Science & Tech Quote by Mitchell Baker

Baker is doing something sly here: she’s laundering a hard-nosed argument about power through the soft prestige of “art.” In one clean comparison, the tech-obsessed are recast from gadget fetishists into makers with sensibility, taste, and a calling. That’s not just flattery. It’s a bid for legitimacy in a culture that still wants to believe innovation is driven by imagination rather than incentives, monopolies, or regulatory arbitrage.

The verb “drawn” matters. It implies compulsion, not careerism; a magnetism that can’t be reduced to stock options. Pair that with “liken,” a careful lawyer’s hedge that avoids the overclaim (“they are artists”) while still smuggling in the moral aura of the artist: autonomy, originality, even a kind of innocence. It’s rhetoric designed to make technology feel less like infrastructure and more like expression.

The context is Baker’s world: Mozilla, open web politics, and the long fight to frame the internet as a public good rather than a private mall. Calling technologists “artists” elevates the hacker ethic and aligns it with creative freedom. It also pressures institutions to treat technical work as cultural production: something that deserves room to experiment, to dissent, to be weird.

There’s a quieter subtext, too: artists are often exploited. If technologists are artists, then we should worry about who owns their canvases, who sells the finished work, and who gets to define “innovation” in the first place. The line flatters, but it also hints at an ethical demand: build with intention, not just velocity.