Time & Perspective Quote by William Gibson

Gibson’s line pulls a neat cyberpunk judo move: it takes the most familiar adult complaint about online life and flips it into a grudging endorsement. “Waste of time” is the phrase of managers, teachers, self-optimizers - anyone measuring human value in productivity units. Gibson keeps the insult intact, then turns the blade: the internet’s point is precisely its non-point. It’s not a tool that behaves, a medium that stays in its lane, or a library that politely waits to be consulted. It’s loitering at planetary scale.

The intent isn’t to romanticize doomscrolling so much as to defend the messy, unprofitable surplus that makes culture possible. Wasted time is where subcultures form, where jokes mutate, where gossip becomes politics, where aesthetics incubate before the market can price them. Gibson, the novelist who basically pre-described networked life, recognizes that the net’s power comes from being hard to instrumentalize. The same architecture that hosts boredom and banter also enables organizing, piracy, fandom, conspiracy, mutual aid, harassment - the whole uncontrolled spectrum.

Subtext: every demand that the internet “get serious” is also a demand that it become legible to institutions and easier to govern. Calling it a waste is a way to keep it in the realm of play, and play is never just play; it’s rehearsal for new identities and new forms of collective behavior.

Context matters: Gibson wrote into an era when the net was sliding from fringe to infrastructure. The quote catches that hinge moment, warning that once we treat it only as a productivity machine, we flatten the very chaos that made it revolutionary - and we pretend control is the same thing as progress.