Success Quote by Scott McNealy

A businessman doesn’t deliver “get over it” as a philosophical shrug; he delivers it as a market forecast. Scott McNealy’s line, dropped at the dawn of the always-on internet era, is Silicon Valley candor in its most bracing form: privacy isn’t being debated, it’s being deprecated. The phrasing is engineered to short-circuit resistance. “Already” implies the fight is finished. “Zero” turns a sliding scale into a cliff. “Get over it” reframes a structural power shift as an emotional maturity test, casting the listener as naive, even childish, for wanting boundaries.

The intent is partly defensive and partly evangelistic. Companies built on data collection needed the public to stop treating surveillance as a scandal and start treating it as the price of admission. McNealy’s bluntness also performs a kind of honesty theater: if he says the quiet part out loud, he can claim realism while normalizing the outcome.

The subtext is the true provocation: privacy isn’t a right you negotiate, it’s a luxury you’ve forfeited by participating in modern life. That conflation - consent with inevitability - is the ideological sleight of hand. It assumes the only choice is to opt out entirely, not to demand rules, limits, or accountability.

Context matters: this was pre-social media saturation, pre-Snowden mainstreaming of state surveillance, pre-adtech’s full behavioral dragnet. Read now, it lands less as prophecy than as a mission statement for the business model that followed: collect first, apologize later, and treat resignation as product-market fit.