Time & Perspective Quote by Dave Foley

The line lands with the kind of hopeful suspicion you expect from a comedian who watched gatekeepers up close: praise the Internet, then immediately circle the sharks. Foley frames the web not as a shiny gadget but as leverage - a way to pry open a cultural marketplace that used to be run like a company town. The key move is his pairing of "information and entertainment", treating news and culture as twin currencies controlled by the same handful of owners. That’s a subtle accusation: when distribution is centralized, even jokes travel on someone else’s terms.

His intent is democratic but not starry-eyed. "Breaking down the power structure" is activist language smuggled into a casual "I think". It suggests he knows how quickly utopian tech talk gets mocked, especially by comics, so he softens the rhetoric while still naming the enemy: multinationals. The subtext is less "the Internet is good" than "consolidation is corrosive". He’s pointing at the pre-streaming reality where a few studios, labels, and networks could make you invisible by simply not picking up the phone.

Context matters: Foley came out of an era when comedy careers depended on a small set of TV slots, development deals, and corporate advertisers. The Internet didn’t just offer new audiences; it offered new permission structures - niche fandoms, direct-to-fan distribution, and the possibility of success without institutional blessing. At the same time, his wording reads like a warning label from the future: the problem isn’t that technology fails, it’s that ownership metastasizes. The joke, if there is one, is how quickly the "tool" can be bought back.