Aging & Wisdom Quote by Mark Crispin Miller

A slogan like this lands because it punctures the tech-era fairy tale: that more data automatically means more knowledge. Mark Crispin Miller, writing as a journalist-critic of modern media systems, frames the “Age of Information” as a bait-and-switch. The line is built on a tidy reversal, almost a punchline, and that’s the point: it compresses a sprawling cultural failure into something you can’t unsee.

The intent isn’t anti-technology so much as anti-complacency. Miller is targeting the confidence that search engines, feeds, and “access” equal enlightenment. The subtext is harsher: information abundance can be a solvent. It dissolves shared reality into competing “research” tabs, turns every claim into a browser war, and rewards the most emotionally legible narrative over the most verifiable one. Ignorance here isn’t a lack of facts; it’s the inability to sort, weigh, and trust facts at all.

Context matters: post-24/7 news, post-social media, post-algorithmic distribution, the public square is engineered for velocity and engagement, not understanding. When everything is available, attention becomes the scarce resource, and whoever can hijack it wins. That’s why the line works rhetorically: it indicts not just consumers for being “dumb,” but an ecosystem that confuses being informed with being inundated. It’s a warning shot at a culture that mistakes a full inbox for a full mind.