectrum allocation, and consumer behavior into a simple object nearly everyone carries. The subtext is reassurance: the future may surprise us, but it still arrives in forms we can point to, hold up, and call progress.