Science & Tech Quote by John Patrick

Relativity is doing double duty here: it’s a philosophical wink and a consumer-tech slap. Patrick opens with a line that sounds like Einstein-by-way-of-the-barroom, then immediately weaponizes it against a familiar kind of hype. “Is the Internet fast?” is less a question than a cross-examination. The punchline is that “fast” and “always on” aren’t qualities of the Internet as some abstract marvel; they’re privileges distributed by infrastructure, geography, and income.

The quote is built like a miniature stage scene: a confident claim (“Everything is relative”), two leading questions, and a reveal that undercuts the audience’s assumed baseline. The subtext is impatience with tech evangelism that confuses early adopters for the public. Cable modem and DSL users become a symbolic elite - not morally, but statistically - whose experience gets misreported as the norm. Patrick is calling out a rhetorical trick that still thrives: marketers and pundits describe the best-case scenario, then speak as if it’s already universal.

Context matters. If this was written in the dial-up-to-broadband transition era, “always on” was a lifestyle shift, not a default setting. Patrick’s line reads like a warning label on progress: new technology doesn’t arrive evenly; it arrives as a patchwork. The intent isn’t to sneer at the Internet, but to puncture complacency - to remind us that describing the world from the vantage point of a “tiny percentage” is how inequality gets narrated as inevitability.