"I consider high-speed data transmission an invention that became a major innovation. It changed the way we all communicate"
About this Quote
Kamen’s line is a subtle flex disguised as plainspoken gratitude: it draws a hard line between an invention (a technical breakthrough) and an innovation (a breakthrough that actually reorganizes daily life). Coming from an inventor who’s spent a career trying to turn engineering into lived reality, the distinction isn’t academic. It’s a worldview. The subtext is that clever hardware isn’t the point; adoption is the point. The real achievement isn’t faster bits, it’s the new social choreography those bits enable.
High-speed data transmission is an intentionally unglamorous hero. He doesn’t name the internet, fiber, cellular, or Wi-Fi; he points to the enabling layer. That choice frames modern communication as infrastructure rather than magic. It’s also a quiet reminder that the technologies we treat as cultural inevitabilities were contingent engineering bets that had to scale, standardize, and become cheap enough to disappear into the background.
The phrasing “we all” matters. It stakes a claim about universality, but it also papers over the unevenness: who gets broadband, who gets left with spotty service, who pays more for less. Kamen’s optimism carries the classic inventor’s bias toward connectivity as net good, while sidestepping what that connectivity drags along: surveillance, attention economies, misinformation at machine speed. In that tension, the quote lands. It captures why high-speed transmission feels less like a gadget and more like a rewiring of society: it didn’t just improve communication, it changed what communication is allowed to be.
High-speed data transmission is an intentionally unglamorous hero. He doesn’t name the internet, fiber, cellular, or Wi-Fi; he points to the enabling layer. That choice frames modern communication as infrastructure rather than magic. It’s also a quiet reminder that the technologies we treat as cultural inevitabilities were contingent engineering bets that had to scale, standardize, and become cheap enough to disappear into the background.
The phrasing “we all” matters. It stakes a claim about universality, but it also papers over the unevenness: who gets broadband, who gets left with spotty service, who pays more for less. Kamen’s optimism carries the classic inventor’s bias toward connectivity as net good, while sidestepping what that connectivity drags along: surveillance, attention economies, misinformation at machine speed. In that tension, the quote lands. It captures why high-speed transmission feels less like a gadget and more like a rewiring of society: it didn’t just improve communication, it changed what communication is allowed to be.
Quote Details
| Topic | Internet |
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