4 ms·

Amazing how much everything has changed in 20 years as to make nearly every single sentence of this article wrong to a hilarious extent. Thank you for sharing

• dublinben 11y ago
  In aggregate, I'd say the predictions in this article were only half wrong. For as much as we use the Web today, the fundamental interactions discussed here have not changed much.
• bobbyi_settv 11y ago
  Most people considered Cliff Stoll to be a hilariously wrong luddite in 1995.
  • knieveltech 11y ago
    True. And he was roundly vindicated at the time by the dot com implosion.
• mixmastamyk 11y ago
  Right, I was a bit surprised myself even with your warning. The guy is not always wrong in this piece, but seems to really miss the point, even for '95. Things never ever get totally replaced, but technology and automation tends to take over the default case. His examples of newspapers and salespeople have not completely gone away, but certain have been significantly impacted by online alternatives.
• notahacker 11y ago
  Whilst it was spectacularly wrong on ecommerce[1], the description of Usenet and the "fawning techno-burble about virtual communities" still sounds suspiciously like the gap between the reality and the fantasy of social today, notwithstanding the greater participation and the decent stab at contextualising the "cacophony" in ways specific to the needs of advertisers and brand-monitors. But apparently he also wrote a book-length version including further predictions about the unlikelihood of computers becoming merged with his telephone, the universal nature of fax machines making them far more practical than email and the practical unlikelihood of Big Brother scenarios. They should probably rerelease it as one of those eBooks he predicted wouldn't take off. [1]even the author now sells stuff over the internet, though I'm willing to bet there's not much of a market for "one sided bottles"
• api 11y ago
  He was right about at least once major thing: tele-presence is largely a failure. It's 2015 and most of the Internet industry is concentrated within the Bay Area because people need to be near one another to interact richly. This is a direct demonstration of the failure of the Internet to permit truly rich long range human communication; the very people who build it can't use it to escape their local rent bubble despite strong economic incentive to do so.
  • wvenable 11y ago
    I don't think it's a failure, it's just not ubiquitous. We have huge tele-presense units in most of our offices to facilitate meetings that used to require plane rides and hotels.
    • api 11y ago
      They also had hypertext in 1969: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yJDv-zdhzMY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yJDv-zdhzMY It's a failure in the sense that it's not generally available or in general use. I've also used tele-presence rooms before and they're not that great. Better than Skype or Google Hangouts, but not by much.
    • rhino369 11y ago
      Telepresence in those situations are mostly just replacing vanilla conference calls. Now it's a telephone call with awkward video. Whether society will view that as good enough to replace business trips remains to be seen. Though email and VPN do allow more telework than has ever occurred before.
• sanderjd 11y ago
  I'm not so sure. I think most of what the article says about education is spot on. We have more efficient replacements for lecturers and (maybe?) textbooks, but not teachers.