Science & Tech Quote by Steve Jobs

Jobs is doing what he did best: selling ambivalence as a kind of clarity. He opens with the classic Silicon Valley promise that technology shrinks distance and expands possibility, a soft utopian pitch that sounds almost civic-minded. Then he pivots, almost parenthetically, into a confession that functions like a disclaimer and a flex at the same time: every tool has a shadow, and anyone serious about building the future has to admit that.

Calling television "the most corrosive piece of technology" isn’t just a jab at a rival medium; it’s a moral diagnosis. TV, for Jobs, stands for passivity, lowest-common-denominator incentives, and a one-way stream that turns attention into a commodity. It’s also a tidy antagonist for the Apple ethos he cultivated: interactive, personal, authored. The subtext is competitive as much as philosophical: our devices are not like that, or at least they don’t have to be.

Then comes the turn: "at its best, is magnificent". That’s the crucial rhetorical move because it reframes the problem away from technology as destiny and toward technology as curation. The medium isn’t evil; the default settings are. Jobs is implicitly arguing for taste, design, and gatekeeping, the idea that great products and great content can redeem the same machinery that enables junk.

Contextually, this lands in the late-20th/early-21st century media panic cycle: fears about TV’s brain-rotting effects, paired with evangelism for the internet’s connective potential. Jobs threads that needle by positioning himself not as a naive futurist, but as a builder with judgment - someone who understands that what corrodes us is often what entertains us, and that the fight is over who gets to shape the "best" version.