Science & Tech Quote by Phillip Adams

Adams’s line lands like a polite diagnosis with a scalpel hidden in the glove: the Internet isn’t accused of making people crazy, it’s framed as infrastructure for craziness. “Delivery system” is doing the dirty work here. It borrows the language of logistics and pharma - efficient distribution, frictionless access - and applies it to something we prefer to treat as private and contained. Pathology becomes a package, routed and tracked, scalable.

The subtext is a refusal of the comforting story that online life is mostly neutral “connection” with a few bad apples. Adams implies the medium has an affinity for certain mental states: paranoia that loves a puzzle, grievance that needs an audience, narcissism that craves metrics, obsession that feeds on endless scroll. The Internet doesn’t just host these impulses; it optimizes them. Algorithms act like couriers, nudging the same hot emotion back to the door in a more addictive box.

Context matters: coming from an Australian public intellectual who’s watched media ecosystems evolve from broadcast consensus to fragmented feeds, it reads as a critique of deregulated attention markets. In earlier eras, gatekeepers (for better and worse) slowed contagion. Online, speed is the gatekeeper. The line also sidesteps a purely moral panic: “pathological states of mind” isn’t a slur so much as an invitation to treat the problem structurally. If the network is the delivery system, the fix isn’t only better manners. It’s redesigning the routes.