"Obviously, our children, who have been playing with their computers since the age of five or six, don't have quite the same brain as those who were brought up on wooden or metal toys, whose brains are certainly atrophied by comparison"
About this Quote
A provocation disguised as parental common sense, Vorilhon’s line uses the language of obviousness to smuggle in a hierarchy: digital kids are evolution’s winners, everyone else is literally diminished. The trick is in the faux-scientific framing. “Don’t have quite the same brain” sounds like sober neuroscience, but it’s really a vibe argument backed by a loaded metaphor. “Atrophied” isn’t just “less practiced”; it’s bodily decay, a word that turns childhood nostalgia into pathology.
As a celebrity figure, Vorilhon is leveraging cultural anxiety rather than peer-reviewed evidence. The quote lands in a long-running media script: each new technology arrives as both salvation and threat, and the loudest voices often speak in absolutes because absolutes travel. Calling the difference “obvious” shuts down debate while inviting the listener to feel either smug (if you’re raising iPad natives) or defensive (if you aren’t). It’s a neat rhetorical two-step: claim empathy for “our children,” then pivot to contempt for the “wooden or metal toys” generation.
The subtext is less about computers than authority. If the young are biologically upgraded, then older institutions - schools, governments, skeptics - can be dismissed as cognitively obsolete. That framing conveniently flatters a futurist worldview and reframes cultural change as natural selection, not politics, pedagogy, or economics. The quote works because it turns a messy question (what do screens do to us?) into an easy status contest, then pretends the scoreboard is biology.
As a celebrity figure, Vorilhon is leveraging cultural anxiety rather than peer-reviewed evidence. The quote lands in a long-running media script: each new technology arrives as both salvation and threat, and the loudest voices often speak in absolutes because absolutes travel. Calling the difference “obvious” shuts down debate while inviting the listener to feel either smug (if you’re raising iPad natives) or defensive (if you aren’t). It’s a neat rhetorical two-step: claim empathy for “our children,” then pivot to contempt for the “wooden or metal toys” generation.
The subtext is less about computers than authority. If the young are biologically upgraded, then older institutions - schools, governments, skeptics - can be dismissed as cognitively obsolete. That framing conveniently flatters a futurist worldview and reframes cultural change as natural selection, not politics, pedagogy, or economics. The quote works because it turns a messy question (what do screens do to us?) into an easy status contest, then pretends the scoreboard is biology.
Quote Details
| Topic | Technology |
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