Science & Tech Quote by James Daly

Spoken by an actor, the line reads less like a thesis and more like a pitch: the Internet as plot twist. “The story of the Internet” reframes a technology as narrative, something with characters, pacing, and stakes. That’s the performative instinct at work. Daly isn’t interested in protocols or infrastructure; he’s selling an arc - the feeling that history has shifted genres and we’re living inside the reveal.

The phrasing is tellingly blunt. “Incredibly strong, exciting change” doubles down on sensation, not specifics, the way trailers use adjectives to stand in for scenes they can’t show yet. That vagueness is the point: it invites the listener to project their own hopes (connection, opportunity, novelty) onto a clean emotional container. The subtext is a kind of consensual hype, a request to join the crowd that already believes something big is happening.

Context complicates it. Daly’s listed lifespan (1918-1978) doesn’t line up with the Internet becoming a public cultural object. Read straight, the quote becomes anachronistic; read culturally, it becomes a neat example of how we retrofit famous voices onto modern revolutions to make them feel inevitable. We like our disruptions pre-blessed by authority.

Either way, the line works because it captures how the Internet first entered everyday imagination: not as a tool, but as an epochal mood. It’s optimism with the details omitted - which is often how change recruits us before it explains itself.