"Back in 1995, Bill Gates himself didn't understand that the internet was the direction computing was going"
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The jab lands because it punctures a comforting myth: that the people who end up winning in tech always saw the future first. Podhoretz isn’t really litigating a timeline detail about Bill Gates; he’s using Gates as a symbol of elite confidence meeting technological discontinuity. The year stamp, “1995,” does double duty. It’s close enough to feel recent (not some prehistoric era of punch cards), yet far enough to sound damning. If the most famous software executive in America could miss what was coming, then the rest of our “visionaries” deserve a side-eye.
The intent is corrective and faintly scolding: stop treating power as proof of foresight. Podhoretz, a writer steeped in political argument, deploys a familiar conservative-cultural move here: skepticism toward expert class narratives, especially when those narratives get retrofitted after victory. The subtext is that today’s authorities - in business, media, even politics - are likely just as fallible, and that institutional certainty often lags behind messy reality.
Context matters. In the mid-90s, Microsoft’s relationship to the web was famously ambivalent before its pivot, and tech history has since been rewritten into neat hero arcs. The line weaponizes that gap between what actually happened (confusion, delay, course correction) and the legend we prefer (genius, inevitability). It works because it’s less about dunking on Gates than about demoting “inevitable progress” to what it often is: hindsight with good PR.
The intent is corrective and faintly scolding: stop treating power as proof of foresight. Podhoretz, a writer steeped in political argument, deploys a familiar conservative-cultural move here: skepticism toward expert class narratives, especially when those narratives get retrofitted after victory. The subtext is that today’s authorities - in business, media, even politics - are likely just as fallible, and that institutional certainty often lags behind messy reality.
Context matters. In the mid-90s, Microsoft’s relationship to the web was famously ambivalent before its pivot, and tech history has since been rewritten into neat hero arcs. The line weaponizes that gap between what actually happened (confusion, delay, course correction) and the legend we prefer (genius, inevitability). It works because it’s less about dunking on Gates than about demoting “inevitable progress” to what it often is: hindsight with good PR.
Quote Details
| Topic | Internet |
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