Science & Tech Quote by Marilyn Hacker

Marilyn Hacker isn’t praising the internet so much as staging a negotiation with it: confession first, then justification. “I’m addicted to email” lands like a half-joke and a half-warning, the kind of candid self-indictment that refuses the clean moralism of tech critique. She admits the compulsion up front, then pivots to “practical things,” narrowing the frame from grand utopian promises to the small, stubborn logistics of a working literary life.

The book-buying example is doing more than name-checking convenience. It’s a defense of access, especially for readers and writers outside metropolitan cultural corridors. “A book… you can’t find in your local bookshop” points to how literary circulation actually works: unevenly, gated by distribution, geography, and the quiet biases of what gets stocked. Hacker’s “lifeline” is pointed language for something that’s often treated as a luxury. For poets, translators, and politically engaged readers, the ability to locate the out-of-print, the foreign press, the marginal title isn’t consumer pleasure; it’s oxygen.

There’s also a subtle solidarity embedded in “if you live further from the sources.” The phrase acknowledges a center-periphery model of culture without romanticizing it. The subtext: the internet’s psychic costs are real, but so is the pre-digital exclusion it can sometimes puncture. Hacker’s intent is pragmatic, not starry-eyed: technology as both habit and tool, vice and lifeline, with literature as the measure of what matters.