"It's been my policy to view the Internet not as an 'information highway,' but as an electronic asylum filled with babbling loonies"
About this Quote
Royko’s line lands because it punctures the era’s favorite techno-utopian metaphor with a nastier, funnier one. The “information highway” was booster-speak: sleek, efficient, vaguely patriotic, a place where progress allegedly flowed in orderly lanes. Royko swaps it for “electronic asylum,” a phrase that yanks the Internet out of the realm of infrastructure and into the realm of human behavior. He’s not arguing that the web lacks information; he’s saying the dominant feature is the people, unfiltered and unembarrassed, performing their minds in public.
The insult is doing double duty. “Babbling loonies” is comic exaggeration, but it’s also a refusal to grant the new medium automatic legitimacy. In Royko’s newspaper-bred worldview, gatekeeping wasn’t just elitism; it was an editing function that kept the loudest crank from being mistaken for the truest voice. The subtext is a warning about scale: the Internet doesn’t create irrationality, it industrializes its distribution and gives it the glow of publication.
Context matters. Royko died in 1997, before social media, before algorithmic feeds, before “misinformation” became a policy word. Yet his joke anticipates the core tension of the digital public square: radical access means radical noise. The line also carries a columnist’s suspicion of mass enthusiasms. He hears a sales pitch and answers with a civic-minded sneer: if you want to understand this technology, don’t look at the cables; listen to the shouting.
The insult is doing double duty. “Babbling loonies” is comic exaggeration, but it’s also a refusal to grant the new medium automatic legitimacy. In Royko’s newspaper-bred worldview, gatekeeping wasn’t just elitism; it was an editing function that kept the loudest crank from being mistaken for the truest voice. The subtext is a warning about scale: the Internet doesn’t create irrationality, it industrializes its distribution and gives it the glow of publication.
Context matters. Royko died in 1997, before social media, before algorithmic feeds, before “misinformation” became a policy word. Yet his joke anticipates the core tension of the digital public square: radical access means radical noise. The line also carries a columnist’s suspicion of mass enthusiasms. He hears a sales pitch and answers with a civic-minded sneer: if you want to understand this technology, don’t look at the cables; listen to the shouting.
Quote Details
| Topic | Internet |
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