Why the Web Won't Be Nirvana (1995)

http://www.newsweek.com/clifford-stoll-why-web-wont-be-nirvana-185306

by Jschwa • 13 years ago

94 67 13 years ago

newsweek.com

gaius3• 13 years ago

Is that the real page title?

mathattack3• 13 years ago

Unless it's been changed, yes.

gaius3• 13 years ago

When I wrote that, the title was "hilariously stupid predictions from 1995".

mathattack3• 13 years ago

Clifford Stoll's writing should be required reading. He missed some of the technological leaps of the past 18 years that improved adoption (this was pre-pre-Bubble) but the many of the ideas of human contact do ring true today. I was very surprised when I read this the first time around. He elaborated more in Silicon Valley Snake Oil, also from 1995.

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

and

http://www.amazon.com/Silicon-Snake-Oil-Thoughts-Information...

gaius3• 13 years ago

SSO should be required reading for the current crop of "teach everyone to code" types.

mathattack3• 13 years ago

I think they tell different stories, no?

SSO is about spending too much time online. "Teach everyone to code" is about giving people marketable skills, and adding computer programming to the mathematics curriculum. Why not?

carlosgg• 13 years ago

I think it's good to learn contrarians' opinions every once in a while. This is the last book he wrote, I think. Although the subtitle sounds indeed like heresy in this 21st century, I wonder what motivated his views back then.

http://www.amazon.com/High-Tech-Heretic-Reflections-Contrari...

Osiris• 13 years ago

One of the reasons that this article may have wrong about the success of the Internet is that he was judging the Internet based on its capabilities at that time, rather than on what the underlying networking capabilities may provide in the future.

For example, he complains that it's too hard to find information online. His searches returned bad results and made it hard to find what he was looking for. This problem was solved (or began to be solved) only a few years later with Google.

He also mentions that you can't "take you laptop to the beach". He missed out on the idea that hardware would also improve until we have today's Kindles and iPads.

The Internet of 1995 wasn't great, but the underlying technical foundation allowed for growth and expansion that was unforeseen.

dccoolgai• 13 years ago

True...I feel there is a subtle lesson in there today for all the folks poo-pooing the Amazon drone announcement....

nakedrobot2• 13 years ago

Wow, he is nearly totally wrong on every point! :-)

"The truth in no online database will replace your daily newspaper, no CD-ROM can take the place of a competent teacher and no computer network will change the way government works."

And to think that we have really only just gotten started.... when I look back a few blinks to 2005 and realize that there wasn't even anything in popular culture known as Youtube... unbelievable!

The next decades are going to be amazing.

mhurron• 13 years ago

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

No, I would say this is still correct. There is a feedback beyond yes/no right/wrong that has not been able to be replicated in automated teaching and training that a competent teacher can provide.

jrs99• 13 years ago

yes. but how many competent teachers are there?

I'm thinking most teachers can be replaced by software while benefiting the student.

drcube• 13 years ago

But certainly, CD-ROMs (or today's equivalent: Khan Academy and MOOCs) can take the place of no teacher?

There is free education to be had today that wasn't available in 1995. It's not better than the face-to-face education we had then or now, but it's quite a bit better than going without any education at all due to location, circumstances or finance.

PhasmaFelis2• 13 years ago

Wow, he is nearly totally wrong on every point! :-) "The truth in no online database will replace your daily newspaper, no CD-ROM can take the place of a competent teacher and no computer network will change the way government works."

Of those three, he was only wrong on the first point.

Archives of facts are very useful, but they do not teach. The internet has changed (and accelerated) the way government delivers talking points to the nation, but it hasn't made anything more egalitarian or democratic.

mjolk2• 13 years ago

I hope others don't take too much away from an article that contains the gem:

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

Human contact is nice and can't be replaced by our current technology. Don't let this one, easy-to-make, statement let the rest of the contrarianism seem correct. Mr. Stroll's vision for the future of the internet was short-sighted and uncreative, but it's fun to see how far we've come.

Very related article in which the author eats humble pie: http://boingboing.net/2010/02/26/curmudgeony-essay-on.html#c...

m3talsmith• 13 years ago

I beg to differ: $61 billion gross for 2012 - http://techcrunch.com/2013/11/13/jeff-bezos-believes-aws-cou...

mjolk2• 13 years ago

In what way do you beg to differ? You're just linking me to an article about AWS profits.

thoughtsimple• 13 years ago

Cliff Stoll had his moment when he wrote Cuckoo's Egg. A pretty good tale of his stalking a hacker and getting the FBI interested. He then squandered that brief internet fame by becoming an internet naysayer and got another 15 minutes.

ErikAugust• 13 years ago

Look at the photo.

Hard to have vision when your workspace is so cluttered.

spodek• 13 years ago

Less than a decade later my father, a history professor, thought I was a fool for thinking Wikipedia could hold a candle to Britannica for many reasons similar to those in the article.

Obviously I didn't know what editing meant, how quality came about in publishing, or what an encyclopedia was for. The value of the GPL was utterly lost on him.

pekk• 13 years ago

Wikipedia is a great place to publish your views with little real oversight, as long as you get seniority, make a few external sites to link to, and squat the relevant pages. The best part is that your message can be taken up well because even adults think they can rely on it (no adult relies on Britannica for anything, few own it anyway).

Maybe you were wrong and your father was right.

periferral2• 13 years ago

and yet it accurately states facts in a majority (if not all) matters I've looked up in recent years.

wdewind• 13 years ago

Wikipedia is a great place to publish your views with little real oversight, as long as you get seniority, make a few external sites to link to, and squat the relevant pages.

Sounds a lot like academia to me (I'm biased, son of a prof here...). Seriously, it's unclear to me which the best form of editing there is, and unclear how you would know one is better than the other.

dicroce• 13 years ago

I use Wikipedia nearly every day. I have learned a great many things that I am able to immediately apply in my work (recent example: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boyer_moore)... I guess its just a coincidence that this false information had the exact same running time complexity as the real thing (O(n+m))?

pyalot2• 13 years ago

Almost no single prediction, critisism or estimate that held up to the test of time. Moral of the story, don't play the prophet and try to predict the future. The future is always stranger than anybody imagined.

bstar77• 13 years ago

I love reading things like this... This guy saw obstacles that were insurmountable while others saw obstacles that we begging to be conquered. And now we know how it turned out.

notjustanymike2• 13 years ago

So I used to work on the Newsweek web ops team. This article gets linked about once a year. Every year the comments are the same. Every year he has to admit he was wrong.

LEAVE CLIFFORD STROLL ALONE!

shalmanese• 13 years ago

Also, get his name right ;).

notjustanymike2• 13 years ago

Well shit.

wehadfun2• 13 years ago

For those that don't know

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kHmvkRoEowc

smegel• 13 years ago

The cacophany more closely resembles citizens band radio, complete with handles, harrasment, and anonymous threats.

Fascinating.

dangayle• 13 years ago

That's the one point that I find the most interesting.

asveikau• 13 years ago

Anyone else bothered that he spelled "cacophony" wrong? "Cacophony" as in "bad sounds"? Going by the Greek roots this is roughly equivalent to writing "telephane".

leokun• 13 years ago

That background taskbar looks green and blue like windows xp. Is that right? How could this be 1995 if that's windows xp.

lelandbatey• 13 years ago

I'm pretty sure that picture was not taken for this article, since the photo credit is to Youtube. So it may very well be a much more recent photo.

normloman• 13 years ago

Most of these naysaying predictions didn't come true, but a few did. Computers haven't replaced teachers and likely won't. E-commerce sites haven't replaced brick and mortar stores (though they have swallowed a huge chunk of their business) And I have never heard of anyone attending a virtual town meeting.

The author knew what was wrong with the internet in 1995, but couldn't imagine the solutions we'd invent in 2013.

TillE• 13 years ago

And we're still a long, long way off from the "information superhighway" dream of the 90s. Wikipedia is good, but it barely scratches the surface of any area of knowledge.

There's nothing technically stopping that (except for copyright), but the fact remains that it hasn't really happened yet.

periferral2• 13 years ago

I think you are overlooking the same thing the author did in 1995. It just hasn't happened yet. There are also somethings where I expect a healthy equilibrium to be reached between online and physical.

digz• 13 years ago

I had forgotten about Cliff Stoll for years... I remember reading his book Silicon Snake Oil in 1995 and giving a presentation to my middle school class about how simplistic the author's arguments were.

His argument and the degree to which he was wrong are among the clearest examples of the power of capitalism in overcoming seemingly impossible barriers.

InclinedPlane• 13 years ago

His biggest mistake is failing to understand that nothing is stationary, especially technology. One must draw a distinction between the limitations of technology in the moment and their fundamental limitations. Within only 5 years after the author's rant against the internet much had changed. The number of people online grew by a factor of over 20. Computers became much faster, broadband internet access became much more widespread, and the internet in general became much more sophisticated.

By 10 years after his statements the internet was a much different and almost completely unrecognizable place than the internet he was familiar with. The same is probably true for the internet 10 years from now. It makes you wonder how many "never"s, "can't"s, and "won't"s are bandied about today among the cognoscenti about the possibilities of the internet which will be outrun by the pace of innovation and change over the next decade.

mattgreenrocks• 13 years ago

I'm not sure what lambasting this guy for being wrong adds to discussion.

Really, I want to see a sensible critique of the final paragraph. It is the most interesting one. I see the Internet as fostering community, but never replacing it. Most social sites today are atrocious, quality-wise, and suffer the exact same symptoms he ran into.

nswanberg• 13 years ago

Likely someone posted this not to ridicule Cliff Stoll, who is a wonderful and charming writer, but to point out the similarity between his idea that the internet is a poor substitute for existing systems and will not hold up to its promises and the sea of incredulity about the idea of Amazon ever successfully delivering via drone, or even Amazon suggesting that they will try.

I'd extend that comparison to the reflexive outrage about self-driving cars, Google Glass, MOOCs, Soylent, Bitcoin, Wolfram|Alpha, Hyperloop, Tesla, and similar interesting projects that, for whatever reason, are described as doomed to failure or labeled as harbingers of the collapse of civilization.

Oh, and about that last paragraph. Cliff Stoll is almost entirely right--the internet is a terrible substitute for many kinds of human contact if there is a direct comparison between the two. That argument is still being made today. Google Hangouts does not beat a face to face meeting with a friend or business partner, following a live concert online is sad compared to being there, and few would prefer "cybersex" to the real thing.

But where Stoll is wrong is the exact reason why the internet succeeded when he thought it would fail. The internet succeeds where it can substitute real life where the real life version is not possible. It should be easy to come up with all sorts of those scenarios, including the ones Stoll mentioned.

fiskkastanj• 13 years ago

What do we who are closer to tech than the average person see in the same light now that people in our role saw the web in the early 90's?

My 5c goes to Bitmessage, the web (still. Biggest distributed computing platform ever), Bitcoin, drones and 3D-printers. Preferably them all combined.

It's not like technical revolutions are uncommon anymore.

swswsw• 13 years ago

Good list. i would agree with you that those 5 items are what to look out for in the near future (the web, Bitcoin, drones and 3D-printers). I would probably add wearable computing to the list as well.

talleyrand• 13 years ago

Wow. I bet he wishes he could take that one back.

wehadfun2• 13 years ago

Baloney: telecommuting workers - WRONG

Baloney: interactive libraries - CORRECT

Baloney: multimedia classrooms - CORRECT

Baloney:electronic town meetings- CORRECT

Baloney:virtual communities - WRONG

Baloney:Commerce and business will shift from offices and malls to networks and modems - HALF CREDIT (they both exist)

Baloney: freedom of digital networks will make government more democratic - CORRECT (Governemts just clamp down on the internet)

no online database will replace your daily newspaper - WRONG

no CD-ROM can take the place of a competent teacher - CORRECT (No CD ROM can keep kids off streets while parents at work)

no computer network will change the way government works - CORRECT (Goverments will change the way computer networks work)

Finding the date of the Battle of Trafalgar takes 15 minutes - WRONG (0.18 seconds on Google)

Baloney:we'll soon buy books and newspapers straight over the Intenet. - WRONG

Baloney:instant catalog shopping—just point and click for great deals. - WRONG

Baloney:We'll order airline tickets over the network, - WRONG

Baloney:make restaurant reservations - WRONG

Baloney:negotiate sales contracts. - HALF CREDIT (Mix of phone, text, email, and in person)

Baloney:Stores will become obselete. -CORRECT (stores are being built everyday)

djur• 13 years ago

That's not a particularly bad hit/miss ratio. The mid-90s were full of a lot of overheated rhetoric about the massive life-changing applications of the Internet. Skepticism like the points above can be broadly grouped into two types of target.

First, you had claims that the Internet would substantially improve civic engagement, government transparency, education, etc. The results are mixed on this end, mostly because a lot of the claims expected people to be more virtuous than they really are -- that people would 'get up and get involved' if they were only given the necessary access.

Second, you had claims that were essentially impossible with the structure of the Internet as it existed. This is an era where Internet access for most people was extremely slow, expensive dial-up service. Other dial-in information services had existed for decades and had not brought about a revolution. Most of the "wrongs" above only really became wrong after the introduction of always-on broadband, WiFi, cheap data plans, and smartphones, none of which were obviously on the way in 1995.

apolymath2• 13 years ago

I have to disagree with your comment about how CD ROMs aren't keeping kids off the streets. That would be equivalent to saying video games don't keep kids off streets. Kids these days don't sell drugs or commit crimes on the streets, or even PLAY in the streets anymore, they sit in their room or friends room and play video games all day. This is a common fact. Unless you're talking about 3rd world countries where most people don't have a PC or internet or even electricity.

6d0debc071• 13 years ago

I never saw kids selling drugs on the streets. In schools on the other hand....

hexagonc• 13 years ago

Baloney: multimedia classrooms - CORRECT

Khan Academy says "hi!"[1]. I'd only give half credit for this, considering the success that Khan Academy has had in schools and with individual learners.

[1] https://www.khanacademy.org/coach-res/case-studies

DanBC• 13 years ago

A few people might not know that Clifford Stoll wrote "Cuckoo's Egg" which is an interesting account that he alludes to in the first paragraph of this article

I've met great people and even caught a hacker or two.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cuckoo%27s_Egg_(book)

It's a great book. Of the time, but still interesting.

EDIT:

How about electronic publishing? 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.

Well, he's right that most people didn't bother with digital books and it took specialised e-book readers (and even then, a low cost device like the kindle) for them to really take off.

Reading this article is a bit like watching science fiction made in 1985. We have flying cars or human-simulation androids, but not flatscreen displays.

rohansingh• 13 years ago

There are two things to take away from this. The first is Clifford Stoll's own comment when his essay resurfaced over in 2010. The whole thing is worth reading [1], and it ends with:

Now, whenever I think I know what’s happening, I temper my thoughts: Might be wrong, Cliff…

Secondly, while Stoll is wrong on many points in this essay, what's amazing is that he hits on things that were definitely broken or deficient in 1995 and had to be fixed to get us to where we are today:

* difficulty of reading on CRT screens

* lack of online payments infrastructure

* difficulty in searching and filtering through Web pages (i.e., search)

These were all very tough problems, and stacks of money have been minted by Amazon, PayPal, and Google by tackling them. I'm impressed by Stoll's ability to identify these problems clearly as early as 1995.

[1] http://boingboing.net/2010/02/26/curmudgeony-essay-on.html#c...

WoodenChair4• 13 years ago

I don't find pointing out the obvious "amazing". Anyone who looked at a CRT in 1995 knew they didn't want to read a book on it.

Peaker2• 13 years ago

The deepest insights are often obvious in hindsight.

argumentum• 13 years ago

“To see what is in front of one’s nose needs a constant struggle.” - George Orwell

PhasmaFelis2• 13 years ago

This thing is all over the web now, and the one constant is that everyone's mocking the stuff he was wrong about but ignoring the stuff he was dead right about.

apolymath2• 13 years ago

18 years later... Google has singlehandedly organized vast amounts of data on the internet, along with wolfram alpha, thousands of hand-crafted infographics, youtube & vimeo, twitter, and a handful of other services. The internet is not only a nirvana but a way to simultaneously empower entire nations of people against the veils of corruption that have befallen civilization throughout human history.

Nicholas_C• 13 years ago

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

Wow, we've come a long way. I just pressed Ctrl + T, typed in "Battle of Trafalgar", hit enter, and had the answer immediately. (21 October 1805)

Interestingly, if you type "Battle of Trafalgar date", Google gives you a different date! It says 1824, which is the date when the painting titled "Battle of Trafalgar" was completed. I suppose we may have a little ways to go.

dragonwriter• 13 years ago

Interestingly, if you type "Battle of Trafalgar date", Google gives you a different date!

OTOH, if you search Google for "When was the battle of Trafalgar" you get the correct answer ...

drdiablo• 13 years ago

I think there is something very important that clifford Stoll doesn't talk about. It's the power of having all our brains connected at one point, like solar panels targeting light towards a sensor to multiply the amount of heat transfer. We are all together in this thing called in the internet, and anyone who has a good idea can share it. Anyone who likes someone else's idea can go and help the person who had the idea. Most of all, people can combine ideas together to make the most brilliant things and very act of combining ideas I call it creativity. Ok fine the internet might not look so bright right now, but let's remember that thanks to the internet, we were able to invent things that would've never thought of, simply because the ideas weren't all there at the same place, easy to combine.

Why the Web Won't Be Nirvana (1995)

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