The Internet? Bah! - hilarious 1995 article by Clifford Stoll

http://www.newsweek.com/id/106554

by edw519 • 18 years ago

59 23 18 years ago

Good find!

It's great looking back to those days when opinions like his were, indeed, mainstream. I was in high school at the time and admitting you used the Internet was not something you did. It was something that would be forever geeky, text based, and for the domain of hackers and scientists only.

Things changed rapidly, of course, but I'd say it was more amazing that it DID take off with the general public than the fact we thought it wouldn't.

edw519• 18 years ago

1995 Predictions = 2008 Flamebait

wumi• 18 years ago

some things still ring true:

"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?"

mechanical_fish• 18 years ago

Back then I thought that Stoll had a point, though he went a bit too far. But he turned out to be very, very wrong.

The problem is the assumed dichotomy. Nobody substitutes network chat for meeting friends or attending live concerts. We augment these experiences.

We use network chat to meet new friends, arrange our meetings with old friends, keep track of distant friends, shop for mail-order coffee, learn about exotic coffees and coffeeshops, and swap hints on the home-roasting of coffee. We figure out which live concerts to go to by watching Youtube and keep track of where and when those concerts are using mailing lists and Myspace.

I'm a classical music idiot, but I own a couple of Vladimir Horowitz CDs. Vladimir is, of course, dead, but I found some video of him on Youtube, and in the comments was a mention of Martha Argerich, an awesome pianist who is still very much alive and is giving a concert not too far from here in August. If it weren't for Youtube I might never have known this woman existed.

I won't say much about sex -- that's what the entire rest of the web is for -- but it seems to me that the web is the most important innovation in the history of sex since birth control.

anescient• 18 years ago

I agree strongly with your "augment" point, and I'd just like to point out that online communications mediums provide opportunities for expression not possible in other contexts.

For one thing, text chat is a very different art from speaking. Any kind of timing or nonverbal sound has to be expressed somehow in ASCII. Most emoticons are thin symbolic standins for actual face-eye contact, but some emoticons and larger images posted on forums and the like express things you couldn't possibly express verbally.

Now, you may say, hey great, so the next great leap in human relationships is fucking LOLcats. Well, people walk around saying Git 'R Dun to each other in the flesh. In my opinion LOLcats is at least a step up from that. Besides, that's just retarded superpopular images.

Putting aside the base communication, what about file transfers? If I'm chatting with someone, it's trivial to hand over, in a sense, some image or mp3 or document or whatever. And we're both in a position to handle those files: play or edit them or whatever.

So.

Yea.

Communication on the net is far more than just speech without inflection.

kajecounterhack• 18 years ago

HAHA Nick Negroponte! "You won't be able to bring that laptop to the beach." Of course not, we're only gonna send them Africa...

astine• 18 years ago

Wow, I should have looked at that date before I started reading the article. Some of those claims seemed downright weird.

davidw• 18 years ago

His book "The Cuckoo's Egg", is, on the other hand, a good read. And given some of the cyber-utopia-singularity type of people he probably ran across in those days, he was probably right to throw some cold water on things.

noonespecial• 18 years ago

This is actually a very typical mistake. To look at a technology as it is instead of how it could be and then try to make predictions using only the latter. The exact same thing happened to cars, electric lights, telephones, you name it.

It seems almost human nature to make this mistake. Thats why visionaries are, well visionary.

wave• 18 years ago

He wrote it in 1995 and he turned out to be wrong. Can we get it right? How are things will be different in 2021?

socmoth• 18 years ago

there are often cycles in newstories

the first cycle is characterized as something found, launched, or created. (gold in california)

2nd, is everyone is doing it, most important thing ever and you are missing out (gold rush)

3rd, is more subtle and often missed as a trend, it is characterized by counter thought, (nobody actually got rich in california) (which is mostly true about gold)

you can see it in a lot of places.

1) facebook platform launched

2) land grab in progress

3) nobody makes money on facebook apps

newpapers have to tell a story, and these stories are the kinda angles that work over and over. there are many variations and subtleties and articles which don't fit, but in any big news trend, you can find some articles which fall directly in to those three categories.

this story is category 3, readers! everything is ok! you've been hearing about something, but everything is ok! you aren't missing anything!

notauser• 18 years ago

A lot of these issues were just bootstrap ones; starting a good internet requires shopping service lots of users, which are attracted by... good internet shopping. Oops.

Not many people in 1995 had an appreciation of just how large the internet would get, because roadblocks like this seemed to stop adoption all over the place. In actual fact it was not stopping growth, just slowing it until critical mass was reached.

Some of his points are still very valid however:

"Lacking editors, reviewers or critics, the Internet has become a wasteland of unfiltered data."

This one is _still_ true. It's getting better because of slashdot and other link collectors, plus places like wikipedia, but no one would claim it is totally there yet.

Right now the internet is divided into two parts: the known good bit and the unknown quality bit (which includes parts known as good months or years ago, but not checked recently).

It isn't as likely as it was in 1995, but if the data you happen to need is in the unknown quality part you are back to the same position as you were in 1995.

Plus plenty of people still prefer reading books to reading on a screen :)

Xichekolas• 18 years ago

My favorite parts...

---

"even caught a hacker or two"

With what? A butterfly net?

---

"Every voice can be heard cheaply and instantly. The result? Every voice is heard. The cacophany more closely resembles citizens band radio, complete with handles, harrasment, and anonymous threats. When most everyone shouts, few listen."

Sadly this part could have been written in 2008.

---

"So how come my local mall does more business in an afternoon than the entire Internet handles in a month? Even if there were a trustworthy way to send money over the Internet--which there isn't ..."

My how things have changed.

---

I wonder what articles we will be linking to 13 years from now. Anyone know of good present-day naysayers that we can keep track of and make fun of in a decade or so?

almost• 18 years ago

>"even caught a hacker or two" > With what? A butterfly net?

I also thought that bit was a little odd at first. But, as davidw points out above, this is the author of The Cuckoo's Nest in which he does, in fact, catch a hacker (or cracker if you prefer)?

allenbrunson• 18 years ago

despite being a lifelong avid computer user, i was about a year late getting to the internet. all i heard about it was hype, hyped to the high heavens. i figured anything being sold to me like that couldn't possibly be any good.

adoyle• 18 years ago

The irony is that if he had been right, there would not be a bunch of people reading that article right now.

ojbyrne• 18 years ago

I actually liked "Silicon Snake Oil." I think he believed that what I call the techno-optimists oversold things, and he probably was too extreme in opposition (because that's how debate works).

But his original point is probably just as true today - the pollyanna-ish "technology will cure everything" side is still dominant,and there is no question that negative things about the internet get glossed over. The reality is in the middle somewhere.

martythemaniak• 18 years ago

He's right on most of the stuff he says in that article actually. Let's have a quick breakdown:

- Electronic publishing will not surpass traditional newspapers: newspapers may now be found online, but the majority of substantial content out there is still produced the out fashioned way by old fashioned reporters. Bloggers have done a pretty decent job of covering stories which are too niche for the mainstream presses (Engadget, TechCrunch etc), but have not come even remotely close to challenging traditional media. I saw a PBS documentary on the Iraq War which mentioned that traditional newspapers are both profitable and account for about 80% of new stories, with talking heads on TV mostly taking their cues from papers.

- multimedia software replaces teachers: I'd like to see someone try and argue he was wrong on this one.

- computers replace books - well, it hasn't happened yet, and it seems it won't happen until computers start to resemble books so much that there isn't any practical difference anymore. The Kindle, E-Ink, etc are all trying to make computers more like books, since no one likes reading off a screen, so I'll give him this point too.

- 'ocean of uneditted data': wikipedia and google have made a huge difference here, so he's wrong on this point

- digital networks change governance: Now that I think about it, isn't it a bit ironic that the rise of blogs, distributed networks, open discussion forums etc all took place during one of the most orwellian administrations ever? Unseen levels of secrecy, scandals too numerous to mention, a disasterous war, erosion of civil liberties, increased surveillance... one of the hubris around electronic governance made an once of difference.

- cyberbusiness: partially right on this one. The internet is great for some kinds of business and quite horrible at others.

- Online communities cannot replace real human ones: again, completely right on this one. While online communities are better than nothing, they pale in comparison with real human ones. There's a very good reason why startup hubs are as relevant as ever and YCombinator and its clones demand that you move to their location in order to partipate.

OVerall, a pretty good record of predictions and I suspect a lot of them will continue to hold for a very long time.

pixcavator• 18 years ago

You failed to discuss his main point - "Bah!".

pius• 18 years ago

Ah, that brightened my evening. Funniest thing I've read all week.

EPIC FAIL.

Agathos• 18 years ago

"the network is missing a most essential ingredient of capitalism: salespeople"

And there we have the reason I prefer to do most of my shopping online.

jk4930• 18 years ago

This is great. Here we have it: Listen to your customers. Many of the problems he complained about were solved later by the community, businesses, or simply by technological progress. Solved profitably, I might add. Sure, one has to subtract the "disruptive silver bullet hype" from some of the issues, but then one finds a lot of real business opportunities. I love those complaints.

mleonhard• 18 years ago

> Even if there were a trustworthy way to send money over the Internet--which there isn't--the network is missing a most essential ingredient of capitalism: salespeople.

I think the network has plenty of salespeople. It still needs a better way to send money. We need an alternative to the $0.20 + 2% VISA tax.

The Internet? Bah! - hilarious 1995 article by Clifford Stoll

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