The Net Is a Waste of Time (1996)
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
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?
But I think the most relevant artifacts are what were referred to as "broadsides" Explosive or dramatic one pagers were printed (often as advertisements) and pasted on sides of buildings usually at night under the safety of darkness.
Otherwise known as headlines.
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
"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_...
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.
How many people are identifying with that premonition right this second?
>"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.
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.
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.
I love finding crazy stuff like that.
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.
"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."
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 ..
But! Its an awesome tech, and I'm pretty sure its going to hit the store soon enough. I'm currently working on ways to embed tons more stuff within the target matrix .. its mind-boggling to think that any recognizable surface can be the human interface mechanism, now.
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...
This documentary from 2003 (really a long-ish interview) was pretty interesting as well: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_Maps_for_These_Territories
Thats not something to be proud of..
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.
'Cyber taskforce'? And you want me to take that serious?
I'm not quite sure how what you mention is related to the use of the word cyberspace as Gibson used it.
I haven't been around in the English-languaged internet back then, so I don't have firsthand information, but it seems to have been more commonly in use everywhere in the past (I remember some hacker's handbook telling me not to associate with people calling themselves 'cyberpunk', for instance). Nowadays the only mentions I see are from governments who plan taskforces to anwer "threats in the cyberspace", which, in my eyes, makes them look incompetent. I think it's interesting that they use that terminology though. </rant>
How does that not relate?
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.
The NY Times Is a Waste of Time (2013) (news.ycombinator.com)
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.
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.
"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.
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.