Why the Web Won't Be Nirvana (1995)
The main thing that he's right about is that it's a mess. There's so much noice and little authority.
When I was a kid in the 90s news and information was curated. If you read an opinion in the paper it was some guy who'd been writing for a long time, who'd done the background reading, and who normally presented things in a balanced way, whatever his leaning was. Nowadays you can find just about any extreme view, badly written in an aggressive or sarcastic tone, and ignorant of the history of the topic. It's not necessarily good to always have the sober and historically informed opinion, but it sure would be good to have it most of the time.
Not sure if he mentioned this, but it's also gotten a lot easier to find like minded uninformed people. I'm still undecided about whether flat earthers are all kidding, but if they aren't you can see how hard it's going to be to climb out of that intellectual hole. There's now conferences and loads of websites about the Bedford Level experiment, and all sorts of other flat earth tropes.
A little context on the author is in order.
His name is Clifford Stoll and he was a physicist and early Internet user. He wrote the book "The Cuckoo's Egg" which should be required reading for all sys-admins.
In the mid-90s, he saw the Internet as something akin to Fahrenheit 451 and began preaching how it would tear us apart as a society. To that end, he wrote Silicon Snake Oil and articles like this one, which combines philosophy and cultural observations (the mob mentality of the crowd) with nonsensical conclusions based on the current technology (ie that online shopping would never be a big thing). I was never sure if he genuinely believed that it wasn't possible, or if he was merely trying to make the web less appealing somehow to prevent it from happening.
Years later he started to sell Klein Bottles on his website. I'm not sure if he still does, but in the year 2000, you could order them from him and he'd take your order over the phone. I ordered a few and it was fun to talk to him.
"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."
Beautiful example of article where the author was skeptical based on the wild west of the current state of technology. What current technology is the same? VR? Self driving cars?
Well, he was wrong. And he admitted it in 2010:"Of my many mistakes, flubs, and howlers, few have been as public as my 1995 howler ... Now, whenever I think I know what's happening, I temper my thoughts: Might be wrong, Cliff ..."
This is so hilariously, specifically wrong, you'd think someone wrote it now and travelled back in time for giggles. Great find! And I'm amazed they still have the article online, the only one by Clifford Stoll, funnily enough.
Still, a good lesson: It remains too easy to miss the forest for the trees. We never wanted salesmen or paper, what we actually wanted were products and information. In other words, it's easy to forget that the technology is not the product, just a vehicle for it.
I feel like this phrase rings somewhat true, even though he was off on many other things: " When most everyone shouts, few listen".
It's quite hard to know who to listen to, and who is telling something objectively true in this environment, since everyone's voice has the same weight. And there are too many of them to sift through, so many probably end up listening to people who pander to them.
Although most of what he said has been easily addressed in the last 20 years, one thing lingers. And it’s not because we can’t solve it, but the VC model has prioritized ads instead, and for whatever reason, social networking hasn’t had any good OPEN SOURCE platforms. My guess is because they would have to work across websites, and very few standards too off.
What's missing from this electronic wonderland? Human contact. Discount the fawning techno-burble about virtual communities. Computers and networks isolate us from one another. A network chat line is a limp substitute for meeting friends over coffee. No interactive multimedia display comes close to the excitement of a live concert. And who'd prefer cybersex to the real thing? While the Internet beckons brightly, seductively flashing an icon of knowledge-as-power, this nonplace lures us to surrender our time on earth. A poor substitute it is, this virtual reality where frustration is legion and where—in the holy names of Education and Progress—important aspects of human interactions are relentlessly devalued.
I have spent the last 7 years and nearly $1 million dollars building such a platform. It’s free and open source but we have yet to make the marketing for it. It needs to be clear how to get started with it, and a community needs to grow. Going to release it later this year. Maybe Nov 5th?
I read Stoll's book Silicon Snake Oil back then and thought it a bit short sighted too. It's amazing how much the Internet experience has changed in 20 years - and not all of it for the better.
Also, the fact that there's a typo directly above the phrase "Lacking editors, reviewers or critics" made me chuckle.
It seems he was close in some aspects but very far off in others.
This is a striking mixture of things that are incredibly prophetic with things that are incredibly shortsighted.
Who has two flat panel monitors in 1995?
ahem, Bitcoin
People take search engines for granted today, but that's what really changed the internet into something useful. That and learning that you can sell user's metadata for tons of $$$$. Those were really the two innovations that this author (and most people at the time) didn't see coming.
The internet? That’s still around?
Fascinating how the analysis gets wrong what becomes possible or doesn't (online shopping,...), but hits the nail on the head concerning the psychological and social aspects.
> 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 cacophony more closely resembles citizens band radio, complete with handles, harrassment, and anonymous threats. When most everyone shouts, few listen.
> Then there's cyberbusiness. We're promised instant catalog shopping—just point and click for great deals. We'll order airline tickets over the network, make restaurant reservations and negotiate sales contracts. Stores will become obsolete. So how come my local mall does more business in an afternoon than the entire Internet handles in a month?
> While the Internet beckons brightly, seductively flashing an icon of knowledge-as-power, this nonplace lures us to surrender our time on earth. A poor substitute it is, this virtual reality where frustration is legion and where—in the holy names of Education and Progress—important aspects of human interactions are relentlessly devalued.