Time & Perspective Quote by Barry Diller

A line like this only sounds blunt because it refuses the comforting euphemisms of modern commerce. Barry Diller isn’t selling a product here; he’s selling the operating system of late-capitalist media: frictionless desire turned into frictionless transactions. The sentence is structured like a mission statement but lands like a confession. “We want” foregrounds corporate appetite. “Be able to” frames domination as mere capability, as if this is just technical progress. Then the triple-any cadence (“anything, anywhere, any time”) mimics an ad slogan while quietly describing a totalizing ambition: remove geography, remove schedule, remove limits on what counts as sellable.

The intent is pragmatic and strategic. Diller came up through television and studio systems and later built IAC, helping shape the shift from broadcast scarcity to digital abundance. In that context, “anywhere, any time” isn’t poetry; it’s distribution. It’s bandwidth, logistics, payment rails, data, and interfaces designed to collapse the gap between impulse and purchase.

The subtext is where the line bites. It assumes the world is a catalog, and the person is a targetable moment. “You want it” nods to consumer sovereignty, but it’s also a tidy alibi: we’re not pushing, we’re responding. Of course, the machinery that makes selling omnipresent also helps manufacture wanting omnipresently, translating attention into inventory and intimacy into monetizable behavior.

Diller’s candor works because it strips the romance from tech’s usual self-mythology. It’s not about “connecting people.” It’s about making markets ambient.