Science & Tech Quote by Peter Davison

Davison’s dismissal lands like a cold splash on the late-20th-century fantasy that new tech automatically upgrades humanity. As an actor, he’s not trying to win a policy argument; he’s puncturing a mood. The repetition of “It’s not going to” works as a stagey incantation, a performer’s rhythm deployed against the breathless evangelism that surrounded the early Internet: the idea that a network could unstick politics, democratize culture, and cleanse human nature of its worst habits.

The specific intent feels less like “the Internet is useless” than “stop projecting your salvation narrative onto a tool.” By narrowing the claim to thinking and feeling, Davison stakes out a stubbornly human center. Technologies can change what we do, how fast we do it, and who gets to do it, but they don’t automatically rewrite the emotional operating system: insecurity, tribalism, desire for status, loneliness. That’s the subtext: the medium may mutate, the motives don’t.

It also carries an actor’s skepticism about “new ways of thinking” rhetoric. Performance is an ancient technology for hacking attention and empathy; Davison has spent his career watching how easily audiences can be moved without being transformed. The line reads like a warning against confusing stimulation with change, connection with intimacy, information with wisdom. In hindsight, its bluntness is almost prophetic: the Internet didn’t replace human psychology so much as scale it, amplify it, and monetize it. Davison’s contrarian stance isn’t anti-progress; it’s anti-messianic, insisting that culture doesn’t get redeemed by bandwidth.