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How the Internet Didn't Fail As Predicted
Lord Byron Eee PC writes "Newsweek is carrying a navel-gazing piece on how wrong they were when in 1995 they published a story about how the Internet would fail. The original article states, 'Nicholas Negroponte, director of the MIT Media Lab, predicts that we'll soon buy books and newspapers straight over the Intenet. Uh, sure.' The article continues to say that online shopping will never happen, that airline tickets won't be purchased over the web, and that newspapers have nothing to fear. It's an interesting look back at a time when the Internet was still a novelty and not yet a necessity."
Here's a good past prediction: http://apple.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=01/10/23/1816257
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum sonatur.
A big-wig at I.B.M. predicted the entire world market for computers would be restricted to about 5 units.
What the Internet hucksters won't tell you is that the Internet is one big ocean of unedited data, without any pretense of completeness. Lacking editors, reviewers or critics, the Internet has become a wasteland of unfiltered data. You don't know what to ignore and what's worth reading.
And along comes Slashdot et al with moderation and meta-moderation schemes to allow the crowd to edit the stream. Problem solved (sort of). Hard to imagine that it was impossible to see lack of editing as anything other than an insurmountable obstacle. But the article was written by journalists with editors, so maybe that explains their limited vision.
From TF95A:
Oh, how I wish the network were still missing that "essential ingredient". On the page containing the 1995 lament, I now see ads for:
* Hugh Downs' Artery Cleaning "Secret" (now with 50% more Nobel Prize Laureate!)
* Acai Berry Exposed - Official Test
* Drivers from Minnesota wanted! (of course, I'm in Dallas... with a MN proxy server)
* Saint Paul - Mom Lost 46lbs Following 1 Rule (MN mislocalization again)
* DON'T Pay for White Teeth (with the requisite sugar cube clenched in teeth, WTF?)
Meanwhile, *my* neighborhood mall -- the first air-conditioned mall west of the Mississippi -- is now a grass-covered field.
That said, I don't think I could go back to 1995, though it would be a fun challenge. The best part was doing DNS reverse lookups of domain names, since the company's network didn't have a DNS server. I could read David Letterman's Top Ten list the next morning, if I plugged the right octets into something called "Netscape" -- I thought I was livin' large.
Stressed? Me? Of course not. Stress is what a rubber band feels before it breaks, silly.
If you have not done so, a must read is Negroponte's book "Being Digital", it's amazing how far in the future he can look, one of the best books talking about digital technology I've read, still, 15 years later: http://www.amazon.com/Being-Digital-Nicholas-Negroponte/dp/0679762906
Did they predict that governments will attempt to crack down on free speech on the internet by dreaming up fake terror threats and copyright nonsense to control the internet, and thus please the governments corporate whore masters?
Take Nobody's Word For It.
What's missing from this electronic wonderland? Human contact. Discount the fawning techno-burble about virtual communities. Computers and networks isolate us from one another.
So he was able to see that human contact was the thing that was missing from the internet - and then blew it. Because of his lack of vision, he's still eating Ramen Noodles. Meanwhile Zuckerberg and Tom Anderson and many others made billions on Facebook and Myspace etc. solving exactly those problems.
Actually, that's a nice lesson for the Slashdot crowd. Remember that idea you were just panning as stupid and unworkable because of xyz flaw that only you could spot? Yep, that's opportunity knocking.
I swore I read about this 15 years ago. Slashdots getting worse.
Logged onto the World Wide Web, I hunt for the date of the Battle of Trafalgar. Hundreds of files show up, and it takes 15 minutes to unravel them—one's a biography written by an eighth grader, the second is a computer game that doesn't work and the third is an image of a London monument. None answers my question,
Heh. Lets cut and past "date of the Battle of Trafalgar" into the location bar of Chrome here...
and instantly...
"Battle of Trafalgar — Date: 21 October 1805
According to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Trafalgar"
Proving that internet search made the internet useful. The article's author had a stunning failure of vision.
To be fair, if you actually read the original article he mentions books and newspapers right after talking about books on disk--in context he's obviously referring to ebooks and not ordering a book and having it physically delivered (which would be nonsense for newspapers anyway). Paying for electronic books and newspapers is better than in 1995, but it hasn't exactly taken over, and newspapers are more outcompeted by free sites than by anything you buy.
As I said on my blog****, the irony was that within 1 year of his article JavaScript was released in Netscape Navigator 2.0 and Brin and Page began Google. The former played a key role in enabling a lot of the usefulness in the web and the latter played a key role in organizing it effectively from the viewpoint of the public, especially to the extent that his point about how hard it was to find useful data was negated by Google.
I have to agree with Newsweek's writer who criticized him by saying that his problem wasn't in stating what the problems were, but his blithe assumption that they would never be overcome. That, right there, was the fatal flaw as it assumed that the computer industry was not invested in the Internet's future. That's almost like assuming that the established auto companies have no interest in the electric car market and would gladly let Tesla take it over unmolested.
****Just an ironic dig since he figured that blogging would never become mainstream, let alone that some bloggers (myself excluded) would become powerful players in the media.
Back in 1995, I was just finishing up a Journalism degree at a Big Ten university, and in more than one media class, the subject of the internet (and its future) came up. But it was the students that brought it up...not the professors or the teaching assistants.
Unfortunately, the subject was always dismissed as some kind of fad. In fact, in one class, the assistant refused to even discuss the subject at all, almost as if he was annoyed by it. So, I'm not surprised at all that some in the mainstream media have been slow to really comprehend the subject, let alone adapt their business models.
In 1995 or 1996 Cliff was the keynote speaker at the Dayton Hamvention. He really got those old men fired up and hating on the Internet. He was promoting a book named "Silicon Snake Oil", IIRC. It was quite humorous for the next two or three years to watch the reaction of some of those guys asking about manuals for stuff I was selling in the Dayton boneyard. I would direct them to check in the Internet, and they would loose all manner of sensibility. Too funny.
--fatboy
You should read the end of TFA:
"At the time, I was trying to speak against the tide of futuristic commentary on how The Internet Will Solve Our Problems.
[...]
And, as I’ve laughed at others’ foibles, I think back to some of my own cringeworthy contributions.
Now, whenever I think I know what’s happening, I temper my thoughts: Might be wrong, Cliff
Warm cheers to all,
—Cliff Stoll on a rainy Friday afternoon in Oakland"
Apple is the Mercedes Benz or BMW of the computer industry. They deliver the best-designed products with "why didn't I think of that?!" features that eventually become commonplace on the Fords and Chevrolets of the computer industry. How many computer makers let you into the case without turning screws? ....
Apparently Apple disagreed with jcoleman (139158) regarding "easily openable case == design feature"
Or, "openable case == design feature"
Source
In all fairness, his remaining 6 points are fairly valid and some are responsible for Apple's success in the market today.
Cock Up Your Beaver" does not mean what you think. That might be true, but googling that phrase will produce exactly the results you would expect.
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
There is a difference, when that paper was released everybody could see past their BS and realize they were wishful-thinking.
The iPod *was* lame, as in, lacking features the competition has had since the beginning, the iPod "won" by means of a) Marketing and b) The iTMS.
By "won" I mean, being the biggest player, it is no the sole player by a long shot.
I don't have numbers to back this up, over half the media player owners I know own something else than an iPod, but I live in Mexico, does anyone can bring statistics about media players in the world or at least the US?
But... the future refused to change.
On the other hand some of the predictions on slashdot have been bang on such as Linus Says 2004 is the Year for Desktop Linux
The iPod was pretty lame when it was introduced. Only worked on Apple, limited space, limited features, pretty much set the stage for most Apple products.
It was only until several years later when increased the storage, added color, and allowed it to work on PC did it take off.
According to the article, Stoll's excuse is that he was trying to play the contrarian:
Contrarianism helps sell magazines (and garners pageviews) but let us not forget that it is usually WRONG. Yes, humbling as it may be to admit, the great unwashed masses, the "sheeple", are usually right in their collective opinions. Contrarians often escape punishment for their folly because no one cares, but in this case Stoll got properly burned.
Don't get me wrong, I tend to go into withdrawls if my connections go down for an extended period of time, but, the internet being a necessity? I dunno. There are plenty of people out there that live and breathe and make money with no connection or need to the internet whatsoever. I don't think it is truly a necessity like shelter and food.
While *I* would not want to live without it, people still can pretty easily these days.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
It also "won" because of the interface, something everybody on slashdot keeps ignoring. Do you remember what the interfaces of pre-ipod mp3 players were like? No comparison.
In 1920 they published an incredibly snotty editorial ripping on Robert Goddard, arrogantly stating scientific errors (such as that a rocket could not work in a vacuum as it lacked something to 'push against'), and generally claiming that even a high school student could see that this Goddard fellow was a crazy loon.
They published a 'correction' of the editorial on July 17th, 1969.
If we can put a man on the moon, why can't we shoot people for Apollo-related non-sequiturs?
But in modern industrialized societies, hypothetically turning off the entire Internet would have secondary effects on those who don't use it in their daily lives or work. Not that people would die in large numbers or anything.
I have seen the future, and it is inconvenient.
For someone with worthy experience to talk about the internet, Im quite surprised he wrote A) That article from 1995 and B) Silicon Snake Oil. His book The Cuckoo's Egg was excellent. I felt he had a firm grasp as to where the internet could go. I admired the guy for his work. I guess all those Berkeley kids aren't on top of their game. The guy _was_ an astronomer after all.
Im a troll because I disagree with you.
and since it existed when they were born, my children will think there was always an internet and that it was always big, and that people always had a computer or four in their homes.
For example, don't you think that the automated and streamlined ordering systems that corporations use to reduce costs on necessary goods used by the poor would suffer?
It's necessary in the same way that roads and highways are necessary for the developed world. Sure, we could do without, but there would be a discernable difference if you removed either.
Write your representatives! Repeal the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics!
It's instructive to look at the differences in what Clifford Stoll says versus what someone like Jaron Lanier says.
Clifford Stoll reminds us that technology is not a panacea, and to stay human.
Jaron Lanier is upset by "numb mobs composed of people who are no longer acting as individuals" - you know, that the peasants were let onto the ARPAnet. His main gripe with the Internet is that he doesn't get the attention any more.
http://rocknerd.co.uk
This could laughable if you are very superficial about it, but economical success or hype is not necessarily related to a good product, actually if you could perform a really impartial feature by feature (design, software, usability, DRM, format management, compatibility, value, etc) comparison between music players I'm sure the iPod will not come as the best, so back in the day, minus the hype and the financial success, the comment is actually quite logical.
Apple knows their markets very well. The high-end Mac Pro tower is far, far easier to open and modify than any other tower case I've used. Lift a lever, pull away the side, and you have each access to everything. Because that's what most of the Mac Pro customers want. iPhone customers? Not so much.
E pluribus unum
he got his 15 minutes of fame from Cuckoo's Egg, the book AND the movie. He's a PhD astonomer who was in the right place at the right time. I've heard him speak. He's witty, funny, and energetic, a delight to hear, really. I've never understood why he turned on the Net. He was, after all, on the bleeding edge for a time, and seemed poised to take off on a career of internet promotion rather than demotion. Strange.
How about a moderation of -1 pedantic.
Don't let this scare you or anything, but you know about ham radio? That chunk of spectrum and users whose motto is "when all else fails"? Who spend time supporting disaster relief and emergency services?
A lot of those folks are putting their eggs in the internet basket, relying on the internet to get email through when local communications systems go down. If the local internet goes down, so local email won't get through, they're planning on using HF or VHF radio to get email out of the disaster area and into the hands of state and federal agencies.
If the internet goes down on a large scale, those messages will go nowhere, and the senders won't know that they aren't going anywhere.
What's even scarier is the draconian anti-spam measures being used. If you aren't on the radio user's whitelist and you don't know the secret code to bypass it, your email won't go through. The bounce message doesn't tell you the secret, and it doesn't alert the intended recipient that you tried. You could be Barack Obama himself, and if whitehouse.gov isn't in the recipient's whitelist, your email won't get delivered. Users in a disaster area who want to turn this feature off cannot.
The internet is not a necessity in the sense that food and shelter are necessities.
But it is a necessity in the sense that automobiles and refrigerators are necessities of modern life.
Yes, but of the people to which you refer, how many of them earn their living providing services to others? And how many of those others depend on the internet for their jobs?
The crew who repaired my roof or the guy who changed my oil might not depend directly on the internet, but he depends on my money, which does depend on the internet.
It doesn't hurt to be nice.
Like the way they didn't even have a power button?
I spent some time playing with my friends original b/w iPod a few years back and actually, I couldn't figure out how to do anything. Then I spent three minutes trying to find the damn power button. Wow, that was an amazing design.
Juln
It's a matter of convenience. Things would be harder, and progress would be a little slower. A very small minority of people would feel the adverse impact in any significant way and they'll have to learn to live with it, but most people will go back to their televisions and newspapers and radios.
But it isn't as if everybody's going to go hungry all of a sudden, or if man-made structures are going to collapse.
"If a nation expects to be ignorant and free in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be."
That is actually arguable. With more companies using the Internet to coordinate tasks such as purchasing and shipping, and more dependence on VoIP for telephone service, you could have people dying.
That sounds silly, but consider a few things. Most essential products (food, clothing, shelter) are not sourced locally. While clothing and shelter do not need to be replenished daily, food is essential.
Most areas do not have sufficient production nor storage of food supplies for any sort of long term survival. Therefore, food must be brought in from those areas that are production areas. Huh? How many cows have you seen grazing in Manhattan? To the best of my knowledge, with the exception of maybe the Central Park Zoo, there are none. How many places can you buy milk, a hamburger, or steak? Ooohh, a whole lot. If the food supply were to be cut off to Manhattan, how long would the food supplies last? My best guess would be a week or two. Looters and hoarders will swing that to be a very wide range.
Quite a bit of the coordination of moving these food supplies are done over the Internet. But, moving the supplies is just one thing. Transportation requires fuel, vehicles, and workers.
Sure, it could maintain in a world without the Internet, but since quite a few facilities have migrated over to Internet based technologies for management, reinventing them without access to the previous resources may be virtually impossible.
I like to ask the same question about Los Angeles. Say there was a large earthquake, where the seaports and airports were rendered unusable, and major highways (I-5, I-10, I-15, CA-14, CA-1) were rendered useless (landslides, collapsed bridges, etc). How long could the Los Angeles area survive on it's own? It's a fair comparison. Isolation of the Internet, where the Internet is an essential part of the coordination of transportation for essential goods, is just as dangerous as if the physical routes to bring supplies in were rendered unusable. My guess (with a lot of math behind it) was honestly 1-2 weeks before dehydration and starvation became a serious problem. The Los Angeles area can't survive without pumping fresh water to the homes and businesses. In 4 to 8 weeks, there would be a very minimal population left.
Some people who lived there said, "we'd make it", until I spelled it out. They shifted to "We'll drive to ..." and they all had different directions. I broke the bad news to them. Millions of people will have the same idea, and most passenger vehicles are only designed for a 300 to 400 maximum range before refueling. They didn't get the reports that bridges or sections of roads were blocked. Putting millions of people on the road all trying to leave would unfortunately leave you parked, burning off what fuel you may have had before whatever incident happened. That of course was countered with "We'll walk." Good luck there. It's somewhere over 350 miles to get to the San Francisco area. 125 miles to the San Diego area. It could be pretty much assumed that they'd both be in the same predicament at that point. Las Vegas is only 256 miles, or Phoenix is 375 miles. There's a lot of dry areas, so unless you happen to have a mule to carry water for you, I wouldn't hold out hope to surviving the hike. Considering rest breaks, people generally walk about 2 miles per hour, and may be able to sustain that for 8 hours. Say you're feeling really ambitious, and walk without stopping for 16 hours per day, you may make it 100 miles in 3.5 days. Oh ya, you had to carry supplies to do that too. Lets ask the military how far they could expect in shape folks carrying supplies to walk every day...
"An infantry div on the march averages 12-15 miles per day, an armored div 100 miles per day."
- U.S. De
Serious? Seriousness is well above my pay grade.
*"What the Internet hucksters won't tell you is tht the Internet is one big ocean of unedited data, without any pretense of completeness. Lacking editors, reviewers or critics, the Internet has become a wasteland of unfiltered data."*
That hasn't changed.
*"What's missing from this electronic wonderland? Human contact."*
Still no real change. Despite social networking sites. It just isn't the same.
His point about teachers is still true. Technology is secondary to good teachers.
I love this quote:
*"But today, I'm uneasy about this most trendy and oversold community."*
The interweb is still trendy and oversold.
So, somethings have not changed. Not at the core anyway.
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
I disagree. You could say the same about the paved road network.
Yes, life would go on if we had to revert to 30mph single lane dirt tracks. Yes, you would be quite able to live your life individually by avoiding the road network (not own a car, not ride the bus). Yes there are alternatives to the road (rail, aircraft, canals, etc.).
But that doesn't mean the road network isn't a necessity. If it were ripped up right now today then there would be serious repercussions- even for the minority who doggedly never use it. Businesses would crumble, quality of life would drop.
If the internet were switched off tomorrow, there would be repercussions. Even if you never use it yourself, it would still effect you.
Well put. I recall reading an article some time back where some major executive was arrogantly dismissing the necessity of email and text messaging because *he* never used it, though he did acknowledge that his assistants did all his electronic communication. It was like someone claiming driving was unnecessary because they have a chauffeur.
Some people don't seem to get that just because they don't use personally use a specific innovation like the internet or evolutionary biology that they may still benefit from it or even be dependent on it.
Momentarily, the need for the construction of new light will no longer exist.
Yes, I remember. This is just a bunch of vague bullshit which gets accepted as the truth and modded appropriately only because it gets repeated all the time. Of course you can't compare the ipod to the cheap flash-based players of the time, but the Creative hard-drive based players had comparable, and I would say superior interface. Usually you'd have distinct physical buttons for most important functions, plus a rocker type thingie to navigate the menus. The menus themselves were clear and logically organized. Now admittedly the text input was a bit awkward, but at least it was possible to create and save playlists on the fly, as well as search songs by title.
I like to ask the same question about Los Angeles. Say there was a large earthquake, where the seaports and airports were rendered unusable, and major highways (I-5, I-10, I-15, CA-14, CA-1) were rendered useless (landslides, collapsed bridges, etc). How long could the Los Angeles area survive on it's own? It's a fair comparison. Isolation of the Internet, where the Internet is an essential part of the coordination of transportation for essential goods, is just as dangerous as if the physical routes to bring supplies in were rendered unusable. My guess (with a lot of math behind it) was honestly 1-2 weeks before dehydration and starvation became a serious problem. The Los Angeles area can't survive without pumping fresh water to the homes and businesses. In 4 to 8 weeks, there would be a very minimal population left.
Keep in mind that the first settlement to Los Angeles had the entire settlement wiped out.... due to starvation and a lack of water. I'm not talking a few people dying of disease, but that the place is simply inhospitable for even a small group of people to live there.... at least live there without massive public works and technology that brings in supplies and materials for you to live there. Los Angeles in particular is a prime example of what technology can do to help bring in resources that turns an inhospitable area into not only a place to live but to thrive and for population to explode.
The one semi-good thing is that Los Angeles can survive on 19th Century technologies (canals, aquaducts, railroads, etc.) if it absolutely needed to happen. I couldn't say the same thing about a similar sized city on the Moon or Mars, but Los Angeles is certainly "proof" that you can sustain a large population in a difficult to live-in climate. It also does help that the general climate there is relatively mild and that people enjoy living there simply because of its location, forgetting that LA is mostly a desert between some mountains. If you need any substantial "proof", try to find the Los Angeles River. It has been made fun of in countless movies, and is about as artificial as the rest of the city too. In the mid-west, it would be a brook that might not even have a name.
Nope, it didn't really start taking off until late 04, early 05 as you can see here.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now. - Ed Howd
I agree with many of the Slashdot posters who've commented on my article of 15 years ago. There's a great deal to munch on - plenty of hilarious mistakes as well as several ideas still worth thinking about.
That 1995 article grew from my questioning attitude. When I hear nearly unanimous commentary without any critical dialog, I become skeptical. Perhaps too skeptical, as that article shows.
At the time, I saw my role as encouraging questions about then-common predictions. As a way of introducing dialog through debate, if not deliberation.
Clearly, I'm no futurist, able to extrapolate across decades. If anyone, I suspect that school teachers are the most in touch with future generations.
Now? Oh, I try to stay away from predictions; two teenagers gleefully keep me informed of my daily mistakes. I teach physics, speak at meetings, and write the occasional article for Scientific American. I make Klein Bottles ... and, yes, I sell them online, in obvious contradiction to that 1995 article.
Best wishes to all,
-Cliff (in Oakland California, on a Monday afternoon without sunspots)
He moved up from janitor to... designated ink reloader? I was expecting a bit more "riches" in this rags to riches story.
My brother-in-law is an executive for a printing company. He moved up through the ranks. Started out cleaning bathrooms, and spent years reloading ink into massive printers. His company like many others got bought up, and he has seen the company that bought his be bought by a yet larger company. Most large scale printing has been consolidated into a few large companies.
See we learned something today. Its called reading everything. Have a good day kids.
It's an interesting look back at a time when the Internet was still a novelty and not yet a necessity.
I'd be interested to see something that is both a novelty and a necessity.
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