Science & Tech Quote by Andy Rooney

Rooney’s line lands because it punctures the shiny, self-congratulatory story technology tells about itself. Computers, he concedes, “may save time” - the obligatory nod to progress - then he pivots hard into the mess progress leaves behind: not liberation, but litter. The joke is that the supposed dematerialization of work actually produces more physical residue. Paper becomes the fossil record of our anxiety.

The “98 percent” figure isn’t meant to be audited; it’s a Rooney move, a fake-precise statistic that mimics managerial speak while mocking it. In newsrooms and offices, numbers are used to launder decisions into inevitability. Rooney flips that trick for comedy: his exaggerated accuracy underlines how little of our output is meaningfully consumed. We print because printing feels like proof. A document on a screen can be ignored; a stack of pages at least looks like effort.

The subtext is about attention, not trees. “Garbage that no one ever reads” isn’t just environmental grousing; it’s an indictment of institutional busyness, the kind that equates productivity with artifacts. Computers didn’t invent that impulse, but they industrialized it, making it effortless to generate drafts, duplicates, memos, and versions. Rooney wrote from the late 20th-century transition point - when offices were digitizing while still clinging to paper workflows - and he catches the era’s most enduring irony: new tools don’t automatically make us wiser. They mostly make us faster at creating nonsense.