Success Quote by Nicholas Negroponte

Negroponte’s line is a classic piece of tech-world reframing: it shrinks the machine and inflates the lifestyle. Coming from a businessman who helped popularize the idea of the “digital future” (think MIT Media Lab optimism and 1990s Wired-era evangelism), it reads less like a neutral observation than a strategic pivot. If computing is “about computers,” it’s a product category. If it’s “about living,” it becomes infrastructure - unavoidable, intimate, and morally freighted. That’s how you move from selling hardware to selling a worldview.

The intent is to naturalize computing, to make it feel like electricity or language: something you don’t opt into so much as breathe in. The subtext is a quiet power play. Once computing is life, resistance looks like Luddism, and regulation can be painted as meddling with the human experience itself. The phrase “not about computers any more” also performs an erasure: it downplays the material realities (labor, extraction, surveillance, monopolies) that keep “living” online afloat.

Rhetorically, it works because it’s both true and slippery. Computing really did dissolve into the environment - phones became prosthetics, platforms became public squares, algorithms began mediating taste, work, romance, politics. But the sentence glides past the question of who gets to define “living” in a digitized world. Is it richer connection or engineered attention? Autonomy or ambient monitoring? Negroponte sells the romance of inevitability, inviting you to mistake a business plan for a destiny.