Science & Tech Quote by Gary Wright

Gary Wright is doing something a lot of legacy musicians have had to do in public: bless the new world while asking it to stop picking his pockets. The line is built on an almost parental balance beam - "great and terrible" - and that symmetry matters. It signals he isn't a crank railing against technology; he's a working artist trying to stay credible in a culture that treats frictionless access as a moral good.

The praise is tellingly specific. The Internet as "a source of information" and "a tool for delivering music and art" frames it as infrastructure, not a vibe. Wright recognizes the genuine democratization: discovery, distribution, the long tail that can keep a catalog alive. For a musician whose peak came before streaming, that acknowledgement is a strategic concession to reality.

Then the mood flips to the part creators have been forced to narrate for decades: ads and piracy. Pairing "spamming ads" with "piracy" is revealing. One is annoyance, the other is theft, but both represent extraction - other people monetizing attention and work at scale. By ending with the blunt moral verdict, "It's stealing", Wright refuses the euphemisms ("sharing", "sampling", "exposure") that have softened piracy's image online. It's not a legal argument so much as a dignity claim: if music is labor and art, taking it without consent isn't rebellious, it's parasitic.

Subtextually, he's mourning an older bargain - you could hear the song, and the song could pay the songwriter - while trying not to sound bitter about the new one.