Clifford Stoll wrote about the Internet in 1995. It’s amusing. He completely disses the whole idea.
Some parts of his rant are correct — he says no CD-ROM will replace a good teacher, which is true. There are aspects of the internet that were oversold, often imposing a computer on human skills inappropriately. But as it’s turned out in the last 20 years, there are some things the computer is really good at, and he missed those.
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.
OK, that’s still a problem. I have to give him that one.
How about electronic publishing? 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.
I haven’t bought a book printed on paper in years. I read the NY Times and the local Morris paper online. You know, technology has kind of left “discs” in the dust.
Logged onto the World Wide Web, 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 connections, try again later.”
21 October 1805. It’s the first result of a Google search that took 0.23 seconds. The entire first page of results is a collection of maps, detailed descriptions of the events, and animations and movies of the battle.
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 obselete. So how come my local mall does more business in an afternoon than the entire Internet handles in a month? Even if there were a trustworthy way to send money over the Internet—which there isn’t—the network is missing a most essential ingredient of capitalism: salespeople.
Uh, how else do you get airline tickets? The one time I tried to use the travel agency in town, it took them a week to get me an estimate (the person at the desk was on vacation), and I got a better deal just doing it myself. I order cat food and furniture on the internet nowadays.
And books. Which are transmitted nearly instantaneously to my iPad. Which I use to read everywhere.
I don’t miss salespeople at all. Sorry, everyone in retail.
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.
Oh, of course, the standard Old Person’s argument that new modes of communication are far inferior to the old ones. Why, there’s no true bonding quite like the bonding a troop of hunters get while tracking a mammoth, or the thrill of a good drum circle around the campfire.
I have friends (and dedicated enemies!) all around the world thanks to this gadget on my desk. My wife and I were surprised when my daughter told us about her first boyfriend — somebody she’d never met over coffee, but knew only through conversations on the internet. Yes, sometimes it’s nice to meet over coffee, but there also good discussions held virtually. This is not an either/or situation — we can do all. Except, sadly, the mammoth hunting.
No interactive multimedia display comes close to the excitement of a live concert.
True. So? We still have live concerts. We just also have iPods and YouTube.
And who’d prefer cybersex to the real thing?
Given the prevalence of porn on the internet, apparently a fair number of people.
I think Stoll’s big problem in this essay was a bit of self-centeredness: here are these things I really like, and the internet doesn’t replace them as well as I want! Well, that isn’t what new technology does: if successful, it doesn’t necessarily swap out the old way for a new one, but instead adds something entirely novel to our web of interactions.
I should take the reverse attitude. Oh, the evil of coffee shops: they’re going to take away my Twitter and force me talk over coffee!
Stoll had his 15 minutes of fame with “The Cuckoo’s Egg”, but since then he’s been Wrong About Everything™. I don’t pay any attention to anything he says.
If you really want to read somebody who’s been spectacularly wrong about nearly everything technology-related, read Stephen L. Talbott’s “net-future” columns. Oh, and he’s a bit of a nut about biology, too.
Bill Gates tried to play oracle about the internet and electronic communication 20 years ago, and got nearly everything wrong, too. But in his case, I imagine there was a fair amount of wishful thinking going on.
My kids want to know: what’s a CD-ROM?
You can still hunt mammoths. Just don’t expect too much success. Or many friends that will willingly go along for the hunt.
On the other hand, you have to give him credit for this response to the last time this article was dredged up.
… And since BoingBoing have broken their own back links with one or other of their hideously iPaddified redesigns, here’s the actual quote:
Mammoths may be problematic to hunt, but there’s plenty of monsters to go after.
“… we can do all. Except, sadly, the mammoth hunting.”
Apart from Siberian paleontologists?
Siberian paleontologists are a species of mammoth?
Whatever, I’m pretty certain we’re in the off-season for paleontologist-hunting at the moment.
I like to think about Robert Metcalf’s warning of the impending collapse of the “big pipes” of the Internet.
There are outages, of course, but usually due to human agency. Recently some area lost Internet service when someone cut a fiber pathway. (Best guess is they were looking for copper to sell.)
A good post except for your disdain for salespeople. I just had a chance to work with a shrewd internet shopper who had no doubt saved a bundle (or not) buying low cost scuba gear on line. No sales people for him, no sir! Of course, he had no idea about the actual features of his gear or how to set it up but he saved money and did not have to put up with sales people. He is still looking for a regulator set and will almost certainly buy some low cost, gray market set that may well prove somewhat problematic to get serviced, but hey – no damn salesperson to tech him the difference. Bottom line, sales people do more than just take your money – they provide information and allow shoppers to make better decisions. For cat food, not so much, but for lot of what is out there, a blurb or internet reviews does not substitute for product knowledge. Money spent locally circulates in your community which is another benefit. You never know when that money can come back to you in one form or another. Amazon, not likely.
A few years ago, I was hunting for Mammoth. Found it, too…
I read Clifford’s book, “Silicon Snake Oil” when I was somewhere around my 4th year out of 5 as a CS undergraduate. It seemed interesting and important to stay skeptical of this “internet” thing, but I was left feeling like a lot of his complaints were really weird and subjective. I think I remember him mentioning that email didn’t have the physical satisfaction of receiving a fax. Which was hilarious in itself. Anyway, he didn’t turn me away from my career path.
It doesn’t seem fair to compare his 1995 rants about ’95 technology to the technology of 2015. like the Trafalgar example; yes Google, today, can bring the most informative link to the first of its list, but Google search has evolved a bit since ’95 (maybe do to the Trafalgar rant). Search in ’95 was kinda limited to spiderweb-word-search rather than the style google uses now.
.
The ’95 rant about ebooks is a little more relevant, even today. There have been several studies of retention of knowledge gained from paperbooks v. ebooks; and paper wins. Something to do with spatial associativeness of memory, Books are more 3dimensional and physical than an endlessly scrolling ebook. Personally, books are preferred for their tactile quality, flipping pages is more better than the etext, which is ‘virtual’, not a physical object.
to summarize me@14:
So he complained about the technology of ’95!! That was then, today’s technology is better, Today’s is NOT what he was complaining about. Isn’t that how tech always gets better? “Not good enough today, improve it!” (motivation that results in improvement). If no one ever complained, nothing would ever get better, and always be locked in a SNAFU status quo.
— I reread that comment of his about “cybersex”, which triggered this here “summary of 14”. Yeah cybersex in ’95 was pretty icky and crewd, but hasn’t it improved? (IDK, really)
CD-ROM, noun: A low capacity predecessor to USB flash drives which is partial to scratching, shattering or otherwise inexplicably becoming unreadable. A CD-ROM can only be written to once, give or take, which, in spite of the low data volumes, can take several minutes or, in the case of early adopters, hours. Reading CD-ROMs requires specialised drives that are exceptionally noisy when operating at relatively high speed. The drives’ bulk and power requirements prohibit their use in many modern mobile computer platforms. This, by and large, bothers no one. (c.f. DVD, and floppy disk)
As for the predictions, it’s not just the wrong bits, it’s also the bits that don’t even appear. For instance, online shopping (and payment) is ridiculously easy – a pitfall, perhaps.
But apart from actually buying stuff you can interrogate the internet for days to figure out which particular item you might want to buy. Thanks to millions of pages dedicated to product reviews or consumer goods, tech support, complaints and whatnot you can learn a lot about things which you would never hear in a store.
Sure, like the salesperson in the store many reviewers tend to put a bit of a positive spin on things but at least you stand a decent chance of picking out the one product that is slightly More Unimaginably Brilliant (TM) than all the others. And those that have shopped before are quick to point out all the Horrible Flaws (c) that product has. It’s an improvement at least, especially if you like to obsess endlessly. (Another pitfall for me, I suppose)
Speaking of tech support, any computer problem I have had in the last decade that didn’t resolve itself within three clicks invariably ended up in google.
On the other hand, there are problems he could never have foreseen.
Apparently he now makes (his living making?) Klein bottles (of glass).
So whatever the merits of his old critique, nowadays he’s really one-sided.
There really was a great deal of snake oil in internet businesses during the 1990s. Still is today. But Cliff Stoll’s book Silicon Snake Oil did not do a good job of identifing it.
Also, he observed (correctly) that usenet didn’t change very much between 1980 and 1990, and used that to assume the whole rest of the internet wouldn’t evolve quickly either. As it happens, a whole hell of a lot of internet stuff changed between 1995 and 2000.
But books and articles prognosticating about the future of the internet, for and against, were stupidly popular all through the 1990s, and I read as many as I could – and practially all of them got nearly everything wrong, whether they took the pro-internet side or the anti-internet side. Cliff Stoll’s failure to predict the future of technology wasn’t unusual; practically everyone else failed at it too.
Perhaps the only exception was Brin’s Transparent Society , whose thesis that we faced a future of nearly zero privacy has clearly been shown to be correct. But practically every anti-privacy technology event he wrote about happened sooner than he predicted (sometimes a lot sooner; even when he wrote the book in 1999, Bill Clinton’s attempt to capture and datamine as many emails as possible was already 4 years old) and now it looks like the last one remaining – tiny flying camera drones – will beat his expectations by a number of years. Also, he got the details on how encryption works all wrong, but he was basically right that it wouldn’t help most people with privacy, because, it requires too much education and attention to detail for most people.
Socrates was equally vexed by the youth of his day wasting their time with studying the written word.
[Writing] will create forgetfulness in the learners’ souls, because they will not use their memories; they will trust to the external written characters and not remember of themselves. The specific which you have discovered is an aid not to memory, but to reminiscence, and you give your disciples not truth, but only the semblance of truth; they will be hearers of many things and will have learned nothing; they will appear to be omniscient and will generally know nothing; they will be tiresome company, having the show of wisdom without the reality.
-Socrates
Online discussions are more fruitful than meeting friends for coffee, since said friends are focused on their smartphones.
I do still like to visit bookshops, though.
What.
More importantly, the MAFIAA hasn’t yet found a way to render books utterly useless in the name of preventing unauthorized copying except for physically shredding them. And books don’t randomly freeze up for 1d6*10 seconds when you try to turn the pages.
He isn’t just ranting about the technology of ’95, he’s ranting about what, in ’95, he could foresee the technology of ’95 ever developing and maturing into ever.
That sort of arrogant failure of imagination is worth pointing and laughing at.
On the second day of the month, I have reached the limit of 5 free articles a month, despite not having used a web browser yesterday. I have a feeling that Newsweek uses an IP-tagged system that considers a university campus to be one person.
eidolon@11
(Note: total derail onto SCUBA) Why would he have to go grey market? There are manufacturers who will sell direct online(in fact, my favorite regulator is only sold online). Moreover, there are plenty of people who could buy something like a Titan or Conshelf series reg and rebuild it themselves. I got started on reg servicing precisely that way. Now, I rebuild double and single hose regs for myself, friends and the occasional dive shop. If a person doesn’t know enough to set up dive gear for themselves, I frankly don’t trust them to be a dive buddy in the first place. If you can’t set up a BC, weights, regs, etc. independently(add working dive tables and weighting yourself to that list, too), then you need to return to your OW class.
I agree that supporting an LDS is important, but this isn’t a good argument for that.
OTOH, time to bring up the CBC’s 1993 feature “A Network called Internet”, which was pretty good.
http://www.cbc.ca/archives/categories/science-technology/computers/inventing-the-internet-age/a-network-called-internet.html
Stoll’s problem was falling headfirst into a common self-created obstacle for people forecasting; Max Dublin, in Futurehype: The Tyranny of Prophecy (very good book, IMO), pointed out that such forecasts typically simply describe “the continuation of the thing that is happening”. As such they are are typically wildly wrong.
To be fair, I think that most of us (well, me, but I am a white, cis-gendered, hetero white male with two kids, a house, a mortgage, a big sedan, a college education, and shitloads of privilege, so I can safely extend my experiences to all) failed to see just how cell phones, the internet, and the unholy collaboration between the two would change the way that we do business, socialize, shop, look things up (seriously, I cannot remember the last time I looked anything up in a dictionary or an encyclopedia), and harass people.
twas brillig @ 14:
My tablet has a 3D page curl when ‘turning’ a page (they don’t endlessly scroll). I have around 1,300 paper books in my house. I have hundreds of e-books on my tablet. I resisted e-books for a long time, thinking I wouldn’t be able to adjust, but they have spoiled me for paper these days. I love being able to poke a word and have various options come up, including a dictionary look up – I’ve found myself trying to do that when I have to read a paper book. E-books also allow for highlighting, note taking, and bookmarking, along with features to search through highlights, notes, and bookmarks. Another nice feature is being able to search a book – that’s not so easy when it comes to a paper book. Also, I can get an e-book immediately. I don’t have to wait for a book to arrive via post, or wait until I can take a trip to the bookstore.
Don’t forget all of the arrogance packed into the worry that “every voice can be heard.” Notice how it wasn’t only limited to threats or harassment, which seems like an afterthought more than anything. Maybe he’s changed some of those views too, but in any case, that’s not a prediction about technology that he got wildly wrong which we can chuckle at comfortably. You had to be just plain confused, no matter what year it was, if you thought it should be your own private garden that’s secluded from the world.
But maybe it would be better if the internet were never born, I don’t know…. It’s still not exactly constructive communication most of the time the way things are, but it has potential. I’m fairly satisfied that I can find out what other people actually think (even if that happens to be terrible). I mean, come on, if this awful terribleness could wash over me at any moment, I’d rather have some clue about what’s coming and maybe even come up with a way to fight it. I’m also glad that we filthy rabble have options other than listening quietly to a bunch of Important Thought Leaders™ pontificating to each other. That’s nice.
This reminds me of an onlline rant recently about how people focus on their smartphones instead of interacting on public transit anymore, which led someone to post this link (photo of a bunch of commuters ignoring each other to read their newspapers, circa 1955, for those who don’t like to click).
The more things change, the more they really do stay the same.
Who ARE these people who want to be interacted with by strangers on public transit, anyway? O.o
I once so many years ago went to a lecture by Arther C. Clark the subject was what he predicted the future would be like. He took the first part of the lecture go over predicting the future in general and how some things about now or details the way things workout that in retrospect seem obvious but at the time just did not register as important. He went over many examples of this phenomena almost a 1/4 of the lecture. Then after telling everyone how wrong and next to impossible to be accurate he proceeded with his lecture on the future any way. I do not remember what he was predicting at the time but I am always wondering what detail am I ignoring or not really noticing.
Mr. Stoll’s comments may have been personal and valid at the time but the future is a moving target which is not traveling in a straight line. The turns are not very easy to predict consistently the further out you go the harder it is and the less accurate you will seem. Its fun to poke at the pasts predictions of the future for sure and even informative.
It can help us ask what are we over looking now that will have a major influence of the path history will take.
uncle frogy
MrFancyPants: This reminds me of an onlline rant recently about how people focus on their smartphones instead of interacting on public transit anymore…
I grew up 14 miles from NYC, so I rode the subways there quite a bit in the 1960s. You didn’t interact on those subways then.
Anecdotal and dated, of course; but still…
For some time now (I’m getting old, it seems :)) I’ve been pointing out that if you look at yourself in the mirror right now, based on long history something in the way you’re dressed or do your hair is going to look pretty silly if you look at it in a picture after a decade or so. What is it?
Caine wrote @29:
{ebook pros vs cons}
Yes, totally agree that there are lots of good things about ebooks, that make them much better than ‘real’ books [ IRLbooks ?]. What I pointed out was just one flaw in the ebook paradigm. I own a Kindle and, also, very much appreciate being able to carry around far more books than physically feasible. Adding more books to it does not increase the bulk or mass in any way. Acknowledge, however, that even the ebook is not “perfect”, it still has at least one flaw. Not a debilitating one, but still a flaw. Sorry I sounded like a naysayer, originally. I was just sour this morning, and am currently proceeding to correct that.
Azkyroth @32 – my mother in law. When she visits us here in the big smoke (Brisbane) and uses public transport, she likes to start conversations with the other commuters. I tell her that it’s not really the done thing but she thinks it’s unfriendly not to.
As long as you accept that you don’t actually own the ebooks you “bought,” and have no guarantee you’ll always be able to access them, I guess you’re all set.
(Oh, plus the fact that the “manufacturer” has eliminated about 99% of the cost of producing that copy, but the price is only 25% lower – and the now-much-higher profit margin is NOT primarily going to the author… etc.)
(and unlike a 100-year old book, the content of a 100-year old ebook file, if you still have it, is likely to be less accessible than a wax cylinder recording…)
Another pro of e-books is that you don’t have to somehow find something to do with nine bookcases worth of them when you’re trying to move out of the country—a task which might be complicated by not having a car or driver’s license, a third of those books being Japanese language comics, and local used bookshops currently only paying in store credit.
Jafafa Hots #38:
I keep seeing people say this. It’s simply not true, so far as I can tell. I’ve not yet run across a vendor-site where you can’t download the actual book file (epub, mobi, whatever) for local storage. (That said, they could, I agree, make this option more obvious in many cases.)
Who was it who said, “Prediction is very difficult — especially about the future”?
I resisted ebooks for a long time, didn’t think I’d be able to stand not feeling an actual book in my hands. Lots of travel and cross-country moving later, I adore the weight and simplicity of my phone or tablet for reading. That said, as far as I know the digital ownership laws in the US haven’t been fully defined yet, so I assume it’s a long term rental like most digital distribution currently is.
And if it’s a book I know I’m going to want to collect or keep, I buy a first edition hardback and the kindle edition. The hardback stays mint, the publisher gets two sales early, increasing the probability of the author I’m reading getting to keep writing. (Yes I know not everyone can afford to do it this way, but books are a passion of mine that I’m willing to budget extra money for.)
Daz @ 40:
Yep. I’ve downloaded all of mine from B&N. I have come across a fair amount of people with Nook tablets who have been utterly unaware that you can easily do that via the website.
Rawnaeris (#42)
Too many books these days have the most godawful cover textures. I don’t know what happened, but it’s definitely a recent (w/in the past 10 years) development since none of my older books put me off touching them like new ones do. And it hasn’t infected the Japanese market hardly at all, which is good because the only paper books I buy are Japanese.
(One downside to e-books, at least using the Kindle app on an iPad, is all the issues to trying to maintain a multi-lingual library. The Kindle app does not like being linked to more than one Amazon account, even if you’re the same person who has different accounts for the US store vs the Japanese store.)
NelC (#41):
That line is often attributed to Niels Bohr, but its actual origins are murkier.
That’s not at all what my experience with pdfs of scientific articles is like.
(Also, searchability makes lots of things a lot easier.)
Retro-Futurology!
@A. Noyd, you mean the kinda soft almost soft touch plastic-y texture, it’s usually matte rather than glossy? I love the way that stuff feels but then I’m an absolute sucker for anything that gives a soft hand-feel.
unclefrogy @33
That reminds me of a scene from his novelization of 2001: A Space Odyssey. Heywood Floyd is on his way to either the moon or the LEO station, when he’s given a courtesy tablet to access a selection of publications, whose latest issues are then served over a network. To access the correct numeric network address, he’s kindly provided with an index printed on a sheet of paper.
The concurrent prescience and blindness made me laugh out loud. Seat-back screens, tablets (well, e-readers), content served over the Internet, thick sauces to keep bits of food from running off, DSTO spaceplanes, but then DNS by hand. Retrospectively obvious, indeed!
…and I completely missed that he’s Clarke. :-]
And does this produce a usable PDF or a godawful thing weighed down with DRM?
Rawnaeris (#47)
There are several obnoxious textures, but that tacky, almost skin-like matte shit is the absolute worst.
Oh, that reminds me of Ghost in the Shell‘s cyberbrains. Granted, they will never actually be real, but the writers still missed a huge feature they would have: Closing the analogue hole with in-brain DRM! Encrypted content could pass all the way from producer to the minds of the audience.
Or even — and this should have occurred to me years ago — the death of perception-neutrality! Walmart makes a deal and now you can’t even see the local shops, and boy, do those prices feel low!
Take that, Kurzweil!
Ogvorbis @28
I just checked. There’s so much dust on the tops of my encyclopedia volumes that the dust bunnies are close to achieving civilization.
This seems relevant.
Tell them it’s like a 45 rpm single record, only smaller and shinier.
What’s Amazon’s file format called again? .azn? I dunno anymore, I stopped paying attention.
I do know that there are open formats that can legally be converted to even freer formats, and there are closed formats that cannot (legally.) epub, mobi, etc… I forget which is which these days.
There is a handy free program, Calibre, that not only catalogs your files, but lets you convert formats between those that are open.
Those that are closed? Nope. Not legal, so it won’t.
Anyway, none of this applies to me anyway.
I’m on disability. The books I buy are all used. Ten cents here, a buck there.
Can’t do THAT with ebooks either.
Uh, it’s AZW3 now (formally .azn) and yes, you can use Calibre to convert to and from AZW3, mobi, and epubs. It’s DRM that’s the problem, not the formats. You can use a plugin to strip that from books but techincally removing it is illegal. Authors and publishers decide on Amazon whether to include DRM, and it states if there’s no DRM so on the book page. There’s also Smashwords, which is DRM free and offers all the major formats.
As for price, there’s tons of legally free e-books and the even bigger market of $1-3. (And piracy, there’s always piracy.)
Azkyroth Drinked the Grammar Too :) #50:
It’ll produce whatever the vendor’s standard file format is, if they don’t offer a choice of formats. As JAL says, the DRM issue is separate from the file-format issue.
Calibre does a decent job of converting to pdf if that’s your preferred format. Personally, I hate pdf with a vengeance though. The lack of reflow when zooming bugs the hell out of me.
My favorite story along these lines – completely undocumented and quite possibly incorrectly remembered by me, so fair warning – was a futurist (Asimov?) correctly predicting the emergence of satellite phone and GPS technology.
He even envisioned the need for the satellites to be built like small apartment blocks to house the people who would work there, replacing the burned-out transistors in the computers.
For me, and for other people with visual and print disabilities, e-books are a gift: they make the same book available at the same time, and for the same price, for anyone wanting to buy it. John Scalzi recently put a photo on his blog of the large-print edition of Redshirts, apparently surprised to find that there was one. There may have been some bitter laughter here.
Rather than hoping a publisher decides there’s enough of a market that they’ll recover their costs if they do a large-print run, I can buy a book, resize the text and convert the document to the Tiresias font with a few taps. I don’t have to search for oversized bookcases, or worry about securing them in earthquake country. Calibre is a wonderful thing: for my last move, I packed two boxes of books — the previous one, 14 years ago, required 40 — while the rest of my library traveled in the car with me on my reader and two back-up stick drives. And as more titles become available, when it’s time for the next move it may well be down to one box . . . .
Now, do I miss the tactile sensation of holding a paper book? You bet. But my new normal is “Can I get this in a format I can actually read?” and electronic books give me that.
Take THAT old guy from 1995 who probably has changed his mind by now! That’ll show you!
You know what really grinds my gears? People from the 18th century. What’s with all the horses? It’s called an automobile folks! It’s much faster!
I need to look through some old magazines from the 80’s or something and find someone who was wrong. Bill Gates said we would only ever need 512k of RAM?! Hilarious!
(Sorry, in good fun I swear!)
A bit late, but I found this bit quite funny: