Science & Tech Quote by Robert Shea

A prosperous industry, Shea suggests, is often an industry already in retreat. The bite of his line is in the word “instructive”: this isn’t a lament, it’s a diagnostic. Watch what happens, he implies, when a field stops being a frontier and starts being a franchise. As money and “importance” pile up, the computer business doesn’t merely mature; it sheds the very qualities that made it feel like a subculture with a cause.

The phrasing is a quiet act of satire. “Decline” is measured not in technical competence or market share but in “vision, idealism, creativity, romance and sheer fun” - values that sound almost embarrassing next to quarterly earnings. Shea stacks them like a lost syllabus, then lands the punchline: the decline happens “as it becomes more and more important and prosperous.” That reversal is the whole trick. Success isn’t the reward for imagination; it’s the solvent that washes imagination out.

Context matters. Shea lived through the 20th century’s repeated pattern of insurgent technologies hardening into institutions: aviation, radio, television, then computing. In early computing lore, the myth is garage-born ingenuity and utopian possibility; in corporate adulthood, the logic shifts to risk management, standardization, legal defensibility, and products designed to offend no one and lock everyone in.

The subtext is less nostalgia than warning: when an industry starts calling itself “important,” it begins policing its own dreams. Prosperity buys power, and power buys caution. Shea is tracing how fun dies - not from failure, but from winning.