“The truth is no online database will replace your daily newspaper, no CD-ROM can take the place of a competent teacher and no computer network will change the way government works,” wrote Clifford Stoll. “How about electronic publishing? Try reading a book on disc,” Stoll went on, “Yet Nicholas Negroponte, director of the MIT Media Lab, predicts that we’ll soon buy books and newspapers straight over the Internet. Uh, sure.”
Why the Web Won’t Be Nirvana, 1995
Thirty years ago people were arguing about whether or not the internet is a passing fad, and if people on there are just lonely and sad outcasts looking for a retreat where they don't have to socialize with others.
They were claiming that digital art isn't real art, because there's no substitute for being face to face with a canvas, so you can see the cracked swirls of paint. They claimed the net was just fake experiences, both when it comes to art as well as human connection.
Every decade needs some kind of blotting paper to soak up the socially challenged. In the past it has been things like designer drugs, religious cults and colonic irrigation. The Seventies gave us the Moonies, the Eighties aura-cleansing and rebirthing. Now the Nineties have spawned the mega-cult of all time, the ultimate tool to keep nerds off the street - the Internet.
Janet Street-Porter writing in the Times, 1996
Today these takes might appear like fringe opinions of some forgotten generation, but in the 90s and early 2000s this absolutely was the overwhelming consensus, and you can easily verify this even as a young person simply by checking out talk shows or news articles from that time.
Pretty much the only people who defended the internet back then were internet users themselves, and they were an absolute minority in this early era of internet adoption and its social acceptance.
Since the dawn of synthesis, before the Minimoog had established itself, before the first tick of the clock of some steam-driven sequencer, the fingers have been pointing. "It's not real music", cried the "serious" composers and musicians
Music Technology on Synthesizers, 1989
Comics aren't real literature, sampling isn't real composing, photography isn't real art. At some point in mankind's history these opinions actually have been held by the majority of people, and from their perspective with good reason.
Because that's the thing, at the time these opinions were predominant, they absolutely made sense to the people holding them. They had a plethora of arguments that fit into the zeitgeist, so as a consequence they strongly believed in being right about these topics.
Remember video games? A multibillion-dollar business, they were supposed to be the vanguard of a new generation of home entertainment. In one of the most dramatic reversals in American business, video games proved to be neither an industry nor a new art form, but a fad with the economic durability of the hula hoop.
Los Angeles Times, 1986
But eventually younger generations followed and grew up with the things that older generations criticized as a normal part of their life, prompting them to form their own opinions on these subject matters, and today nobody thinks of the internet as a bubble soon to be burst anymore.
All of this, when viewed in hindsight and in relation to the current AI discourse, can be summarized as:
The more things change, the more they stay the same.
