Science Quote by Alan Kay

Normal is less a discovery than a quorum. Alan Kay, a computer scientist who spent his career watching “impossible” ideas harden into default settings, frames social legitimacy as a network effect: reality by adoption. The language of “threshold” and “voting” borrows from the logic of distributed systems and standards battles, where a technology doesn’t win because it’s best, but because enough nodes agree to treat it as the baseline. Once consensus passes a tipping point, dissent doesn’t just lose; it becomes unintelligible.

Kay’s sly jab is at our appetite for inevitability. Before the threshold, a behavior is “weird,” risky, maybe even punishable. After it, the same crowd that policed it insists on access and rights: “everyone demands to do whatever it is.” That pivot captures how communities launder preferences into principles. We don’t merely tolerate the newly normal; we retrofit moral urgency onto it, as if we’d always been headed there.

The subtext is a warning to anyone who confuses popularity with truth or ethics. “Normal” is a social contract with momentum, not a proof. In practice, this explains everything from workplace norms (remote work went from suspect to expected in a flash) to cultural language shifts, to the way products become “must-haves” once a critical mass adopts them. Kay’s scientist’s eye spots the mechanism: beliefs propagate, lock in, and then impose themselves. The sting is that the process can elevate either liberation or nonsense with the same brutal efficiency.