Science & Tech Quote by Jane Haddam

There is a sly, almost heretical audacity in ranking the Internet just behind antibiotics: Haddam isn’t praising convenience, she’s putting connectivity in the category of life-altering infrastructure. Antibiotics liberated bodies from certain inevitabilities; the Internet, in her telling, liberates lives from geography. That parallel is the engine of the quote: it escalates a familiar claim (the web makes remote work possible) into a statement about autonomy, not lifestyle branding.

The most telling phrase is “people like me.” She’s speaking as a writer, but also as a type: someone whose work depends on information flow, professional visibility, and a networked marketplace, yet whose temperament or economics may not fit the big-city grind. “Without it, I’d have to be in New York” name-checks the old gatekeeping capital of publishing and media, where access used to be physical: offices, parties, agents, chance encounters. The subtext is a quiet revolt against cultural centralization. The Internet doesn’t just distribute drafts; it redistributes power, letting creative labor exist at a distance from the institutions that once controlled it.

Calling it the “greatest invention” isn’t naïve tech-utopianism so much as a personal cost-benefit ledger. For a working writer, the web collapses research time, widens readership, and turns isolation into a viable operating system. The context here is a creative economy that long demanded relocation as an entrance fee. Haddam is arguing that the fee has changed, and that shift is nothing less than historic.