Life & Wisdom Quote by Clive James

Modern life runs on a comforting illusion: that machines are polite, neutral helpers until summoned. Clive James punctures that fantasy with a line that lands like a deadpan diagnosis. The power of technology, he suggests, isn’t most visible in its smooth functioning but in the moment it fails and exposes how thoroughly it has reorganized your day, your attention, your dependencies. A broken elevator doesn’t just inconvenience you; it suddenly redraws the building. A crashed server doesn’t just lose files; it freezes payroll, hospitals, flights, memory.

James’s wit is in the reversal. We tend to read “power” as speed, muscle, capacity. He frames it as leverage: the ability to interrupt, to compel human improvisation, to reveal the hidden scaffolding of routines we no longer notice. When machines “go wrong,” they stop being background infrastructure and become protagonists. That shift is the subtext: technology’s dominance is easiest to deny precisely because it’s frictionless. The smoother the system, the more invisible the bargain we’ve made with it.

Context matters here: James wrote as a cultural critic attuned to how modernity sells itself as convenience while quietly concentrating control in systems most people don’t understand. The line anticipates our current era of algorithmic black boxes and brittle networks. We don’t feel the grid’s authority when the lights are on. We feel it when they aren’t, and suddenly our competence looks like a user agreement.