Time & Perspective Quote by Philip Greenspun

Greenspun’s line reads like a shrug, but it’s a carefully aimed shrug: a confession that doubles as a manifesto for the early Web. He frames “a novel” as the gold standard for turning lived experience into art, then immediately undercuts it with two blunt admissions: time is scarce, craft is hard. The punch comes in the last clause - “so I slapped it up on the Web” - where the offhand verb does a lot of cultural work. “Slapped” implies speed, imperfection, even a little contempt for polish. It’s also a flex: the Web lets you publish anyway.

The intent isn’t self-pity; it’s a recalibration of legitimacy. Greenspun positions the Internet as an alternative pipeline for ideas that would otherwise die in drafts or never survive the gatekeeping of traditional publishing. The subtext is that “better writing” is often a luxury good, while “same ideas and experiences” are the real payload. If you can’t afford the time to sculpt them into fiction, you can still distribute them as lived documentation.

Context matters: this is the voice of a scientist/engineer steeped in a culture that prizes shipping over sanding. In that world, a rough public version beats a perfect private one. The line captures a turning point when the Web democratized authorship and made a new kind of credibility possible: not literary prestige, but usefulness, reach, and the audacity to hit publish.