1995: The Internet? Bah
newsweek.com
newsweek.com
"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...
Well, he really didn't have much of a choice now, did he? Nevertheless, props to him for seeing the funny side of it.
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".
Meanwhile, a long list of now-billionaires saw the same problems and decided to address them.
Next up is the internet of objects.
A Facebook of objects. Someone should build it.
What is to entice people to start using it?
I have had similar ideas for a long time, ever since I was passed the possession of the (defunct) skivsamling.nu. One idea, as a motivator, is for insurance purposes.
I can see a lot of applications, but for it to take off it has to be fun to do it.
Also, do you have an idea of how to identify each object?
(switches back to other tab and back to hacking away wildly)
#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.
Maybe a stretch, maybe not.
New media creates new ad venues, it doesn't necessarily change what sorts of people are elected to government or what they do once they arrive there.
The internet's ability to change government lies in its ability to connect people, where before you had two guys in a small town with no political power, they can all the sudden become a national force of thousands, two guys in each small town. Hasn't really caused a noticable change in governance yet though, in my opinion. I am young however, so my frame of reference is narrow.
My only disagreement would be with this. The people being targeted by these new ad ventures are usually either newly targeted because the venture is newly allowing them to be targeted, or newly targeted because the ad venture allows the targeting of more people for less money.
If new people are being targeted, and more people are voting that wouldn't have before then people are possibly in office that wouldn't have been before these new ad ventures.
I get the feeling that if Obama wouldn't have aggressively gone after my generation (born in the 80's) using means that we understand well (internet) then he wouldn't be in office. But this is purely my gut feeling. I also live in Portland, OR. Which is about as Obama crazy as it gets.
On the flip side though, I'm a "church goin'/Jesus lovin'" dude, and I still don't know anyone my age that didn't vote for Obama. Maybe one.
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
Your Wikipedia link is broken, try this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cuckoo%27s_Egg_%28book%29
edit: OP fixed his link
So thanks! :)
And he gave a TED talk in 2006:
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.
Personally I'm very aware of this gap, but I've never yet been convinced by the "serious shortcomings in current technology" part, except in a strictly commercial sense. Can you expand or provide references that might convince me?
First, let's have a unification of user interfaces. As it stands right now, novices find it incredibly challenging to tell when to left click, when to right click, when to click once, and when to double-click. They can't tell the difference between their "desktop" and their "web browser", and if you step back and think about it for a moment, it doesn't make any sense that they should have to.
I would also like to see the notion of everything in a computer being a metaphor for something in real life come to a blessed end. There's no reason that computers need to have a "desktop", and "files" and "folders" don't make much sense to novice users. Most of them are totally incapable of organizing their information in a useful way, and inconsistencies with file save and open dialogs don't help this. I often hear from people who just need help finding the file that they know they saved, but can't find on their computer. I've also had to reconcile vast hierarchies of folders for users that had been saving different versions of the same file to different locations.
I would like to see a new internet-distributed file system, where data is separated into regular chunks, and then those chunks are saved in multiple locations around the internet in a fast rootless node structure. Public chunks are unencrypted; private chunks are encrypted. To access all of your information from anywhere in the world, you simply sign in to a portal from any computer; your login decrypts a small chunk file which contains encrypted references to all the rest of your data. This would make the very idea of a "backup" completely obsolete and would solve data portability and storage issues for anyone with a broadband internet connection. It would also -- at least for a while -- completely halt viruses and malware.
I want to see consumer devices become more upgradeable and more modular. At least once a week I have to explain to a customer that their entire motherboard (or, often, laptop) needs to be expensively replaced, because the DC circuit failed, or a graphics chip overheated (thankyouverymuch HP).
I think there needs to be a serious effort to upgrade the communications infrastructure in the U.S.; I'm aware of the challenges presented by the geography in this country and current and past building practices. However, much of this build-out has already been paid for [1]. Instead, customers find themselves having to call tech support every time they think their email has stopped working, only to be told that their computer is currently in the process of downloading a 10MB attachment from someone.
I believe that there needs to be a much greater importance placed on performance in software. I think that the current commonly-accepted principles in software development -- ship early, ship often, and hardware is cheap so don't spend too much time making it fast or small -- is wrong-headed, and I think that's obvious to anyone who actually interacts with their customers on a regular basis. The fact that products like McAfee and Norton can have such massive impacts on system performance that the customer is left wondering what died and went to hell in their computer is a problem that needs to be addressed.
This is just for starters. I could go on like this for a long time. I think that all new construction should be wired up for gigabit, right alongside phone & power; I'd like to see cars with upgradeable powerplants; etc.
It's not that I think that current technology isn't improving, or that it's bad necessarily, but I do think there are many problems that it presents that its developers really aren't even aware of, or that they care to address. We keep getting more and more time sinks in the form of shiny new "social" networks where less and less of substance is shared in each iteration, while basic principles of design and infrastructure continue to languish in the shadows.
[1]: http://www.newnetworks.com/BroadbandScandalIntro.htm -- not the very best reference, but it's getting harder to dig this story up anymore.
For real readers, who get through a novel every day or two, the sheer mass of paper books is an annoying encumbrance.
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.
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...
* 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
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/news/7874307/Prince-th...
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.
The other way is not true, ask all the people who praised the Segway. Nobody cares that they thought it would be so cool.
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."
The second hit is a commentary on this very article.
Back then I took it more as the author's expression of frustration than as prediction.
good times.
"What the Internet hucksters won't tell you is tht the Internet is one big ocean of unedited data,"
Unedited data indeed. :-)
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
If you do it you will be able to admit that actually internet communication IS less valuable in many ways, despite the fact how much you wouldn't want to think like this right now.
Most of my communication on social networks is with people that I would otherwise not communicate with because they are too far away.I see only gain there.
But! Please look around and check how many people prefer this kind of communication with distant people when in the same time they could communicate in a more valuable way with people around them. That's what I'm trying to condemn here.
Social networking can give a more lasting value if someone is consciously treating it as a kind of trampoline to reach those people IRL finally. Which is huh 0.0042% of social networking usage?
Luckily at least one country understands this...
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.
Instead, some people who were paying attention made Google, instead, which I think is a better solution anyway.
Or we might have tried teaching kids that information is not something to be frightened of, but that would be absurd, I suppose.