Time & Perspective Quote by Clifford Stoll

Stoll’s line lands like a confession that doubles as an indictment: the internet doesn’t just steal time, it reroutes belonging. The sentence is built to feel like a slow tightening. He starts with the polite premise of the early web - connection - then flips it with “rather than,” a hinge word that turns utopian marketing into personal loss. What follows is a deliberate cascade of “my”: my life, my family, my friends, my neighbourhood, my community. The repetition isn’t literary flourish; it’s a ledger. Each “my” marks a relationship that can’t be replaced by a feed, and the movement from intimate to civic suggests the damage scales outward. It’s not only that you miss dinner. You miss the neighborhood fabric that makes politics less abstract and loneliness less profitable.

The intent is corrective, almost paternal: stop confusing access with intimacy. Stoll isn’t arguing that online life is fake; he’s arguing it’s frictionless in a way that weakens commitment. You can log off from a forum. You can’t log off from a neighbor’s broken fence without consequences. That asymmetry is the subtext.

Context matters: Stoll became a prominent skeptic during the 1990s cyber-optimism, when “community” was being redefined by dial-up and glossy magazine promises. Read now, the quote sounds less like technophobia and more like a warning about substitution. The internet is excellent at simulating the feeling of togetherness while quietly displacing the practices that produce it.