Science & Tech Quote by Clifford Stoll

“The Internet is a telephone system that’s gotten uppity” is a jab wrapped in a metaphor: take a technology we’ve already domesticated (the phone) and accuse its successor of developing an attitude. Stoll’s intent isn’t just to simplify the Internet; it’s to puncture its self-mythology. In the 1990s, the Internet was sold as a frontier that would dissolve gatekeepers, flatten hierarchies, and deliver frictionless enlightenment. Calling it an “uppity” telephone system drags that utopian pitch back to earth. It suggests the Internet’s biggest innovation might be scale and swagger, not some moral or metaphysical upgrade.

The line works because “uppity” is doing double duty. It’s comic - a network with a personality, talking back - but it’s also a cultural warning label. The word carries a whiff of class policing: something is “getting above itself,” demanding more authority than it deserves. That subtext targets the Internet’s tendency to present itself as inevitable, neutral, and beyond accountability, even as it reshapes labor, privacy, and attention. Stoll is skeptical of the reverence: if you treat a medium like destiny, you stop interrogating who controls it and who benefits.

Context matters: Stoll was an early, technically literate critic of digital hype, arguing that online life would not automatically produce community, truth, or wisdom. This quip compresses that critique into a single image: the Internet isn’t magic; it’s infrastructure - just louder, nosier, and far more convinced of its own importance.