6 ms·

Why the Web Won't Be Nirvana (1995)

94 points by munaf 8y ago

finknotal 8y ago
"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?
- AVTizzle 8y ago
  Blockchain and cryptocurrency comes to mind - especially given HN’s frequent dismissals and distaste of the two.
  - krrrh 8y ago
    The funny thing is that the mainstream media is often breathless over the possibilities of blockchain these days, but the nerd forums in the nineties for the most part understood and were excited about the impact of the internet and web. Draw your own conclusions I guess.
  - SilasX 8y ago
    I see a lot of people making this exact mistake regarding blockchain: >So how come my local mall does more business in an afternoon than the entire Internet handles in a month? IOW, “It hasn’t displaced some other market already, so it never will.” It’s only a few steps away from “it has the volatility associated with being a small market, so it’s inherently flawed”. With that said, I’m skeptical about whether it will find any large scale use myself, but it’s unfair to criticize it for the above reason.
    - eksemplar 8y ago
      Isn’t most of the critique of crypto currencies that better systems already exist? I have an app that lets me send cash instantly and free to anyone else with the same app. It’s operated by our largest bank, but it works for anyone in my country regardless of what bank they have. I can also shop instantly all over the world, I do pay a tax to the bank for this, but it’s currently a lot cheaper than paying for most crypto transactions. I guess with crypto, I would be free of the banking tyranny, but I actually rather like the security that comes with centralized banking. The internet on the other hand changed the world. It made it possible for me to browse your product catalog, buy and pay for your products, almost instantly, even though you live in another part of the world. Crypto never really had that, it wanted to uproot existing systems for political reasons, but the technology by itself, has frankly always been somewhat obsolete. The internet was hard to predict because it was new, a currency isn’t exactly a new thing. Hell, blockchain isn’t even the first attempt at a decentralized currency.
      - SilasX 8y ago
        >Isn’t most of the critique of crypto currencies that better systems already exist? Of course there are other arguments. I even suggested I agreed with that one. I was just pointing out one kind of fallacy, of using current low adoption as evidence of a fundamental flaw.
    - TazeTSchnitzel 8y ago
      Well, a bigger problem in terms of transaction count is that proof-of-work systems are designed in such a way as to put a hard limit on the number of processable transactions that's nowhere near the world's needs, and moreover, they expend multiple orders of magnitude more energy to do it.
- adoctor 8y ago
  For what it's worth, I still prefer reading on paper. Buying ebooks is cheaper, though (because you need the device you use to read them for other reasons), and the logistics of storing such books are much simpler
  - exodust 8y ago
    Yes but some devices will have screens more like paper. We're slowly seeing small steps towards that. For example Wacom now talks up their tablet screens for feeling more like paper when you draw on them with the pen. The glass has more granular resistance or something. I think iPad Pro also makes these claims. In terms of reading, I guess in time the very thin screens that can be rolled up will hit the market.
- eksemplar 8y ago
  VR would be my bet. Every time is exit VR I feel like my monitor is limiting. It requires quite a lot of work though, and unlike the web, it probably can’t be done by one person in a basement. Which I think is important to it’s impact, because google probably wouldn’t have existed if it couldn’t have started small and gradually build its way up.
  - GordonS 8y ago
    It feels like decent VR has been 'any time now' away for decades. Is Oculus still the only real attempt at it these days?
    - exodust 8y ago
      Technical progress is slower than the VR hype train. Not only that, but ergonomics was a bigger issue than many predicted. In the meantime, I don't see any reason why we can't see arcade venues bounce back, with dedicated VR rooms using powerful projections rather than headsets. I know I'd prefer a room with 360 VR projection done well, moving platform or chair to simulate driving, flying etc, and surround sound with huge cinematic range, than a headset with headphones. The other issue with headsets is when sharing them, particularly public ones. There's a certain hygiene factor, if you know what I mean!
    - wolfgke 8y ago
      > Is Oculus still the only real attempt at it these days? At least HTC Vive and PlayStation VR (if you are a console player) additionally come to my mind.
    - SmellyGeekBoy 8y ago
      I have to admit I often feel like VR will be the next 3DTV.
  - CM30 8y ago
    > It requires quite a lot of work though, and unlike the web, it probably can’t be done by one person in a basement. Which I think is important to it’s impact, because google probably wouldn’t have existed if it couldn’t have started small and gradually build its way up. This may be why VR hasn't taken off yet. If it requires a lot of resources to create an experience using it, then you've limited the number of new ideas that can be built/tested. Maybe it'll do better when more frameworks and engines for VR applications are a thing, and building one is as easy as making a website or mobile app is today.
gboudrias 8y ago
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.
- marvin 8y ago
  Look back at Hacker News in twenty years. You'll see whole threads full of comments that are so specifically wrong it looks like a parody :)
  - WhiteSource1 8y ago
    That implies that Hacker News will be around in 20 years. Newsweek will be (in some format or another).
    - andrew_ 8y ago
      I genuinely thought that twitter was a ridiculous fad for trend-whores and it would die quickly, or remain a tiny niche. I've been wrong about tech so many times personally it's ridiculous.
    - nathcd 8y ago
      At the very least, I think it's pretty safe to assume that in 20 years the Internet Archive will still be around and we'll be able to look at 20 year old HN threads there.
  - SmellyGeekBoy 8y ago
    You don't need to wait 20 years for this. Often it's weeks or even days.
adamnemecek 8y ago
The internet? That’s still around?
planck01 8y ago
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 ..."
- ModernMech 8y ago
  I think in 2010 the outlook of Internet was a little more rosey than it is today, almost a decade later. The thesis of the article holds in many regards, notably on the social implications rather than the tech predictions. I think this piece will age well after all.
scalio 8y ago
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.
- zouhair 8y ago
  Any predictions that pertains to the technological aspect of our lives is utterly futile. Imagine you are in the mid 90' and you say to someone that in the next decade we will have a camera, a video camera, a radio, a music and video player, a voice recorder and much more in just one pocket. Saying it like this make it look insane. On the other hand psychological and social aspects are linked to our brains that didn't change much in the course of the human recorded history.
  - adoctor 8y ago
    In the 90s I'd have readily believed that. My only objection would be that it might cost too much. It turns out smartphones became very cheap and ubiquitous.
  - laumars 8y ago
    Normally I might agree, but tablets where already being common place in sci-fi (Star Trek TNG, 2001 Space Odyssey, etc) and PDAs were starting to get prototyped in real life around that time too. So we are not talking about technology that was completely alien to mankind in the 90s. In fact the reason people were predicting great things for future tech and the internet (which the author of this article is arguing against) is because it was technology already emerging - not some imaginary theoretical stuff. Ok, the pace of change and the specifics (smart phones with high speed internet, eink displays, etc) might still have taken people by surprise, but the rest isn't that shocking. I mean back in the mid 90s I was building 3D websites in VRML and just assumed by the 2010s all sites would have a rich, communal, skeuomorphism interface. Clear I was wrong on some parts (thankfully) but not that far off the mark. So the signs were already there but the author was too busy trying to imagine those predictions being utilised with then current technology. You could argue that is a failure of imagination on his part but I'm tempted to go further and say it was down right ignorant. He's clearly techy enough to understand the then current tech better than most yet failed to notice the emerging technologies. And he clearly witnessed the evolution of technology for the 10 years leading up to the 90s yet assumed hardware would suddenly just stagnate at that point. That was his biggest mistakes and ultimately why his predictions were so out of sync with what many others had predicted (yhise if whom did see the change happening and the future potential they had). To be honest though, I do wonder how much of his comments where based on his own comfort zone and not liking a the thought of a digital future so allowed his own prejudices to bias his vision of the future.
ikt 8y ago
It seems he was close in some aspects but very far off in others.
lordnacho 8y ago
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.
- mercer 8y ago
  This has been on my mind quite often when I use reddit. I grew up on phpBB style forums where every user was immediately identifiable, through avatar, signature etc. And to a lesser degree I find myself developing a kind of 'image' of various HN posters. On reddit this somehow doesn't happen. Every comment stands on its own and half the time what looks like a threaded conversation is various different users replying to each other. I think something very important is lost there. Much as I'd like to believe so, I think the way my brain works is that no comment stands on its own and communication is heavily mediated by the knowledge and reputation of the other in relation to myself. Without that, so much that is valuable in the exchange of information, whether facts or opionion, or nuance, is lost.
  - ianai 8y ago
    You’re totally right. If it’s an argument then maybe one of the replies convinced the original poster. But some other person may reply to the most authoritative reply and claim superiority and falsehood of that posts authority. And there’s no way to correct it automatically. So all the smart comments wind up fighting the incorrect and an honest third party will likely have gained nothing.
NegatioN 8y ago
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.
- rainbowmverse 8y ago
  There was no shortage of hype peddlers and ignorant people with authority before the internet. All the internet did was wake more people up to this fact and force them to either start thinking critically or turn into cynics. What changed is the peddlers and powerful fools have bigger audiences now. There's less space for the niche con artist because all the marks are in someone's downline throwing all their money and credit at a lost cause.
bwldrbst 8y ago
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.
EGreg 8y ago
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? https://qbix.com https://qbix.com
- rainbowmverse 8y ago
  Your site has some auto-playing video below the fold and a spinning GIF of a globe from 1995. It's cluttered, noisy, and unclear. There is no point of focus. I can't get as far as figuring out what sets it apart or makes it better because I had to close the page. Compare this to Mastodon--which you dismissed with all other open source social networks--where the project lead thinks hard and openly about the accessibility and value of virtually every UX change.
  - EGreg 8y ago
    Thank you for your feedback. What operating system and browser do you use that the video autoplays? It’s not supposed to. And the globe - if you click it - is a visualization of 5 million people actually using our product. Where is Mastodon today? What are its stats?
linkmotif 8y ago
Who has two flat panel monitors in 1995?
- exodust 8y ago
  Nobody. The image is more recent.
emacsen 8y ago
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.
- jacquesm 8y ago
  > Years later he started to sell Klein Bottles on his website. From a miniature robotic warehouse under his house, no less: https://techcrunch.com/2015/06/23/how-clifford-stoll-sells-klein-bottles-from-under-his-house/ https://techcrunch.com/2015/06/23/how-clifford-stoll-sells-k...
- SmellyGeekBoy 8y ago
  Heh. Funny thing is I had absolutely no idea who he was until you mentioned the Klein bottle thing. Then a little light bulb went off in my head. I guess my brain filed him away as "Klein bottle guy" at some point in the past. Funny how the brain works sometimes.
- perlpimp 8y ago
  Internet is dead, web with interface galore reigns supreme with multitude of interfaces all incomprehensible to single point of use of programs. Google news reader was killed, after google bought dejanews turned it into rarely visited place. having a low cost application that can talks over protocols promoted democracy among client selection and democracy of choice that you don't have to learn new as you move between infromation spaces. Web is a great expression medium but a terrible information aggregator and information consumtion source. So it has gotten quite a bit worse since Cliff wrote the article.
_bxg1 8y ago
This is a striking mixture of things that are incredibly prophetic with things that are incredibly shortsighted.
arisAlexis 8y ago
ahem, Bitcoin
JohnClark1337 8y ago
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.

94 points by munaf 8y ago

"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?

AVTizzle 8y ago
Blockchain and cryptocurrency comes to mind - especially given HN’s frequent dismissals and distaste of the two.
- krrrh 8y ago
  The funny thing is that the mainstream media is often breathless over the possibilities of blockchain these days, but the nerd forums in the nineties for the most part understood and were excited about the impact of the internet and web. Draw your own conclusions I guess.
- SilasX 8y ago
  I see a lot of people making this exact mistake regarding blockchain: >So how come my local mall does more business in an afternoon than the entire Internet handles in a month? IOW, “It hasn’t displaced some other market already, so it never will.” It’s only a few steps away from “it has the volatility associated with being a small market, so it’s inherently flawed”. With that said, I’m skeptical about whether it will find any large scale use myself, but it’s unfair to criticize it for the above reason.
  - eksemplar 8y ago
    Isn’t most of the critique of crypto currencies that better systems already exist? I have an app that lets me send cash instantly and free to anyone else with the same app. It’s operated by our largest bank, but it works for anyone in my country regardless of what bank they have. I can also shop instantly all over the world, I do pay a tax to the bank for this, but it’s currently a lot cheaper than paying for most crypto transactions. I guess with crypto, I would be free of the banking tyranny, but I actually rather like the security that comes with centralized banking. The internet on the other hand changed the world. It made it possible for me to browse your product catalog, buy and pay for your products, almost instantly, even though you live in another part of the world. Crypto never really had that, it wanted to uproot existing systems for political reasons, but the technology by itself, has frankly always been somewhat obsolete. The internet was hard to predict because it was new, a currency isn’t exactly a new thing. Hell, blockchain isn’t even the first attempt at a decentralized currency.
    - SilasX 8y ago
      >Isn’t most of the critique of crypto currencies that better systems already exist? Of course there are other arguments. I even suggested I agreed with that one. I was just pointing out one kind of fallacy, of using current low adoption as evidence of a fundamental flaw.
  - TazeTSchnitzel 8y ago
    Well, a bigger problem in terms of transaction count is that proof-of-work systems are designed in such a way as to put a hard limit on the number of processable transactions that's nowhere near the world's needs, and moreover, they expend multiple orders of magnitude more energy to do it.
adoctor 8y ago
For what it's worth, I still prefer reading on paper. Buying ebooks is cheaper, though (because you need the device you use to read them for other reasons), and the logistics of storing such books are much simpler
- exodust 8y ago
  Yes but some devices will have screens more like paper. We're slowly seeing small steps towards that. For example Wacom now talks up their tablet screens for feeling more like paper when you draw on them with the pen. The glass has more granular resistance or something. I think iPad Pro also makes these claims. In terms of reading, I guess in time the very thin screens that can be rolled up will hit the market.
eksemplar 8y ago
VR would be my bet. Every time is exit VR I feel like my monitor is limiting. It requires quite a lot of work though, and unlike the web, it probably can’t be done by one person in a basement. Which I think is important to it’s impact, because google probably wouldn’t have existed if it couldn’t have started small and gradually build its way up.
- GordonS 8y ago
  It feels like decent VR has been 'any time now' away for decades. Is Oculus still the only real attempt at it these days?
  - exodust 8y ago
    Technical progress is slower than the VR hype train. Not only that, but ergonomics was a bigger issue than many predicted. In the meantime, I don't see any reason why we can't see arcade venues bounce back, with dedicated VR rooms using powerful projections rather than headsets. I know I'd prefer a room with 360 VR projection done well, moving platform or chair to simulate driving, flying etc, and surround sound with huge cinematic range, than a headset with headphones. The other issue with headsets is when sharing them, particularly public ones. There's a certain hygiene factor, if you know what I mean!
  - wolfgke 8y ago
    > Is Oculus still the only real attempt at it these days? At least HTC Vive and PlayStation VR (if you are a console player) additionally come to my mind.
  - SmellyGeekBoy 8y ago
    I have to admit I often feel like VR will be the next 3DTV.
- CM30 8y ago
  > It requires quite a lot of work though, and unlike the web, it probably can’t be done by one person in a basement. Which I think is important to it’s impact, because google probably wouldn’t have existed if it couldn’t have started small and gradually build its way up. This may be why VR hasn't taken off yet. If it requires a lot of resources to create an experience using it, then you've limited the number of new ideas that can be built/tested. Maybe it'll do better when more frameworks and engines for VR applications are a thing, and building one is as easy as making a website or mobile app is today.

gboudrias 8y ago

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.

marvin 8y ago
Look back at Hacker News in twenty years. You'll see whole threads full of comments that are so specifically wrong it looks like a parody :)
- WhiteSource1 8y ago
  That implies that Hacker News will be around in 20 years. Newsweek will be (in some format or another).
  - andrew_ 8y ago
    I genuinely thought that twitter was a ridiculous fad for trend-whores and it would die quickly, or remain a tiny niche. I've been wrong about tech so many times personally it's ridiculous.
  - nathcd 8y ago
    At the very least, I think it's pretty safe to assume that in 20 years the Internet Archive will still be around and we'll be able to look at 20 year old HN threads there.
- SmellyGeekBoy 8y ago
  You don't need to wait 20 years for this. Often it's weeks or even days.

adamnemecek 8y ago

The internet? That’s still around?

planck01 8y ago

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 ..."

ModernMech 8y ago
I think in 2010 the outlook of Internet was a little more rosey than it is today, almost a decade later. The thesis of the article holds in many regards, notably on the social implications rather than the tech predictions. I think this piece will age well after all.

scalio 8y ago

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.

zouhair 8y ago
Any predictions that pertains to the technological aspect of our lives is utterly futile. Imagine you are in the mid 90' and you say to someone that in the next decade we will have a camera, a video camera, a radio, a music and video player, a voice recorder and much more in just one pocket. Saying it like this make it look insane. On the other hand psychological and social aspects are linked to our brains that didn't change much in the course of the human recorded history.
- adoctor 8y ago
  In the 90s I'd have readily believed that. My only objection would be that it might cost too much. It turns out smartphones became very cheap and ubiquitous.
- laumars 8y ago
  Normally I might agree, but tablets where already being common place in sci-fi (Star Trek TNG, 2001 Space Odyssey, etc) and PDAs were starting to get prototyped in real life around that time too. So we are not talking about technology that was completely alien to mankind in the 90s. In fact the reason people were predicting great things for future tech and the internet (which the author of this article is arguing against) is because it was technology already emerging - not some imaginary theoretical stuff. Ok, the pace of change and the specifics (smart phones with high speed internet, eink displays, etc) might still have taken people by surprise, but the rest isn't that shocking. I mean back in the mid 90s I was building 3D websites in VRML and just assumed by the 2010s all sites would have a rich, communal, skeuomorphism interface. Clear I was wrong on some parts (thankfully) but not that far off the mark. So the signs were already there but the author was too busy trying to imagine those predictions being utilised with then current technology. You could argue that is a failure of imagination on his part but I'm tempted to go further and say it was down right ignorant. He's clearly techy enough to understand the then current tech better than most yet failed to notice the emerging technologies. And he clearly witnessed the evolution of technology for the 10 years leading up to the 90s yet assumed hardware would suddenly just stagnate at that point. That was his biggest mistakes and ultimately why his predictions were so out of sync with what many others had predicted (yhise if whom did see the change happening and the future potential they had). To be honest though, I do wonder how much of his comments where based on his own comfort zone and not liking a the thought of a digital future so allowed his own prejudices to bias his vision of the future.

ikt 8y ago

It seems he was close in some aspects but very far off in others.

lordnacho 8y ago

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.

mercer 8y ago
This has been on my mind quite often when I use reddit. I grew up on phpBB style forums where every user was immediately identifiable, through avatar, signature etc. And to a lesser degree I find myself developing a kind of 'image' of various HN posters. On reddit this somehow doesn't happen. Every comment stands on its own and half the time what looks like a threaded conversation is various different users replying to each other. I think something very important is lost there. Much as I'd like to believe so, I think the way my brain works is that no comment stands on its own and communication is heavily mediated by the knowledge and reputation of the other in relation to myself. Without that, so much that is valuable in the exchange of information, whether facts or opionion, or nuance, is lost.
- ianai 8y ago
  You’re totally right. If it’s an argument then maybe one of the replies convinced the original poster. But some other person may reply to the most authoritative reply and claim superiority and falsehood of that posts authority. And there’s no way to correct it automatically. So all the smart comments wind up fighting the incorrect and an honest third party will likely have gained nothing.

NegatioN 8y ago

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.

rainbowmverse 8y ago
There was no shortage of hype peddlers and ignorant people with authority before the internet. All the internet did was wake more people up to this fact and force them to either start thinking critically or turn into cynics. What changed is the peddlers and powerful fools have bigger audiences now. There's less space for the niche con artist because all the marks are in someone's downline throwing all their money and credit at a lost cause.

bwldrbst 8y ago

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.

EGreg 8y ago

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? https://qbix.com https://qbix.com

rainbowmverse 8y ago
Your site has some auto-playing video below the fold and a spinning GIF of a globe from 1995. It's cluttered, noisy, and unclear. There is no point of focus. I can't get as far as figuring out what sets it apart or makes it better because I had to close the page. Compare this to Mastodon--which you dismissed with all other open source social networks--where the project lead thinks hard and openly about the accessibility and value of virtually every UX change.
- EGreg 8y ago
  Thank you for your feedback. What operating system and browser do you use that the video autoplays? It’s not supposed to. And the globe - if you click it - is a visualization of 5 million people actually using our product. Where is Mastodon today? What are its stats?

linkmotif 8y ago

Who has two flat panel monitors in 1995?

exodust 8y ago
Nobody. The image is more recent.

emacsen 8y ago

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.

jacquesm 8y ago
> Years later he started to sell Klein Bottles on his website. From a miniature robotic warehouse under his house, no less: https://techcrunch.com/2015/06/23/how-clifford-stoll-sells-klein-bottles-from-under-his-house/ https://techcrunch.com/2015/06/23/how-clifford-stoll-sells-k...
SmellyGeekBoy 8y ago
Heh. Funny thing is I had absolutely no idea who he was until you mentioned the Klein bottle thing. Then a little light bulb went off in my head. I guess my brain filed him away as "Klein bottle guy" at some point in the past. Funny how the brain works sometimes.
perlpimp 8y ago
Internet is dead, web with interface galore reigns supreme with multitude of interfaces all incomprehensible to single point of use of programs. Google news reader was killed, after google bought dejanews turned it into rarely visited place. having a low cost application that can talks over protocols promoted democracy among client selection and democracy of choice that you don't have to learn new as you move between infromation spaces. Web is a great expression medium but a terrible information aggregator and information consumtion source. So it has gotten quite a bit worse since Cliff wrote the article.

_bxg1 8y ago

This is a striking mixture of things that are incredibly prophetic with things that are incredibly shortsighted.

arisAlexis 8y ago

ahem, Bitcoin

JohnClark1337 8y ago

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.