We've all heard that a million monkeys banging on a million typewriters will eventually reproduce the entire works of Shakespeare. Now, thanks to the Internet, we know this is not true.

Robert Wilensky, a computer scientist and professor at UC Berkeley associated with early work in artificial intelligence and digital libraries, is widely credited with this quip from the early public-Internet era. It riffs on the long-standing “infinite monkey theorem” (the idea that random typing over vast time will eventually produce Shakespeare) by contrasting it with the lived experience of online text: abundant, rapid, and mostly not converging on literary greatness. The line circulated as a wry observation about information overload and the gap between theoretical possibility and practical outcomes in networked communication, often repeated in talks and writings about the Internet’s cultural effects.

The joke turns a mathematical thought experiment into social commentary. In theory, enough random output can yield masterpieces; in practice, the Internet demonstrates that scale and speed of production do not reliably generate quality. Wilensky’s punchline implies that human attention, incentives, and selection matter more than sheer volume: the web amplifies noise as easily as signal. The quote also critiques naïve techno-optimism—the belief that more connectivity or more content automatically produces wisdom or art—by suggesting that without curation, expertise, or editorial filters, mass publication tends to reproduce mediocrity rather than Shakespeare.