"I'm very excited about having the Internet in my den"
About this Quote
A line like this lands today as almost comically small-bore, which is exactly why it’s revealing. Steve Jobs, the showman of the technological sublime, isn’t pitching a utopia here. He’s talking about a den. Not “the future,” not “revolution,” just a domestic room where you read, tinker, disappear. The specificity is the point: it shrinks the internet from an abstract network into an appliance of everyday life, a kind of cultural graduation ceremony where the frontier finally gets carpeting.
The intent is both earnest and strategic. Jobs is signaling that connectivity isn’t only for universities, labs, or the office. It’s something you should want where you relax. That’s a subtle shift in power: when a technology moves into the home, it stops being a tool and starts becoming a habit, then an expectation. “Excited” reads as consumer desire, not technical awe; it’s the language of lifestyle, the emotional register Jobs repeatedly used to convert engineering into identity.
The subtext is classic Jobs-era persuasion: the future will arrive not by asking you to learn a new world, but by placing that world exactly where you already are. If the internet belongs in the den, it belongs everywhere. In hindsight, the line captures a hinge moment when being “online” stopped sounding nerdy and started sounding normal. That normalization is where the real revolution hides: not in the rhetoric, but in the room.
The intent is both earnest and strategic. Jobs is signaling that connectivity isn’t only for universities, labs, or the office. It’s something you should want where you relax. That’s a subtle shift in power: when a technology moves into the home, it stops being a tool and starts becoming a habit, then an expectation. “Excited” reads as consumer desire, not technical awe; it’s the language of lifestyle, the emotional register Jobs repeatedly used to convert engineering into identity.
The subtext is classic Jobs-era persuasion: the future will arrive not by asking you to learn a new world, but by placing that world exactly where you already are. If the internet belongs in the den, it belongs everywhere. In hindsight, the line captures a hinge moment when being “online” stopped sounding nerdy and started sounding normal. That normalization is where the real revolution hides: not in the rhetoric, but in the room.
Quote Details
| Topic | Internet |
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