Science & Tech Quote by Steve Crocker

There is a particular kind of modern panic embedded in Steve Crocker's complaint: the scramble to regulate what you barely understand. The line lands because it frames "Internet Governance" as theater - rooms full of stakeholders performing seriousness around a technology that, to them, is more symbol than system. "Important" becomes the only credential needed to demand a seat at the table. That's the joke, and it's not gentle.

Crocker is speaking from inside the Internet's founding culture, where legitimacy came from technical competence and rough consensus, not titles. As an early architect of the networked world, he watched a hand-built, engineer-led infrastructure turn into geopolitical terrain: elections, surveillance, commerce, speech. The more the Internet became a proxy for everything we fight about, the more irresistible it became to everyone who governs for a living. His phrasing "have to be involved" punctures the moral self-importance of that impulse. It's not curiosity or responsibility; it's institutional FOMO.

The subtext is also a warning about how bad policy gets made: when participants can't distinguish the Internet from the applications on it, or confuse governance of protocols with governance of content, they reach for blunt tools. Meetings proliferate, frameworks multiply, and the people who actually know how the system behaves get treated like one interest group among many.

Crocker isn't arguing against governance; he's arguing against governance as branding. The future of the Internet, he implies, will be decided less by visionary debate than by whether power bothers to learn the basics before it starts rewriting the rules.