Slashdot Mirror
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.
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.
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"
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.
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!
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.
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
*"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.
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 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)