I thought that everyone was going to be on the Internet in a fairly short time, and that would present three major problems. First, accessible files would beco

I thought that everyone was going to be on the Internet in a fairly short time, and that would present three major problems. First, accessible files would become so numerous that no one would be able to navigate them sensibly with the tools that we had. We would drown in a sea of random gratuitous data. Second, user interfaces would tend toward a swamp of accidental complexity unless someone made it their business to compete on the basis of superior user experience, based on sound UX research. Third, unless we could figure out a framework for individuals to own and control their own data, everything would end up owned and controlled by large, faceless institutions with no accountability, and regular people would be reduced to serfs with no effective control of their own data. I wrote an email about these predictions and circulated it at Apple, trying to get someone interested. I tried to pitch the idea of tackling these problems head-on. Nobody bit. Partly that's because I'm not a great salesman. I lack the absolute conviction and the necessary zeal. Partly it's because I was a minor cog in a large machine. Partly it's because Apple was in a death spiral at that moment, and didn't have a lot of attention to spare for grand visions of the future. I had worked for a couple of years on Apple's Newton project, then at NeXT. My expectations of the future arose from stuff I saw while working on those projects. Both Newton and NeXT tried really hard to make user experiences that were natural and comfortable and productive. Both were concerned with trying to connect people using ubiquitous networking. Both succeeded in no small measure, but both also exposed problems that didn't become visible until you started connecting everything together and trying to design interfaces to help people make sense of it all. I didn't sell my pitch to anybody, and neither did anybody else. Instead, I think we more or less got the dystopia I was afraid of.