Science & Tech Quote by Eric Schmidt

Schmidt’s line is almost accidentally candid: it strips the Internet of its utopian gloss and frames it as an engine of precision. Not connection, not community, not democratized knowledge - specialization. The repetition does the work. “Highly specialized information” sounds like a celebration of niche expertise, the long tail, the idea that anyone can find exactly what they need. Then comes the second half: “highly specialized targeting,” the phrase that gives away the business model hiding inside the ideal.

In context, this is a Google-era worldview, forged when search stopped being a library metaphor and became an auction house. Information isn’t just organized; it’s packaged into categories that can be bought. Targeting isn’t a side feature; it’s the point at which “relevance” turns into revenue. Schmidt is describing a system where your curiosity, your anxieties, your late-night questions become signals. The Internet is not merely a medium; it’s a surveillance-powered feedback loop that learns what you’ll click, then reshapes what you see.

The subtext is managerial and quietly deterministic: the web is legible, measurable, optimizable. If you can classify people finely enough, you can sell to them finely enough. That logic helps explain why platforms drift toward personalization that feels like convenience while narrowing the world into a feed. Schmidt’s phrasing makes the tradeoff sound technical, even inevitable, which is precisely how power likes to speak when it’s most confident.