Science & Tech Quote by Jerry Brown

Jerry Brown plays the heretic here: he grants the obvious seduction of the digital age, then yanks the halo off it. The opening is deliberately plain, almost gee-whiz, as if he’s trying to disarm the listener before the real move. By calling computers and the Internet "a tool", he strips them of their Silicon Valley theology - no destiny, no inevitability, no moral upgrade baked into the code. Tools don’t redeem you; they just amplify whatever system is holding them.

The line that does the work is "don’t be misled". It’s a warning against a particular American habit: confusing new machinery with social progress. Brown’s subtext is that tech optimism functions as anesthesia. If you can be dazzled by faster communication and slicker interfaces, you’re less likely to notice stagnant wages, precarious labor, financialization, and the way "innovation" often means extracting more value from fewer people.

"Degenerate economic system" is intentionally provocative, a politician’s way of saying the rot isn’t cultural taste but structural incentives. He’s not arguing that the Internet is inherently corrupt; he’s arguing it is currently deployed as an accessory to an economy that rewards surveillance, monopoly, and speed over durability, care, or democratic accountability.

Context matters: Brown is a California politician who watched the state become both the cradle of counterculture and the headquarters of platform capitalism. The quote reads like someone who’s seen utopian rhetoric get repackaged as venture-backed inevitability - and is trying, pointedly, to separate the gadget from the gospel.