Creativity Quote by David Milne

The line lands like a time-travel glitch: an early-20th-century artist allegedly speaking in the clipped, investor-call dialect of Silicon Valley. That dissonance is the whole story. “Fabless semiconductor company” is not just an anachronism; it’s a signal of how contemporary language tries to launder radical shifts in labor and power through bland corporate taxonomy. “Fabless” sounds sleek and strategic, but it’s also an admission: we don’t make the thing we sell. We design, we brand, we outsource the messy, expensive, human part.

As intent, the sentence reads like defensive positioning. “For a number of years now” isn’t informational; it’s reputational. It tells you there was a before (we had fabs, we had infrastructure, we had workers) and that the speaker wants the audience to accept the pivot as settled, inevitable, even prudent. The subtext is risk management and accountability management at once: if production is elsewhere, so are disruptions, labor conditions, and environmental costs.

Context matters because the attribution doesn’t. David Milne the artist (1882-1953) could not have meant this literally; semiconductors and “fabless” as an industry model arrive decades later. That mismatch suggests the quote is misattributed, fabricated, or repurposed as a conceptual-art prank. If read as art, it becomes a deadpan critique of modern creativity itself: the artist as “fabless” operator, separating conception from craft, authorship from fabrication, and calling it innovation. The joke is that it’s barely a joke anymore.