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Comment by losvedir | Hacker News Reader

Wow, the phrase "information superhighway" really brought me back. I hadn't heard that for quite some time!

Ironically, I just ran into this phrase last week while reading an anthropology paper from the 90's ("Maya Hackers and the Cyberspatialized Nation-State: Modernity, Ethnostalgia, and a Lizard Queen in Guatemala")

Whenever I hear this phrase it reminds me the part in the book Cryptonomicon where the pretentious humanities professor feels so clever for asking "How many slums will we bulldoze to build the Information Superhighway?"

Oh, ugh... Memories of all the awful road metaphor headlines of the time are flooding back-- "Breaking Down on the Information Superhighway", "Traffic Jams...",

Unfortunately that term brings an even more awful memory back for me and many others, as That enthusiasm was used for a brazen lie to the American public: https://www.huffpost.com/entry/the-book-of-broken-promis_b_5...

And, as evident in the video, its considerable overuse. I cringed watching this every time she said it beyond the first few times.

I heard that so many times in the 1990's in France, "les autoroutes de l'information". I knew that politicians were running after what the USA do, but I did not realize that they were also translating and recycling the very same words.

I just realized it while watching that 1994 video :-)

Google Trends shows "information superhighway" is getting midly more popular again in recent time: https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=informat...

I've been reading Douglas Copeland's 1994 novel "Microserfs" recently and there's a bit where the main character starts reading up on actual highway construction in response to the information superhighway.

Is it as good as Generation X ? Also I'd love Coupland to reiterate and do a 'Generation Z' about zoomers and digital natives.

He did write a sequel of sorts to Generation X called Generation A in 2009. I haven't read it so I can't comment on it, though I suspect it is already 'of it's time' in the way that, say, Microserfs is. It's a fun novel to be sure, for something that emanates a huge "now-ness circa 1994" it's still very enjoyable today, but maybe that's because I can vaguely remember life back then. I'd wonder what a younger reader might think about it?

Fun fact: Because of this phrase (In German „Datenautobahn“) the German digital ministry is docked to the ministry of transport…

This makes sense. Cloud computing should be part of the Meteorology department!

The Department of Agriculture would beg to differ - clearly the oversight of server farms should be their responsibility.

Unless the servers are doing machine learning, in which case that falls under the Department of Education.

Are these servers communicating internationally? The department of foreign affairs would like to have a word.

Department of Labor might have had something to say about crypto mining.

How about OSHA? Mines fall under our purview.

Shouldn't it be linked to the agricultural department because of the phrase "Neuland"?

I recently learned that one of the major competition regulators in Germany is called the Federal Network Agency (Bundesnetzagentur or BNetzA), which oversees electricity, gas, telecommunications, post, and railway markets.

<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Network_Agency>

Given my own relatively recent realisation that virtually all industrial monopolies can be considered (sometimes with some mental gymnastics) as networks, this is an interesting bit of confirmation.

That's amazing, I don't even care if its true.

Check it out: https://www.bmvi.de/EN/Home/home.html

"Federal Ministry for Digital and Transport"

It got its current name 2013. It was a merger 1998 of "Federal Ministry for Housing, Urban Development and Building" and the one responsible for transport. The urban development department was responsible for internet infrastructure not the transport one.

Shouldn't it be the ministry for infrastructure?

Doesn't confirm the "Because of this phrase" part of the claim.

Reminiscent of how New York transferred responsibility for the state canal system to the electric power authority because of NYSDOT mismanagement.

In Texas the railroad commission is super powerful and responsible for oil and gas leases.

But it can only manage policies for Layer 4 and above, right? :)

Heavy "citation needed" here.

OMG this is... quite the misunderstanding -_-'

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