Science & Tech Quote by Dave Rowntree

There is a quiet victory lap baked into Rowntree's line: the end of a gatekept era when digital creativity belonged to whoever could afford the hardware. Silicon Graphics workstations were once the glossy, prohibitively expensive symbol of “real” computer graphics - the kind of machines you’d see in behind-the-scenes shots from big studios, treated like sacred tools. By calling those days “gone,” he’s not just noting a tech upgrade; he’s puncturing a whole status hierarchy.

Coming from a musician, the subtext lands as cultural rather than technical. It echoes what happened to recording: the collapse of the old studio system into laptops, bedrooms, and amateur software that’s suddenly professional enough. His wording is almost shrug-level casual, which is the point. This revolution didn’t arrive with a manifesto; it arrived as price drops, open-source tools, consumer GPUs, and software ecosystems that made “good enough” astonishingly good.

The intent reads as permission-giving: you don’t need to be initiated into an elite world to make animated work anymore. Underneath that optimism sits a sharper edge. When access explodes, standards and scarcity lose their power. The new dividing line becomes time, taste, and attention - not machines. Rowntree’s sentence nods to a democratization that’s real, while hinting at the messier consequence: if everyone can make it, standing out gets harder, not easier.