Fascinating how the analysis gets wrong what becomes possible or doesn't (online shopping,...), but hits the nail on the head concerning the psychological and social aspects.
> The Usenet, a worldwide bulletin board, allows anyone to post messages across the nation. Your word gets out, leapfrogging editors and publishers. Every voice can be heard cheaply and instantly. The result? Every voice is heard. The cacophony more closely resembles citizens band radio, complete with handles, harrassment, and anonymous threats. When most everyone shouts, few listen.
> Then there's cyberbusiness. We're promised instant catalog shopping—just point and click for great deals. We'll order airline tickets over the network, make restaurant reservations and negotiate sales contracts. Stores will become obsolete. So how come my local mall does more business in an afternoon than the entire Internet handles in a month?
> While the Internet beckons brightly, seductively flashing an icon of knowledge-as-power, this nonplace lures us to surrender our time on earth. A poor substitute it is, this virtual reality where frustration is legion and where—in the holy names of Education and Progress—important aspects of human interactions are relentlessly devalued.
He couldn't imagine the vast technical improvements that solved all immediate, practical challenges he faced: sending money online, comfortable, ubiquitous devices with unlimited connectivity, etc.
He clearly saw the wider limits of technology in relation to society. Liquid and online democracy has failed, we are in an age of autocrats that have weaponized online propaganda and misinformation to directly reach their voters. The freedom of the press increased online but it's quality dropped markedly, the cacophony effect is real. Alienation and engineering addiction are the name of the game for tech giants and their bottom line. Online self teaching is great for adults, but a very poor substitute and at most a complement to competent teachers in schools.
Any predictions that pertains to the technological aspect of our lives is utterly futile.
Imagine you are in the mid 90' and you say to someone that in the next decade we will have a camera, a video camera, a radio, a music and video player, a voice recorder and much more in just one pocket. Saying it like this make it look insane.
On the other hand psychological and social aspects are linked to our brains that didn't change much in the course of the human recorded history.
I feel this is most evident on Twitter. I see it in the indie gamedev scene: everyone trying to advertise their upcoming game or steam sale, trying to build an audience, but no one listening to anyone else's.
Another aspect being sold (implicitly or explicitly) is the democracy of the platform: anyone (commonfolk) can talk to anyone else (celebrities, CEOs), but the fact it's possible works against itself. There's so many voices no one really gets heard except a handful.
The main thing that he's right about is that it's a mess. There's so much noice and little authority.
When I was a kid in the 90s news and information was curated. If you read an opinion in the paper it was some guy who'd been writing for a long time, who'd done the background reading, and who normally presented things in a balanced way, whatever his leaning was. Nowadays you can find just about any extreme view, badly written in an aggressive or sarcastic tone, and ignorant of the history of the topic. It's not necessarily good to always have the sober and historically informed opinion, but it sure would be good to have it most of the time.
Not sure if he mentioned this, but it's also gotten a lot easier to find like minded uninformed people. I'm still undecided about whether flat earthers are all kidding, but if they aren't you can see how hard it's going to be to climb out of that intellectual hole. There's now conferences and loads of websites about the Bedford Level experiment, and all sorts of other flat earth tropes.
This has been on my mind quite often when I use reddit. I grew up on phpBB style forums where every user was immediately identifiable, through avatar, signature etc. And to a lesser degree I find myself developing a kind of 'image' of various HN posters.
On reddit this somehow doesn't happen. Every comment stands on its own and half the time what looks like a threaded conversation is various different users replying to each other.
I think something very important is lost there. Much as I'd like to believe so, I think the way my brain works is that no comment stands on its own and communication is heavily mediated by the knowledge and reputation of the other in relation to myself. Without that, so much that is valuable in the exchange of information, whether facts or opionion, or nuance, is lost.
His name is Clifford Stoll and he was a physicist and early Internet user. He wrote the book "The Cuckoo's Egg" which should be required reading for all sys-admins.
In the mid-90s, he saw the Internet as something akin to Fahrenheit 451 and began preaching how it would tear us apart as a society. To that end, he wrote Silicon Snake Oil and articles like this one, which combines philosophy and cultural observations (the mob mentality of the crowd) with nonsensical conclusions based on the current technology (ie that online shopping would never be a big thing). I was never sure if he genuinely believed that it wasn't possible, or if he was merely trying to make the web less appealing somehow to prevent it from happening.
Years later he started to sell Klein Bottles on his website. I'm not sure if he still does, but in the year 2000, you could order them from him and he'd take your order over the phone. I ordered a few and it was fun to talk to him.
Heh. Funny thing is I had absolutely no idea who he was until you mentioned the Klein bottle thing. Then a little light bulb went off in my head. I guess my brain filed him away as "Klein bottle guy" at some point in the past. Funny how the brain works sometimes.
Internet is dead, web with interface galore reigns supreme with multitude of interfaces all incomprehensible to single point of use of programs. Google news reader was killed, after google bought dejanews turned it into rarely visited place. having a low cost application that can talks over protocols promoted democracy among client selection and democracy of choice that you don't have to learn new as you move between infromation spaces. Web is a great expression medium but a terrible information aggregator and information consumtion source.
So it has gotten quite a bit worse since Cliff wrote the article.
"Try reading a book on disc. At best, it's an unpleasant chore: the myopic glow of a clunky computer replaces the friendly pages of a book. And you can't tote that laptop to the beach. Yet Nicholas Negroponte, director of the MIT Media Lab, predicts that we'll soon buy books and newspapers straight over the Intenet. Uh, sure."
Beautiful example of article where the author was skeptical based on the wild west of the current state of technology. What current technology is the same? VR? Self driving cars?
VR would be my bet. Every time is exit VR I feel like my monitor is limiting.
It requires quite a lot of work though, and unlike the web, it probably can’t be done by one person in a basement. Which I think is important to it’s impact, because google probably wouldn’t have existed if it couldn’t have started small and gradually build its way up.
For what it's worth, I still prefer reading on paper. Buying ebooks is cheaper, though (because you need the device you use to read them for other reasons), and the logistics of storing such books are much simpler
Well, he was wrong. And he admitted it in 2010:"Of my many mistakes, flubs, and howlers, few have been as public as my 1995 howler ... Now, whenever I think I know what's happening, I temper my thoughts: Might be wrong, Cliff ..."
I think in 2010 the outlook of Internet was a little more rosey than it is today, almost a decade later. The thesis of the article holds in many regards, notably on the social implications rather than the tech predictions. I think this piece will age well after all.
This is so hilariously, specifically wrong, you'd think someone wrote it now and travelled back in time for giggles. Great find! And I'm amazed they still have the article online, the only one by Clifford Stoll, funnily enough.
Still, a good lesson: It remains too easy to miss the forest for the trees. We never wanted salesmen or paper, what we actually wanted were products and information. In other words, it's easy to forget that the technology is not the product, just a vehicle for it.
I feel like this phrase rings somewhat true, even though he was off on many other things: " When most everyone shouts, few listen".
It's quite hard to know who to listen to, and who is telling something objectively true in this environment, since everyone's voice has the same weight. And there are too many of them to sift through, so many probably end up listening to people who pander to them.
There was no shortage of hype peddlers and ignorant people with authority before the internet. All the internet did was wake more people up to this fact and force them to either start thinking critically or turn into cynics.
What changed is the peddlers and powerful fools have bigger audiences now. There's less space for the niche con artist because all the marks are in someone's downline throwing all their money and credit at a lost cause.
Although most of what he said has been easily addressed in the last 20 years, one thing lingers. And it’s not because we can’t solve it, but the VC model has prioritized ads instead, and for whatever reason, social networking hasn’t had any good OPEN SOURCE platforms. My guess is because they would have to work across websites, and very few standards too off.
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. A network chat line is a limp substitute for meeting friends over coffee. No interactive multimedia display comes close to the excitement of a live concert. And who'd prefer cybersex to the real thing? While the Internet beckons brightly, seductively flashing an icon of knowledge-as-power, this nonplace lures us to surrender our time on earth. A poor substitute it is, this virtual reality where frustration is legion and where—in the holy names of Education and Progress—important aspects of human interactions are relentlessly devalued.
I have spent the last 7 years and nearly $1 million dollars building such a platform. It’s free and open source but we have yet to make the marketing for it. It needs to be clear how to get started with it, and a community needs to grow. Going to release it later this year. Maybe Nov 5th?
Your site has some auto-playing video below the fold and a spinning GIF of a globe from 1995. It's cluttered, noisy, and unclear. There is no point of focus. I can't get as far as figuring out what sets it apart or makes it better because I had to close the page.
Compare this to Mastodon--which you dismissed with all other open source social networks--where the project lead thinks hard and openly about the accessibility and value of virtually every UX change.
I read Stoll's book Silicon Snake Oil back then and thought it a bit short sighted too. It's amazing how much the Internet experience has changed in 20 years - and not all of it for the better.
Also, the fact that there's a typo directly above the phrase "Lacking editors, reviewers or critics" made me chuckle.
[+] [-] scalio|7 years ago|reply
> The Usenet, a worldwide bulletin board, allows anyone to post messages across the nation. Your word gets out, leapfrogging editors and publishers. Every voice can be heard cheaply and instantly. The result? Every voice is heard. The cacophony more closely resembles citizens band radio, complete with handles, harrassment, and anonymous threats. When most everyone shouts, few listen.
> Then there's cyberbusiness. We're promised instant catalog shopping—just point and click for great deals. We'll order airline tickets over the network, make restaurant reservations and negotiate sales contracts. Stores will become obsolete. So how come my local mall does more business in an afternoon than the entire Internet handles in a month?
> While the Internet beckons brightly, seductively flashing an icon of knowledge-as-power, this nonplace lures us to surrender our time on earth. A poor substitute it is, this virtual reality where frustration is legion and where—in the holy names of Education and Progress—important aspects of human interactions are relentlessly devalued.
[+] [-] bumholio|7 years ago|reply
He clearly saw the wider limits of technology in relation to society. Liquid and online democracy has failed, we are in an age of autocrats that have weaponized online propaganda and misinformation to directly reach their voters. The freedom of the press increased online but it's quality dropped markedly, the cacophony effect is real. Alienation and engineering addiction are the name of the game for tech giants and their bottom line. Online self teaching is great for adults, but a very poor substitute and at most a complement to competent teachers in schools.
[+] [-] zouhair|7 years ago|reply
Imagine you are in the mid 90' and you say to someone that in the next decade we will have a camera, a video camera, a radio, a music and video player, a voice recorder and much more in just one pocket. Saying it like this make it look insane.
On the other hand psychological and social aspects are linked to our brains that didn't change much in the course of the human recorded history.
[+] [-] mysterydip|7 years ago|reply
I feel this is most evident on Twitter. I see it in the indie gamedev scene: everyone trying to advertise their upcoming game or steam sale, trying to build an audience, but no one listening to anyone else's.
Another aspect being sold (implicitly or explicitly) is the democracy of the platform: anyone (commonfolk) can talk to anyone else (celebrities, CEOs), but the fact it's possible works against itself. There's so many voices no one really gets heard except a handful.
[+] [-] hcs|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lordnacho|7 years ago|reply
When I was a kid in the 90s news and information was curated. If you read an opinion in the paper it was some guy who'd been writing for a long time, who'd done the background reading, and who normally presented things in a balanced way, whatever his leaning was. Nowadays you can find just about any extreme view, badly written in an aggressive or sarcastic tone, and ignorant of the history of the topic. It's not necessarily good to always have the sober and historically informed opinion, but it sure would be good to have it most of the time.
Not sure if he mentioned this, but it's also gotten a lot easier to find like minded uninformed people. I'm still undecided about whether flat earthers are all kidding, but if they aren't you can see how hard it's going to be to climb out of that intellectual hole. There's now conferences and loads of websites about the Bedford Level experiment, and all sorts of other flat earth tropes.
[+] [-] mercer|7 years ago|reply
On reddit this somehow doesn't happen. Every comment stands on its own and half the time what looks like a threaded conversation is various different users replying to each other.
I think something very important is lost there. Much as I'd like to believe so, I think the way my brain works is that no comment stands on its own and communication is heavily mediated by the knowledge and reputation of the other in relation to myself. Without that, so much that is valuable in the exchange of information, whether facts or opionion, or nuance, is lost.
[+] [-] emacsen|7 years ago|reply
His name is Clifford Stoll and he was a physicist and early Internet user. He wrote the book "The Cuckoo's Egg" which should be required reading for all sys-admins.
In the mid-90s, he saw the Internet as something akin to Fahrenheit 451 and began preaching how it would tear us apart as a society. To that end, he wrote Silicon Snake Oil and articles like this one, which combines philosophy and cultural observations (the mob mentality of the crowd) with nonsensical conclusions based on the current technology (ie that online shopping would never be a big thing). I was never sure if he genuinely believed that it wasn't possible, or if he was merely trying to make the web less appealing somehow to prevent it from happening.
Years later he started to sell Klein Bottles on his website. I'm not sure if he still does, but in the year 2000, you could order them from him and he'd take your order over the phone. I ordered a few and it was fun to talk to him.
[+] [-] jacquesm|7 years ago|reply
From a miniature robotic warehouse under his house, no less:
https://techcrunch.com/2015/06/23/how-clifford-stoll-sells-k...
[+] [-] SmellyGeekBoy|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] perlpimp|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] finknotal|7 years ago|reply
Beautiful example of article where the author was skeptical based on the wild west of the current state of technology. What current technology is the same? VR? Self driving cars?
[+] [-] eksemplar|7 years ago|reply
It requires quite a lot of work though, and unlike the web, it probably can’t be done by one person in a basement. Which I think is important to it’s impact, because google probably wouldn’t have existed if it couldn’t have started small and gradually build its way up.
[+] [-] AVTizzle|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] adoctor|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] planck01|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ModernMech|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gboudrias|7 years ago|reply
Still, a good lesson: It remains too easy to miss the forest for the trees. We never wanted salesmen or paper, what we actually wanted were products and information. In other words, it's easy to forget that the technology is not the product, just a vehicle for it.
[+] [-] marvin|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] NegatioN|7 years ago|reply
It's quite hard to know who to listen to, and who is telling something objectively true in this environment, since everyone's voice has the same weight. And there are too many of them to sift through, so many probably end up listening to people who pander to them.
[+] [-] rainbowmverse|7 years ago|reply
What changed is the peddlers and powerful fools have bigger audiences now. There's less space for the niche con artist because all the marks are in someone's downline throwing all their money and credit at a lost cause.
[+] [-] EGreg|7 years ago|reply
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. A network chat line is a limp substitute for meeting friends over coffee. No interactive multimedia display comes close to the excitement of a live concert. And who'd prefer cybersex to the real thing? While the Internet beckons brightly, seductively flashing an icon of knowledge-as-power, this nonplace lures us to surrender our time on earth. A poor substitute it is, this virtual reality where frustration is legion and where—in the holy names of Education and Progress—important aspects of human interactions are relentlessly devalued.
I have spent the last 7 years and nearly $1 million dollars building such a platform. It’s free and open source but we have yet to make the marketing for it. It needs to be clear how to get started with it, and a community needs to grow. Going to release it later this year. Maybe Nov 5th?
https://qbix.com
[+] [-] rainbowmverse|7 years ago|reply
Compare this to Mastodon--which you dismissed with all other open source social networks--where the project lead thinks hard and openly about the accessibility and value of virtually every UX change.
[+] [-] bwldrbst|7 years ago|reply
Also, the fact that there's a typo directly above the phrase "Lacking editors, reviewers or critics" made me chuckle.
[+] [-] ikt|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] _bxg1|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] linkmotif|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] exodust|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] arisAlexis|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] JohnClark1337|7 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] adamnemecek|7 years ago|reply