Faith & Spirit Quote by Jon Postel

There is a sly, almost embarrassed swagger in Postel framing his legend as something other people “called” him. The line performs humility while still leaving the crown on his head. It’s the rhetorical equivalent of a shrug that happens to reveal a halo: I didn’t appoint myself, but let’s not pretend the myth isn’t real.

The context makes the boast less about ego than about governance. Postel wasn’t a celebrity coder; he was an architect-caretaker of the early Internet, the person who effectively stewarded naming and numbering when the network was still a research commons held together by trust, email threads, and handshakes disguised as “Requests for Comments.” Calling him a “God” captures an uncomfortable truth about that era: a supposedly decentralized system relied on a few intensely competent humans and a culture of deference. Power wasn’t only in protocols; it lived in who maintained the root files, who replied first, who everyone trusted to be boringly right.

The subtext is also a warning. If the Internet can produce “gods,” it’s not because the technology demands worship; it’s because communities outsource accountability to a single reliable operator until reliability turns into authority. Postel’s legacy sits at that hinge point between idealism and institutionalization: the moment when the network outgrew personal stewardship and needed formal structures, because reverence is not a scaling strategy.