Why the Web Won't Be Nirvana (1995)
newsweek.com
newsweek.com
I was involved in a discussion this weekend that had a similar tone around people becoming too future aware. Specifically when you know a lot about the underlying technology (as Cliff does (and did) about networking) you tend to extrapolate what you know, but when you don't know anything about the underlying technology you tend to extrapolate your imagination.
People can imagine wondrous things. And when they tell an engineer to go build it, that engineer starts working backward from what would have to be true in order to have that amazing capability, and starts working on the pre-cursors.
Of all the things he got wrong I think there is a lot of resonance in the online education thing. I've done a few Coursera and MIT-X courses and while it could be my previous experience clouding my expectation, I personally learn better when the teacher is in the room and I can ask questions as they arise. Too often I start trying to answer a question to get clarity and get distracted into a whole new train of thought. That makes the learning process much slower and less satisfying for me.
Link to "Get Newsweek on your iPad" directly below the article. I love it.
If you haven't read Stoll's The Cuckoo's Egg, you really should. It recounts online life in the 1980's and Stoll's own real involvement in uncovering an online espionage ring.
I see this problem a lot: even if you know what a metaphor refers to, it can be unclear how its use is intended:
arms-length transaction: so wait, within arms length, or beyond arms length? (The term is used for the latter.)
sanguine: sang ... blood? So you feel bloody about this? What does that have to do with optimism? (I know, the four humors thing, but it's still weird.)
Actually, its usually used to mean at arms-length, neither closer nor farther: maintaining a distance that is close enough for the contact necessary to perform the transaction, but no closer.
Anyways, I would enjoy reading bold predictions about the future that's falsifiable rather than wishy-washy useless articles titled "7 reasons why Uber is winning." or "Why less users are joining Twitter."
Thank you for sharing this. It didn't tickle my intellectual curiosity, but it's a nice reminder of how bad humans can be at predicting even short-term changes. :)
But apparently he also wrote a book-length version including further predictions about the unlikelihood of computers becoming merged with his telephone, the universal nature of fax machines making them far more practical than email and the practical unlikelihood of Big Brother scenarios. They should probably rerelease it as one of those eBooks he predicted wouldn't take off.
[1]even the author now sells stuff over the internet, though I'm willing to bet there's not much of a market for "one sided bottles"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yJDv-zdhzMY
It's a failure in the sense that it's not generally available or in general use. I've also used tele-presence rooms before and they're not that great. Better than Skype or Google Hangouts, but not by much.
Whether society will view that as good enough to replace business trips remains to be seen.
Though email and VPN do allow more telework than has ever occurred before.
Things never ever get totally replaced, but technology and automation tends to take over the default case. His examples of newspapers and salespeople have not completely gone away, but certain have been significantly impacted by online alternatives.
[1] Edit: people have different standards for this, of course, but something like, "where have a global, working model of a large domain in which predictions of consciousness aren't a special case, and in which people who study it feel like it makes sense and is less mysterious".
I have personally made some headway on this problem, and I wouldn't be saying it was possible if I hadn't. Your inability to find a workable framework is more evidence to me of your lack of imagination than it is that the problem is fundamentally unsolvable. There's a finite number of consistent models to explore, and one of them will give us what we want.
It doesn't matter if you want to call that a technological problem or a social problem; the world isn't actually divided in those terms. So saying "social problems" strikes me as starting with a shitty model of what we are capable of. It's also just corporate-talk and there's no reason to expect it to be valid in this domain. The best that distinction has ever done is prime somebody to employ an actual problem solving technique.
No, I have one that works. I really don't care what any philosophers have to say about it. And if you think everyone has to agree to something before it can be useful, then I can see why you'd think this is a social problem.
>Where do you get this "finite number of consistent models" from?
There's a finite number of people, a finite number of configurations their brains have been in, and thus a finite number of models provided by those configurations.
The argument about finite brain configurations is not compelling. There's no reason why only brain states that have occurred would be relevant. Morality deals with hypotheticals and counterfactuals: what would be the moral judgment in this or that situation. I think it would be uncontroversial to claim that there are an infinity of such hypothetical situations, and each model of morality can deal with them differently, ergo you get an infinity of possible models.
>What does "one that works" mean?
It means it is both consistent with reality and useful.
>There's no reason why only brain states that have occurred would be relevant.
The reason those ones are relevant is because those are the only ones available for analysis. Those are the brains that determine what "human" currently means. We could evolve into toads in 100B years, but you'd hardly aspire to create a toad brain and call it a good human brain.
>I think it would be uncontroversial to claim that there are an infinity of such hypothetical situations, and each model of morality can deal with them differently, ergo you get an infinity of possible models.
You are confusing the multitude of possible moralities with the multitude of counterfactuals they model. More importantly, you or forgetting that we are only concerned with relevant moralities and relevant counterfactuals, and that we have to make our developments incrementally, and in finite time, which massively constrains the possibilities.
There are an infinite number of ways to skin a cat, but that doesn't mean we can't have a useful notion of the "right way" to do it.
I think that their enormous popularity has demonstrated that even if these two particular services eventually die, online social networks are here to stay. We're social creatures, and in retrospect, it's obvious we would use the internet to socialize.
They both don't age well with younger or long time users. Worse, there monetization strategy is to annoy users. So, long term I expect there going to be replaced with much leaner organizations that need less revenue to make quarterly projections or just shrink.
So sure, social networks may be around, but message boards for example have evolved into some small, but reasonably profitable companies like Reddit.
PS: Long term Facebook might try the MS route of buying enough companies that something sticks. EX: MS Access. But, that says more about Money than Social Networks.
Exactly like USD and all other first world currencies. Bitcoin is simply the next step in money.
Bitcoin has nobody forcing you into using it and nobody controls the price. Bitcoins are just bits on a ledger that maybe someone will buy from you tomorrow, maybe.
Even in the niche roles where bitcoin is superior to bank accounts, credit cards, and cash, there is nothing beyond momentum keeping people from switching to another type of cyptocurrency. That's why it's monopoly money.
As to what that value will be, I have no fucking idea. I don't imagine that it will be a major currency. But it'll always have some use cases, imo.
I mean your argument is essentially like saying: TCP/IP is just a protocol and anybody can switch to a different protocol any time. Well, sure. But they haven't. And they won't unless it breaks completely.
You can point to TCP/IP, but we've seen other protocols come and go. Back in the late 90/early 2000s's AOL messenger was dominate. Now nobody uses it. And that had very strong network effects, it was a messenger system.
That statement demonstrates you don't understand cyptocurrency at all. You're absolutely wrong, the difference between them is security, and that's something people value. And no, you can't trivially just substitute another crypto in place of bitcoin, other cryptos have neither the liquidity nor the security (which comes from the size of the network) to effectively move around the amount of money bitcoin can move around.
> I don't think the networking effects are that strong for bitcoin
Which means flatly you don't understand how cryptos work; no one who does would make that statement.
Bitcoin encodes a lot of economic assumptions and values into its design, but there's no practical way for the people affected by those decisions to work to change them, unlike money backed by a democratic government.
I don't need to know how to code to vote in the regular elections that decide how the Fed operates, all I need is to be a registered voter.
The next thing after USD and other first world currencies will be something that gives more power to the people, not less.
As that statement is wrong, so is everything else that follows. Democracy is built into the protocol, it is the very core of how bitcoin works.
No bitcoin advocate has ever said anything about my point other than "Just code up your alternative and get 50% of the network to adopt it," which does not mesh with any definition of democratic engagement anywhere in history, and doesn't even make sense in the context of democratic governance.
I'll just note that you didn't even say that, you just said "yes it is! yes it is so democratic!" ... which, of course, it isn't, at all.
> Just code up your alternative and get 50% of the network to adopt it," which does not mesh with any definition of democratic engagement anywhere in history
Nonsense, winning in any democracy requires gaining the support of the majority. If your idea has merit, it'll be adopted when the majority of of the network agrees it has merit by adopting it.
"You have to code, and then you have to get your changes distributed to more than half the world" fits no definition of democratic governance ever. The two are so far removed, I'm having trouble really understanding how you can conflate the two.
But I'll be charitable, and try and make sense of it, because you seem genuine (and genuinely confused).... I guess if you take a concept like "majority rules" and interpret it to its most shallow, then you can bend what you just described up there into a kind of democracy, but democracy isn't actually that shallow an idea.
It's about the distribution of political power to the people, not just "majority rules". That's why people get to vote on things that influence them, even where they're not subject-matter experts. Your typical bitcoin user is affected by Bitcoin design decisions, but has no say in them and no means to change them.
No, "just code it and get it adopted by 51% of the network" doesn't count. That's a far, far, far higher barrier to participation than a poll tax or a literacy test, and those have been dismissed long ago as crude methods of taking democratic power away from the people.
You don't have to code. You have to have an idea worth being coded and make enough people care that someone does it, this is no different than implementing any other idea in any kind of democracy. It's called lobbying and getting support and under no democracy is getting change into place free of effort.
It doesn't look like democracy to you because you don't want it to, nothing more nothing less, your mind is closed and you're only looking for excuses to dismiss it.
And yes, it is democracy, as a decentralized ledger, it only changes when the network by a majority agrees the change is acceptable. Choosing which split of a network to follow is voting, if your personal definition of democracy claims this isn't democracy, then your definition is wrong. It is democratic to the core, there is by definition no central authority, change happens only by mass approval.