Science & Tech Quote by Dave Barry

Dave Barry’s genius has always been to smuggle a raised eyebrow into a straight sentence, and this line reads like a parody of tech-utopian press releases. “Transforming society” and “shaping the future” are the kind of swollen phrases you’d expect from a keynote speaker trying to sell you a gadget and a destiny at the same time. Then Barry punctures the balloon with two small syllables: “through chat.” Not AI. Not broadband infrastructure. Not the democratization of knowledge. Chat.

That punchline does a lot of work. It shrinks the grand narrative of progress down to something stubbornly human: we mostly use new machines to talk, flirt, argue, gossip, and waste time in public. The subtext isn’t that the internet is trivial; it’s that our relationship to technology is. We drape epochal language over tools that, in practice, amplify the same impulses we’ve always had, just faster and with worse manners.

The context is the late-20th/early-21st-century habit of treating every new platform as a civilizational turning point. Barry aims at the gap between what the internet was promised to be (a library, a revolution, a meritocracy) and what it often became (a chatroom, a comment section, a notification treadmill). It lands because it weaponizes anticlimax: the future arrives wearing a name tag and asking “u up?”