Life & Wisdom Quote by Clifford Stoll

There’s a polite compliment up front, then the chill: Stoll isn’t rejecting “the people in computing” so much as diagnosing a cultural gap that feels bodily, not merely intellectual. “I admire” signals he knows the canon, respects the craft, and still can’t shake the sense that something is off. The turn to “this cold feeling” is doing heavy work: alienation becomes physical sensation, the way you feel when a room’s social temperature drops and you realize you’re not part of the in-group.

The “different language” line lands because it’s both literal and metaphorical. Computing really does have its dialects - abstraction, optimization, “elegant” solutions - but Stoll is pointing at a deeper grammar: what counts as truth, what counts as progress, what gets sacrificed. The subtext is that insight in tech can be dazzling and still emotionally tone-deaf, ethically thin, or socially naive. He’s not calling anyone stupid; he’s saying the shared assumptions aren’t shared.

Context matters: Stoll emerged as a skeptical narrator of Silicon Valley’s self-mythology, especially in the era when “cyberspace” promised frictionless community and salvation-by-innovation. His sentence reads like a warning against mistaking technical fluency for wisdom. It’s also a quiet admission of loneliness: admiration without belonging. That’s why it sticks - it captures the modern predicament of living inside systems we rely on, built by people we can’t quite talk to.