Life & Wisdom Quote by Walter Jon Williams

In an age that keeps promising disintermediation, Williams is betting on a stubborn human appetite: delegation. The line’s force comes from how plainly it frames the reader not as an empowered sovereign but as a busy person standing at the threshold, wanting a bouncer. “Taste and authority” is a loaded pairing. Taste is aesthetic judgment, the soft power of sensibility; authority is institutional, the hard power that makes a recommendation feel like a decision you can trust. Put together, they describe the classic editorial role: not merely finding what’s good, but legitimizing it.

The quote’s subtext pushes back against the internet’s implicit bargain that more access equals more freedom. Williams is arguing that abundance is its own form of coercion: if everything can reach you, then everything will. That’s why he chooses “obsolete,” a tech-world word, and answers it with a domestic metaphor: “away from their door.” The threat isn’t abstract; it’s invasive. Bad writing becomes spam, noise, manipulation, time theft.

Contextually, this comes from a working writer’s vantage point, shaped by the churn of self-publishing, algorithmic feeds, and collapsing gatekeepers. It’s not nostalgia for old publishing’s monoculture so much as a defense of curation as a service. The provocation is that “gatekeeping,” now often treated as a moral failure, is also a consumer protection policy. Editors don’t just elevate; they exclude. Williams reminds us that exclusion is part of how culture remains navigable, and why the middlemen keep returning under new names, whether we call them editors, critics, playlists, or recommendation engines.