Leadership Quote by Paul Gillmor

The line lands like a calm warning siren: progress is accelerating, but the scaffolding underneath is getting shakier. Coming from Paul Gillmor, a Republican congressman who spent years around telecom and technology policy, it reads less like vague technophobia and more like a systems critique from inside the machinery. The rhetorical trick is the mirrored structure - "more and more" against "less and less" - which makes the imbalance feel mathematical, inevitable, hard to argue with. You can almost hear the meter tipping.

Gillmor is pointing at a familiar modern temptation: centralize, automate, scale. Put finance, elections, defense, health records, air traffic, and daily communication into networked infrastructures because it is efficient, because it is profitable, because it feels like the future. The subtext is that efficiency has become a substitute for resilience. We chase uptime like a moral good, then act shocked when cascading failures expose how tightly coupled our systems are.

The context is the early-2000s political moment when the internet was no longer a novelty and homeland security was reshaping government priorities. Critical infrastructure was becoming digitized and privatized at once, while public oversight lagged behind complexity. Gillmor's phrasing implies a political indictment without naming a villain: we are the ones "putting" power there, treating capacity as infinite and reliability as an afterthought. It's a conservative-sounding sentence with a quietly radical implication: if your tools can topple the house, the problem isn't the speed of innovation, it's the negligence of governance.