The Net Is a Waste of Time (1996)

http://www.nytimes.com/1996/07/14/magazine/the-net-is-a-waste-of-time.html

by mtrn • 13 years ago

303 81 13 years ago

HunterV• 13 years ago

Wonder what headlines we'll make fun of in 17 years?

I think the headline is actually self-mocking. Pretty sure the author is not actually arguing the net is a waste of time.

mtrn• 13 years ago

If I understand it correctly, Gibson describes his writing even net-driven in this interview: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fVnt_Rr-TB4#t=49m12s (49m12s). At least partially.

femto• 13 years ago

I read it as "The web is currently (1996) a time waster, but it will evolve into a time consumer."

networked• 13 years ago

Gibson's point seem to be that the 1996 Web is not so much itself a waste of time as a great tool for wasting time, and that that's not necessarily a bad thing. He also notes how this state of freedom and freeform-ness that encourages "surfing the Web" is fleeting and will pass to be replaced with something more conventional and structured.

I came back to this essay several times over the years and each time I read it I take a moment to appreciate how true its core observation rings. It can be considered a successful if somewhat vague prophecy about what the WWW has since in large part become: a delivery mechanism for traditional, one-to-many media. You could see that same thing happen in miniature on YouTube throughout its short history: the many-to-many system of its early days has been overshadowed by prepackaged shows. I'm not saying it's a bad thing (personally, I enjoy some of the shows), but it's different.

smosher• 13 years ago

He might have been saying it basically was at the time, like the analogy to television. I don't see how he could endorse the idea that it was a fundamental time-sink though. He expresses his inability to predict it, and prior to its widespread popularity he wrote of a cyberspace that was as woven into the fabric of daily machinations as ours is today, and not in the sense television is.

But he was right about it not feeling like a conversation. It still doesn't. We are still connected mostly to the things other people have done in the past. Even this particular mode of conversation, comment threads, is guilty of that.

OGinparadise• 13 years ago

" Wonder what headlines we'll make fun of in 17 years?"

"Smartphones are a waste of time"----if you waste your time on them with useless apps and especially if you get in the stupid game of telling everyone, every bite you take.

Gibson realized it was a double edged sword, useful but also a procrastinator's dream.

smegel• 13 years ago

Hopefully something about Facebook becoming the "new internet"

alaskamiller3• 13 years ago

It's okay, kids these days are used to it. Just like how kids back then got used to radio, pulp, and television.

GuiA• 13 years ago

Have you even read the article?

alaskamiller3• 13 years ago

My point is that as the fidelity of signals become stronger we acclimate to it. Turn back 6 years and the connectedest Gen Y lighting up on the internet felt the same way, in the circles I traveled many espoused the same self-aware sentiment as this, some even without the benefit of being Gibsonites.

Now that Gen Z is lighting up, crowding into Instagram, inheriting Reddit, rebuilding Tumblr, you know what I see? The most connectedest again are repeating the same sentiment and make believing they're the only ones in all of history to hold such perspective.

It's the same generational gap meme. Over and over again. Eventually the Gen Z grow old and grow out of using whatever trends charmed them. Then we get the reverb about how awkward of phase it was in the aughts and 10's that we became a generation addicted to black mirrors in the palm of our hands like the 70's was about sparking up and 80's was about indulging in cocaine in social situations.

And as I get older and on my march of filing out of the 18-35 demographics the more I learn and realize it's always been this way, but took awhile for the education to reveal itself. From the times of pulp fiction to radio surfing. And it will forever be this way as each generation arrive.

Just wait until the babies having grown up entirely with glass become self aware.

mauricio-OH• 13 years ago

I love how things have changed so much but they remain exactly the same. We're still hooked - to our smartphones. We're still wondering what the experience will be in a few years. Just like he did. Awesome.

lhnn• 13 years ago

Makes me think of Snow Crash a bit... plugged in constantly to virtual reality.

primitur3• 13 years ago

I just shipped my first AR app to a customer, and I have been having serious Snow Crash moments in real-life, lately. As a mobile developer, all I can think about now is the death of the native interface, and the new age of the rule of Augmented Reality. Yikes, I've slipped and fallen into the digital hole that is: reality with overlays.

For example I've quite literally got a little 3d animated ghost that sits in the corner of my favourite hangout, which only I can see through my phone when I point its camera in the right angle, which tells me the name of the track being played on the house speakers .. it really is a moment like Snow Crash, played out in real life, I have to say..

Up next, Finn the finger ..

DavidAdams• 13 years ago

If you'll read to the last paragraph, you'll find Gibson's very profound conclusion: that the 1996 Web was the early "test pattern" for what he predicts will be a world-changing, but "less fun" medium. How right he was.

GHFigs• 13 years ago

Interesting in light of some of his more recent thoughts, too:

We have yet to take Google’s measure. We’ve seen nothing like it before, and we already perceive much of our world through it. We would all very much like to be sagely and reliably advised by our own private genie; we would like the genie to make the world more transparent, more easily navigable. Google does that for us: it makes everything in the world accessible to everyone, and everyone accessible to the world. But we see everyone looking in, and blame Google. -- http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/01/opinion/01gibson.html

nacker• 13 years ago

This is what McLuhan called the "agenbite of outwit", riffing on Joyce:

"With the telegraph Western man began a process of putting his nerves outside his body. Previous technologies had been extensions of physical organs: the wheel is a putting-outside-ourselves of the feet; the city wall is a collective outering of the skin. But electronic media are, instead, extensions of the central nervous system, an inclusive and simultaneous field. Since the telegraph we have extended the brains and nerves of man around the globe. As a result, the electronic age endures a total uneasiness, as of a man wearing his skull inside and his brain outside. We have become peculiarly vulnerable. The year of the establishment of the commercial telegraph in America, 1844, was also the year Kierkegaard published The Concept of Dread.

A special property of all social extensions of the body is that they return to plague the inventors in a kind of agenbite of outwit. As Narcissus fell in love with an outering (projection, extension) of himself, man seems invariably to fall in love with the newest gadget or gimmick that is merely an extension of his own body. Driving a car or watching television, we tend to forget that what we have to do with is simply a part of ourselves stuck out there. Thus disposed, we become servo-mechanisms of our contrivances, responding to them in the immediate, mechanical way that they demand of us. The point of the Narcissus myth is not that people are prone to fall in love with their own images but that people fall in love with extensions of themselves which they are convinced are not extensions of themselves."

http://projects.chass.utoronto.ca/mcluhan-studies/v1_iss2/1_...

mortenjorck• 13 years ago

That closing paragraph really is a fantastic one. It contains a Gibsonism that really resonated with me: "gloriously unsorted Global Ham Television Postcard Universes."

Even with all the order that we've consented to have imposed by various hubs over the past 17 years, it inspires a certain swell of optimism for me to consider that we've never really abandoned that spirit. The frontier may be long settled and built up, but YouTube, Tumblr, Imgur, and other gated communities still play host to the kind of spectacularly diverse, ham-radio aesthetic of 1996. And there are still frontier sites. Cult webcomics, improbable enthusiast projects, random artifacts of odd genius.

I hope we never lose this spirit, and given the past two decades of the web, I don't think we need to worry.

SilasX• 13 years ago

Less fun? Are you high? I get more intellectual stimulation of a single site's content on one day than I've ever gotten from every dumbed-down newspaper editorial I ever read before the Web took off.

danseagrave• 13 years ago

I think Gibson meant the future www would be "less fun" relative to the procrasination friendly "unsorted Global Ham Television" 1996 version

j_s• 13 years ago

Perhaps a reference to the commercialization of the web? As various SEO masters monetize every nook and cranny of the long tail, even Google will have a hard time finding the crazy.

alxndr• 13 years ago

It's also in his fifth paragraph.

jgh• 13 years ago

His book "Distrust That Particular Flavor" is full of his old articles, such as this one, and his thoughts on them after looking back at them in 2012. I really recommend it if you're into William Gibson at all.

jere• 13 years ago

The headline had me cringing in expectation for a brain dead article, but how stupid of me! It's fricking William Gibson. Almost everything he said in this article seems to be spot on, then and now.

In case you have any remaining worry that Gibson is some crotchety "get of my lawn" type, check him out on twitter. He is one the most prolific, bizarre, and interesting users I follow: https://twitter.com/GreatDismal Recent examples:

>Once saw fake Zippo lighters with Confederate flags with swastikas in Shinjuku. Mindless mashup getting it right anyway.

>I've had the tv-in-the-mirror in bathrooms of a few hotel rooms. Have never turned one on. Feels like bad sci-fi prop-design.

>Fellatio illegal in 11 states. Lawmakers afraid to risk being known ever after as "the blowjob senator", if they act to strike them down?

eksith• 13 years ago

The level of prescience is astounding and this is almost 17 years ago.

NoPiece• 13 years ago

New York Times experimenting with link-bait headlines back in 1996.

dasil0032• 13 years ago

Link-bait is just a new word, the phenomenon must date back to the invention of the printing press.

angrycoder• 13 years ago

> link-bait headlines

Otherwise known as headlines.

kmfrk• 13 years ago

It still makes me kind of wistful considering how their headlines today are usually completely anodyne to the point of euphemism, which it sound like the author was in some Valium-induced fugue state.

subsystem• 13 years ago

If you havn't already seen it:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_Maps_for_These_Territories

http://archive.org/details/NoMapsForTheseTerritories

FajitaNachos• 13 years ago

The swastika symbol in Japan is the sign for a temple. It was used in Japan and many other cultures well before the Nazis adopted it. /end off topic reply

agscala• 13 years ago

The symbols aren't the same, one is a mirror of the other

mbubb• 13 years ago

I was going to reply with something like 'The NYTimes is a waste of time (2013)' - but that is a really good short piece.

Tsagadai• 13 years ago

The winning quote: "[sic] surfing the Web is a procrastinator's dream. And people who see you doing it might even imagine you're working."

How many people are identifying with that premonition right this second?

TechNewb• 13 years ago

Agreed. Golden.

phaus• 13 years ago

It's actually pretty funny. I'm in the middle of writing a paper for my philosophy class, about Pieper's Leisure, the Basis of Culture, and this is the first article I click on when I start slacking off.

The points Gibson makes about the importance of down time are almost the same as Josef Pieper's. I guess I'm still working on that paper after all.

primitur3• 13 years ago

Hail slack, brother! :)

aeontech2• 13 years ago

Praise Bob

taproot2• 13 years ago

> I COINED THE WORD "CYBERSPACE" IN 1981

Thats not something to be proud of..

prawn2• 13 years ago

He didn't write "I coined the word "cyberspace" in 1981 and I'm really proud of that."

thisone2• 13 years ago

I would say it is. I don't think you can talk the concept of the data driven world without looking at how Gibson and later cyber-punk authors imagined how it might be.

We may think that the word "cyberspace" is a bit twee now, but it was an investigation about what the future might be. And it was a way to present that investigation to an audience who most likely had little to no frame of reference.

kaybe2• 13 years ago

It's funny how the only ones using the word nowadays are governments and agencies.

'Cyber taskforce'? And you want me to take that serious?

taproot2• 13 years ago

"Cyber" - a prefix used to let you know a shitty metaphor is coming.

I'm sorry but I grew up in "cyberspace". There is no need to make the distinction between online and offline, for me and many others they are one in the same, we don't need cyber task forces to go after cyber criminals in order to uphold cyber laws inside cyber space. Its a stupid & redundant term, and coining it is not something to be proud of.

> And it was a way to present that investigation to an audience who most likely had little to no frame of reference.

That doesn't even make any sense. Lets tell people the internet is like a place they can run around in, that makes total sense yea? No, no it doesn't not in the fucking slightest. Have you seen Tron? This is what happens when idiots get a hold of shitty metaphors.

pshin45• 13 years ago

> The Web is new, and our response to it has not yet hardened. That is a large part of its appeal. It is something half-formed, growing. Larval. It is not what it was six months ago; in another six months it will be something else again. It was not planned; it simply happened, is happening. It is happening the way cities happened. It is a city.

I've always loved metaphors comparing the Internet to a growing city. The Web used to be a Wild West-style town that was ventured into only by the most daring of people and businesses, but it's now become a much more established and secure city, still full of possibilities, where everyone and their mother wants to move and try to make their fortune, but at the same time has lost a lot of its original "flavor" that made it so special.

And... I don't really know where I'm going with this...

prawn2• 13 years ago

I think it holds beyond that too. Still have the ugly neighbourhoods, properties designed in a way that give away their age, dangerous parts of town, etc.

wamatt• 13 years ago

That was a mostly prescient and enjoyable blast from the past. One thing though I was glad Gibson was wrong about:

>"It will probably evolve into something considerably less random, and less fun"

While his point was/is true of many systems and organizations, the internet is one example that has really outdone itself in terms of sustaining an unrelenting resistance towards a global monoculture.

Perhaps, like some older HN users here, when I go looking beyond the walled gardens of social networks, I feel just as fascinated by what I read today, as I did in the mid 90's.

Mahn• 13 years ago

Well, at least it's true there are some expectations now that there were not before: you can't show up with a "personal homepage" full of silly animated gifs, random midi music in the background and a photo as a repeating background image and likewise you cannot post a comment that sounds stupid, silly or random on any site and expect it to be accepted, so to speak. Most people would agree this is for the better, but hey, it is true there is less randomness and less fun, in a way.

mseebach• 13 years ago

It's the eternal september. When only a select few avantgardists are on the internet, you can generally assume that a random stupid comment is, in fact, brilliant (you just don't get it yet) - when everybody and their moms (literally) are there, you have to assume that a stupid comment is just that.

The great thing is that the internet has infinite capacity for people to create and congregate in increasingly smaller communities where the initial assumption still holds - ie. if you're posting on HN, you're already within 4-5 sigmas of someone whose opinion I'd care about than the average person on the net.

d23• 13 years ago

I decided to stick my head into the "firehose" of Facebook's public graph API last night and ended up finding some strange spambots creating pages and posting thousands of Amazon links. I followed the trail, trying to figure out what they were doing and what the point was. No one had liked the pages, so it didn't seem to make sense that they were building links to Amazon and not their own site (which I could understand for SEO). Anyway, I ended up going to the furthest reaches of the internet, never really finding an answer, but I got that same feeling: holy hell, this is amazing!

It's like being an explorer, going where only a few people have gone before. The internet can still be this, if you want it to be. You can still dig around the trenches, take the back-roads, see what you find, see what's going on behind the surface of the social networks and media.

God damn, I love it.

defen• 13 years ago

Speaking of the furthest reaches of the internet - just last night I ended up on a website dedicated to warning us about the coming race-war between Neanderthal-humans (introvert/autistic/asperger spectrum), Cro-Magnon humans ("normal" people), and "melonheads" (psychopaths? maybe?). It appeared to be entirely serious. You see, 40,000 years ago the melonheads decided that the neanderthals needed to be wiped out, so they sent in a slave army of cro-magnons armed with high-tech weaponry such as spear throwers. And then.....you get the idea.

I love finding crazy stuff like that.

Claudus2• 13 years ago

William Gibson is a strange person. I remember him making a comment at a convention once where he said he was shocked at what computers looked like on the inside, he expected them to be weird crystalline contraptions.

Claudus2• 13 years ago

Well, here's an actual quote: http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/William_Gibson

"On the most basic level, computers in my books are simply a metaphor for human memory: I'm interested in the hows and whys of memory, the ways it defines who and what we are, in how easily memory is subject to revision. When I was writing Neuromancer, it was wonderful to be able to tie a lot of these interests into the computer metaphor. It wasn't until I could finally afford a computer of my own that I found out there's a drive mechanism inside — this little thing that spins around. I'd been expecting an exotic crystalline thing, a cyberspace deck or something, and what I got was a little piece of a Victorian engine that made noises like a scratchy old record player. That noise took away some of the mystique for me; it made computers less sexy. My ignorance had allowed me to romanticize them."

guard-of-terra• 13 years ago

It caught up to his expectations with SSD.

coldtea• 13 years ago

Even more true in hindsight...

zemanel• 13 years ago

for some part of it, still true :-p

masto• 13 years ago

It's hard to remember what the Internet was like in 1996. I do it by remembering that in 1997 I started an ISP to offer blazing-fast 56K dialup to the indifferent grandparents of Long Island for $19.95/month. We had a computer on display in the front of our office so the skeptical could poke around and see what the web had to offer. Windows did not come with a browser installed, so many of our new customers had to wait for us to mail them a Netscape CD-ROM. People frequently got upset at us for high phone bills when they discovered too late that their local calling area did not include our POP. The writing was on the wall, of course.. dialup wasn't going to be around forever, and I already had the future of telecommunications installed in my apartment: ISDN.

tlarkworthy• 13 years ago

Neuromancer had the worst sex scene I have ever read.

negativity• 13 years ago

God damn. I don't think I've ever disagreed with William Gibson.

This documentary from 2003 (really a long-ish interview) was pretty interesting as well: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_Maps_for_These_Territories

mikaelf• 13 years ago

They knew it back then!

spiritplumber• 13 years ago

Obvious joke:

The NY Times Is a Waste of Time (2013) (news.ycombinator.com)

The Net Is a Waste of Time (1996)

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