1995: The Internet? Bah

http://www.newsweek.com/1995/02/26/the-internet-bah.html

by MykalM • 16 years ago

149 91 16 years ago

newsweek.com

something• 16 years ago

so, in hindsight, how many business cases are in this rant?

jessor• 16 years ago

"So how come my local mall does more business in an afternoon than the entire Internet handles in a month?"

good times.

petervandijck• 16 years ago

Yes, although the point somewhat stands: my local cornershop does more business selling milk, cereal and cans than many internet startups.

unwind• 16 years ago

Cans? Just empty cans?

sbov• 16 years ago

Your local cornershop does more business selling milk, cereal and cans than many non-internet non-startups. So I'm not sure how meaningful your point is.

lurkinggrue• 16 years ago

That reminds me, need to order some milk on Amazon.

metageek3• 16 years ago

Answer: because, in February 1995, the only browser with SSL (Netscape 1.0) had been out for only two months.

docgnome2• 16 years ago

I've seen this article before and it always makes me queasy. I always get to this line "I've met great people and even caught a hacker or two." and have to go throw up.

mbrubeck• 16 years ago

I didn't realize at first that this article was written by Clifford Stoll, who famously caught a spy/cracker working for the KGB, and wrote about it in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cuckoos_Egg_(book)

docgnome2• 16 years ago

OH! Neither did I. Thanks. Now don't I look stupid. In my defense the author isn't listed anywhere but the title tag. Which I didn't see. I've always thought it was just written by some jerk.

yread• 16 years ago

Preivous discussions:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1138707

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=143333

adorton• 16 years ago

The Internet is still a cacophony, albeit a more organized one.

hugh32• 16 years ago

Partly, we've learned to deal with it. The tools for searching for stuff we want have gotten better, and the amount of good content has improved, but we've also learned not to be surprised when our searches show up completely irrelevant junk.

pierrefar3• 16 years ago

Attempting to count every incidence of rubbish he poo-poos:

1. telecommuting workers

2. interactive libraries and multimedia classrooms

3. electronic town meetings (Actually, not sure about this!)

4. virtual communities

5. online database [to] replace your daily newspaper

6. no CD-ROM can take the place of a competent teacher

7. no computer network will change the way government works

8. Your word gets out, leapfrogging editors and publishers (that was already happening...)

9. reading a book on disc

10. buy books and newspapers straight over the Intenet

11. "Too many connectios, try again later." (The predecessor to the fail whale? I kid.)

12. Internet addicts clamor for government reports

13. pushing computers into schools

14. instant catalog shopping—just point and click for great deals

15. order airline tickets

16. make restaurant reservations

17. negotiate sales contracts

18. trustworthy way to send money over the Internet

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

The only one he actually got right: "[the internet] lures us to surrender our time on earth".

drtse42• 16 years ago

He alone could have created more than 19 successful companies...

pierrefar3• 16 years ago

Indeed! It does read like a checklist of what was about to hit.

russell_h• 16 years ago

That was what struck me about the article. He saw problem after problem with existing technology. But rather than trying to fix the problems, he just threw up his hands and said "this is obviously impossible".

Meanwhile, a long list of now-billionaires saw the same problems and decided to address them.

sabat• 16 years ago

The thing he's railing against is technology-as-panacea, and he's right, except that he overreacts and wants to throw the whole thing out. The Internet will not solve all our problems. It's helping, though.

PostOnce2• 16 years ago

#7 is accurate so far, but might change.

#6 I believe is just a truth of human nature. OpenCourseWare has no insight into your mistakes or personal leanings. A CD will never teach you kung-fu, or how to correct your poetry failings. General advice is all a book or CD can provide, they can't be personalized for you without the intervention of a human.

The rest have been pretty much disproven.

cschep2• 16 years ago

Maybe not change the way the government "works", but to say that internet didn't help Obama get elected is just simply false. In that sense the government of the USA is working differently because of the internet?

Maybe a stretch, maybe not.

mkramlich2• 16 years ago

And for many of the ideas he snubs there was probably a startup that made it happen or helped it along and sold the shovels, and ended up also making somebody rich in the process.

edanm2• 16 years ago

In case anyone doesn't know him, Clifford Stoll wrote "The Cuckoo's Egg: Tracking a Spy Through the Maze of Computer Espionage", a book about his real experiences tracking down a group of computer hackers.

By the way, there's a bonus at the end of the book: he mentions Paul Graham (in the context of Robert Morris' worm). Was a pleasant surprise when I read the book.

Amazon link: http://www.amazon.com/Cuckoos-Egg-Tracking-Computer-Espionag...

Wiki about the book: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cuckoo%27s_Egg_%28book%29

daten• 16 years ago

I knew that author's name sounded familiar. I also read and enjoyed that book.

Your Wikipedia link is broken, try this:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cuckoo%27s_Egg_%28book%29

edit: OP fixed his link

edanm2• 16 years ago

Woops, forgot to say thinks for pointing out the link.

So thanks! :)

erik• 16 years ago

He also has a Klein Bottle company, with an entertaining website:

http://www.kleinbottle.com/

And he gave a TED talk in 2006:

http://www.ted.com/talks/clifford_stoll_on_everything.html

thaumaturgy2• 16 years ago

His is one of my all-time-favorite TED talks. I also happen to agree with him on most of his points.

I currently make a reasonable living by untangling technology for people. Not only that, but I make another person's living doing it, and soon I'll be making yet another's, in spite of my many competitors all doing the same thing. I think this indicates some serious shortcomings in current technology, and a severe gap between technologists and non-technologists -- one which is incredibly difficult to communicate to technologists.

There are two different ways to read what he wrote. One is to take it in the way that most technologists would: when Clifford Stoll opens with, "The truth in no online database will replace your daily newspaper", you take the word "replace" in the most literal way possible, and say, "A-ha! But now we do have online databases replacing daily newspapers, so he was wrong!"

The other way -- and the one that I think is closer to his intended meaning -- is less favorable to technologists; in this case, no online database will "replace" our daily newspapers because online databases won't offer the same value. (Not more value, nor less value, but just not the same value.)

I think this is supported by his very next statement: "...no CD-ROM can take the place of a competent teacher..." And, again, I think he's exactly right. A competent teacher interacts with students in ways which technology has yet to offer.

And, some of his other statements are eerily prescient: "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 cacophany more closely resembles citizens band radio, complete with handles, harrasment, and anonymous threats. When most everyone shouts, few listen." ...This happens now, all the time, and yet I don't think it can be said that the average internet user is actually more informed about the topics on their favorite community site.

It's a cheap form of education, at best, the nutritrional equivalent of subsisting on a snack food and dessert diet.

"At best, it's an unpleasant chore: the myopic glow of a clunky computer replaces the friendly pages of a book." Again, readability on electronic devices is still a work in progress. ePaper and Amazon have made incredible strides, but many avid readers -- those that value the experience as well as the content -- still prefer a dead-tree book. For me, this has been something of an eye-opener recently: I started taking dance classes with my girlfriend a little while back, and the classes take place in a used book store. With my busy schedule and the internet at my fingertips, I haven't been visiting the book stores like I once did. But look! There's a great book on statistics! Oh, and Fluid Mechanics! Oh, and a sci-fi novel! And a history book!

Browsing Amazon just doesn't get quite the same reaction as wandering through the shelves of a good used book store. Amazon has other strengths; a local store can't possibly have a copy of everything, so if I'm looking for a specific title, Amazon might be a better bet. But, it doesn't completely take the place of a local store.

While he might have failed to predict the extent to which technology would evolve and invade so many people's daily lives, I don't think he was wrong to criticize technology's impact on those lives.

w1ntermute• 16 years ago

A hint: search the title along with the filetype: feature to find the whole book ;)

RyanMcGreal• 16 years ago

He also wrote Silicon Snake Oil in 1996, which seems to have been an expansion of the argument he made in this Newsweek article.

isamuel• 16 years ago

Here's Clifford Stoll's TED talk, which is about as well organized and carefully thought out as this article:

http://blog.ted.com/2008/03/clifford_stoll.php

correct• 16 years ago

We shouldn't be too critical, the following quote was probably true back then.

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, and my search is periodically interrupted by messages like, "Too many connectios, try again later."

hugh32• 16 years ago

RIght now, if you google "Date of the Battle of Trafalgar", the first hit is wikipedia, which in google's excerpt tells you it was October 21, 1805.

The second hit is a commentary on this very article.

DanielBMarkham• 16 years ago

I assume this was posted for folks to read and say "Look at the fool! Look how wrong he was!"

I find it much more interesting to find the parts in his essay that were true both then and now, for those are the parts where he stands the greatest chance of making a useful observation.

Reading it in this fashion, it looks as though we continue to confuse data for knowledge, images for experiences, and typing for human interaction. Not a lot of news there, but interesting nonetheless.

joezydeco• 16 years ago

There's an old book from 1980 called "The Book of Predictions" that I used to keep around for the same reasons.

The book is pretty much whack now, but it looks like others are in a similar boat:

http://www.vanityfair.com/online/daily/2008/06/the-book-of-p...

smallblacksun• 16 years ago

Also, some of his criticisms were very real issues that lead (in part) to the dot com bust.

TomOfTTB• 16 years ago

I think people saw this in 1995 and thought “what an idiot” and I think people are doing the same thing now. But in my opinion that’s a mistake.

What we should be seeing is that his points were valid in 1995 and are still valid today (except for the Cyber-business one which really was pretty dumb). The internet is still an unedited mess where answers are hard to find (if they aren’t on Wikipedia), people still don’t pay attention to government based internet initiatives (outside of SF) and classrooms have computers but generally don’t use them for anything but games.

That’s a sad commentary on our technological advancement.

If people had paid attention in 1995 we might have a Semantic Web by now, we might have forced porn sites and proxies into their own domain so kids could use the internet in the classrooms, we might have forced colleges to include “interactive digital design” into their curriculum for teachers and we might have an internet based government as opposed to a government that mindlessly throws datasets up that no one pays attention to.

So in my opinion the last thing we should be doing is writing this piece off as silly

illumin83• 16 years ago

I thought I would reply to your comment rather than just downvoting you.

How would forcing porn sites and proxies into their own domain make it any easier (or safer, for that matter) for kids to use the Internet in classrooms? If this is even technically possible, which I assure you, it is not, why should such things have to be legislated at all? Internet censorship and regulation does nothing to hurt and inevitably harms the free flow of information.

The piece is silly. Advocating that a highly censored Internet would have contributed to a Semantic web is silly as well.

pierrefar3• 16 years ago

We laugh now only because we witnessed first-hand the very fast innovation that happened in 15-odd years.

And who's to say that the semantic data from the beginning approach is the right one? Because we didn't have that, we got PageRank and Google: non-semantic data became a constraint leading to invention.

kunley5• 16 years ago

Scanning thru the comments here looks like there are two of us who think most of OP's points were and are valid.

I guess most of HN readers (including me!) are living in a comfort zone of carefully selected sites and services, but it doesn't change the fact that most of internet content is a pile of bullshit.

And of course, nothing can be a substitute of a human contact, and no, social networking is not a human contact.

dirtyaura• 16 years ago

most of internet content is a pile of bullshit

So are the most of published books, despite the editorial work put into them. And as the internet democratized publishing, it's just natural that there is more crap out there. I see that as a very positive sign of true freedom of expression.

social networking is not a human contact

This is rather silly point of view. Why isn't anybody discussing how talking in the phone "is not a human contact" ? People discuss, joke, argue, meet their future spouses, cuddle with their current spouses, all this and more in the internet. Of course that's not a substitute for kisses on a romantic dinner or for a good fist-fight at the bar, but that doesn't make communication over the internet any way less valuable.

warfangle• 16 years ago

Until internet access is a basic right of citizenship, and all citizens know how to use it, it will never become the basis for major government interaction.

Luckily at least one country understands this...

astine• 16 years ago

North Korea!

powrtoch• 16 years ago

I agree that the piece is educational in some important ways. There are several criticisms he makes that are still valid, and we really should be taking this as a sign that we need to address these problems. But the part where I think "what an idiot" does reasonably come in is that he seems convinced that since the internet's problems were not already solved (and no solution was immediately obvious) that they never would be.

The easy example would be his dismissal of ebusiness. But more interestingly, he observes "Lacking editors, reviewers or critics, the Internet has become a wasteland of unfiltered data". It is just as true today that underneath it all, the internet is a mess of disjointed and almost entirely useless data. But that's no reason to think it's hopeless. It's just a problem, and one that we have made huge advancements in dealing with. E.g. PageRank. It's now trivial to find the date of the Battle of Trafalgar.

My point being: he addresses a lot of serious problems with the internet. Many of them remain serious problems today. But it's clear that in a big-picture kind of way, he really did miss the point. And that point is that problems get solved, often in clever and unforseen ways. We shouldn't write the piece off as silly, but we should take it as a lesson in shortsightedness and drawing the wrong conclusions.

jimbokun• 16 years ago

"If people had paid attention in 1995 we might have a Semantic Web by now"

Instead, some people who were paying attention made Google, instead, which I think is a better solution anyway.

CamperBob• 16 years ago

If people had paid attention in 1995 we might have a Semantic Web by now, we might have forced porn sites and proxies into their own domain so kids could use the internet in the classrooms,

Or we might have tried teaching kids that information is not something to be frightened of, but that would be absurd, I suppose.

illumin83• 16 years ago

Favorite line from the article:

"What the Internet hucksters won't tell you is tht the Internet is one big ocean of unedited data,"

Unedited data indeed. :-)

kunley5• 16 years ago

It's mostly true.

The point is that you belong to an enlightened elite who already know where to look for edited information.

Back in 1995 there was no Wikipedia and search engines were crap.

illumin83• 16 years ago

I just found it ironic that an article complaining about "unedited data" also had a spelling error that should have been caught by an editor.

zebra• 16 years ago

I would hire Clifford Stoll as a consultant - when he says "There is no future in this idea" I will put all my efforts behind it. He had 100% of his guesses wrong.

s810• 16 years ago

Oh the wonderful 1990s jargon. I wonder how many 'Multimedia CDROMs' today's wikipedia would fit on.

rauljara• 16 years ago

What's really amazing is how right he was about how much was wrong at the time. The thing he missed is that a lot of those problems could be solved (and many have since been). But I think he can be forgiven for that. The people who had the insight to deliver solutions to those problems are mostly very rich now.

frevd• 16 years ago

how can I downvote that?

kunley5• 16 years ago

People always are eager to downvote an uncomfortable truth.

michael_nielsen• 16 years ago

A few months ago the author of this article, Clifford Stoll, wrote a short, thoughtful note admitting how badly he got it wrong:

"Of my many mistakes, flubs, and howlers, few have been as public as my 1995 howler.

Wrong? Yep.

At the time, I was trying to speak against the tide of futuristic commentary on how The Internet Will Solve Our Problems.

Gives me pause. Most of my screwups have had limited publicity: Forgetting my lines in my 4th grade play. Misidentifying a Gilbert and Sullivan song while suddenly drafted to fill in as announcer on a classical radio station. Wasting a week hunting for planets interior to Mercury's orbit using an infrared system with a noise level so high that it couldn't possibly detect 'em. Heck - trying to dry my sneakers in a microwave oven (a quarter century later, there's still a smudge on the kitchen ceiling)

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"

Assuming the author really is Stoll, major props to him for admitting he got it wrong.

Source: http://www.boingboing.net/2010/02/26/curmudgeony-essay-on.ht...

pavs• 16 years ago

>major props to him for admitting he got it wrong.

Well, he really didn't have much of a choice now, did he? Nevertheless, props to him for seeing the funny side of it.

Semiapies• 16 years ago

Actually, a lot of pundits and opinion-writers never do.

jafl5272• 16 years ago

Does it scare anybody just how quickly the technology has evolved to negate many of his arguments?

jeb• 16 years ago

Never mock anything technological and new. People will laugh at you for years if you get it wrong. Ask CmdrTaco.

The other way is not true, ask all the people who praised the Segway. Nobody cares that they thought it would be so cool.

megablast• 16 years ago

What is so wrong with people laughing at you?

troymc• 16 years ago

I can believe that he couldn't find out the date of the Battle of Trafalgar back in 1995. I was curious to see how hard (or how easy) it is today.

First I went to Wolfram Alpha and entered "when was the battle of trafalgar?" The response was "21-10-1805" (plus some other information about that date).

Then I went to Wikipedia and entered "Battle of Trafalgar" to find the eponymous article, which begins: "The Battle of Trafalgar (21 October 1805) was a sea battle fought between..."

When I Google "When was the Battle of Trafalgar?" the Wikipedia article is the top result.

So answering that particular question is indeed much easier today, if you know where to look.

caf2• 16 years ago

This is really another on the list of technological fixes that the author didn't forsee - search technology has improved massively since 1995. The data was likely out there - it's just it was hard to find.

mtigas2• 16 years ago

FWIW, though a lot of the details were wrong and changed over time, I’ve got to agree with his unhappiness about the oozing optimism of the time. A couple of examples he brought up:

* e-readers are still relatively new, and have not (yet) changed the publishing industry. That a screen can replace the printed page is still contested.[1] (Stoll: “At best, it's an unpleasant chore: the myopic glow of a clunky computer replaces the friendly pages of a book.” — I still hear things like this today.)

* The Internet has not yet revolutionized and re-democratized the government. (During the whole Google Fiber hub-bub, I heard many an optimist bring up this idea in my community.) Hell, in the United States, up to 25% of the population does not use the Internet.[2]

* I’m a self-driven learner but I don’t think I ever learned anything of practical application via an online course or a multimedia-driven online museum. Learning information is one thing, but I still think it’s hard to replicate the experience of in-person discourse and interaction. Just a personal observation.

Discounting a medium entirely is likely a poor choice since media (as in “formats for communication”) tend to last a very, very long time. All of the science fiction hopes and dreams tacked onto the medium? Not so much. These things take time, and Stoll was at least spot-on calling out things that were at best disappointing about the Internet in the 90’s.

[1] http://www.pcworld.com/article/200491/reading_on_paper_is_fa... [2] http://www.internetworldstats.com/am/us.htm

mtigas2• 16 years ago

Oh, and Prince — in the year 2010 — has no excuse for his own “the internet's completely over” argument.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/news/7874307/Prince-th...

z92• 16 years ago

I remember reading this article in 1995, in its context. And remember long discussion on mailing lists on this article. All these problems were real at that time. We overlooked most, because we were working to fix those. This article worked as a reminder of current situation at the time.

Back then I took it more as the author's expression of frustration than as prediction.

poundy• 16 years ago

IMHO, the Internet revolution only began with the web around 1995. The web (http) is the marvel we see today (Facebook, Gmail, Hacker News, etc). By the end of 1994, the total number of websites was still minute compared to present standards and Netscape was only founded in 1994. If the web didn't take off, the author probably would have been right!

ww520• 16 years ago

More than 640K of RAM? Bah.

motters• 16 years ago

I knew a few people who thought that the internet was merely a fad, right up until around 2001. After that time it was clear even to the most hardened sceptic that the internet was here to stay.

ibejoeb• 16 years ago

Who else would have agreed with him at the time of writing?

This is gold: it reads as if it were written today to troll us. It's almost freaky how nearly all of points have manifested, and some have even forced the obsolescence of their alternatives. I haven't purchased a ticket at an airline counter in many years; I'm not even sure if it's still legal :) I feel like I'm a holdout on the newspaper, but although I buy one almost daily, I still find that I get the majority of my news from online sources. The last time I visited a library it was to charge my blackberry so I could make a call.

metageek3• 16 years ago

It's probably possible to buy a ticket at the counter—though I wouldn't try paying cash—but what's definitely extinct are paper tickets. Since about 2004, it's all e-tickets.

Androsynth• 16 years ago

At first I was going to mock this author, but then I realized this is one of those articles that needs to be analyzed one level further than just a cursory (mocking) glance. This is something you should read and always remember when you yourself are telling someone that something is impossible.

I was telling a friend that streaming video games would never be possible due to the inherent latency involved, but then onlive came and proved me wrong.

It just goes to show you that you should always be an optimist when it comes to predicting technology.

gamble• 16 years ago

Though most fads are not trends and most trends are not fads, there are the occasional instances like the Internet circa 1995 that are both fads and trends. The fallacy of youth is to treat all fads as trends; the fallacy of age is to ignore all trends as fads.

metageek3• 16 years ago

I'm stealing that second sentence for my .sig randomizer. (With attribution.)

1995: The Internet? Bah

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