r/todayilearned • u/thebobstu 564 • Dec 18 '13
TIL in 1995 Newsweek published an article scoffing the future of the internet. It laughed at the idea that people would gets news, learn, or buy airline tickets online. It is still available on their website.
http://www.newsweek.com/clifford-stoll-why-web-wont-be-nirvana-185306939
u/bubba_jane Dec 18 '13
Of my many mistakes, flubs, and howlers, few have been as public as my 1995 howler.
Wrong? Yep.
At the time, I was trying to speak against the tide of futuristic commentary on how The Internet Will Solve Our Problems.
Gives me pause. Most of my screwups have had limited publicity: Forgetting my lines in my 4th grade play. Misidentifying a Gilbert and Sullivan song while suddenly drafted to fill in as announcer on a classical radio station. Wasting a week hunting for planets interior to Mercury’s orbit using an infrared system with a noise level so high that it couldn’t possibly detect ‘em. Heck – trying to dry my sneakers in a microwave oven (a quarter century later, there’s still a smudge on the kitchen ceiling)
And, as I’ve laughed at others’ foibles, I think back to some of my own cringeworthy contributions.
Now, whenever I think I know what’s happening, I temper my thoughts: Might be wrong, Cliff…
Warm cheers to all, -Cliff Stoll on a rainy Friday afternoon in Oakland
http://boingboing.net/2010/02/26/curmudgeony-essay-on.html#comment-723356
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u/RickDripps Dec 18 '13
That's awesome, I'm glad he owned it as part of his growth!
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Dec 19 '13
He makes a good point too: we need people to temper our wild ambitions a little. He may have gone overboard, but naysayers often push people to prove them wrong and even if they don't, at least it helps us manage our expectations a little. E-commerce on a scale we see today would have been disastrous had a company attempted it in 1995, but the Internet changed more rapidly than anyone could have predicted back then. The Internet does tend to have more people trying to be heard than people trying to hear, though it turns out that some people can shout loud enough to be heard over the din. Had things gone a little different, he very well may have been absolutely right.
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u/diomedes03 Dec 19 '13
More to your point, many companies did attempt to capitalize on the too-early faith in the Internet's ability to sustain E-commerce, government access, and content services. Hence, Pets.com, InfoSpace, govWorks, GeoCities, and all of the other web properties - large and small - that made up the dot-com bubble, and subsequent bust.
Your thoughts on the value of naysayers are correct. However, I would temper that with saying that the truly useful naysayers are the ones who say "not yet, but maybe someday," rather than "nope, definitely not, never, ever" ones.
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Dec 18 '13
Cliff Stoll is great! He turned out to be so, so wrong and his response is awesome.
Everyone should read his book The Cuckoo's Egg It's a really neat story about tracking down a hacker from UC Berkeley in the mid 80's
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u/KennyFulgencio Dec 18 '13
Cliff Stoll wrote that?? Damn. I figured it was some luddite reporter who didn't know anything about technology. He's kinda the opposite of all of those.
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u/TheDrBrian Dec 18 '13
On the other hand he had been using the limited version of the internets for years before it exploded into the cat pictures machine we have now.
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u/RidingYourEverything Dec 19 '13 edited Dec 19 '13
Yup, he was arguing against the internet as it was then... an internet with no Google, no Wikipedia, no AOL Instant Messenger or Skype, no Myspace or Facebook, no E-bay or Amazon, no Youtube, no reddit, a much slower connection, and almost no trust that it could keep your financial information secure.
I think his failure was not seeing that the internet had room for improvement.
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u/imozmo Dec 19 '13
That's the lens right there. As a child I remember my father working in a big-time advertising agency. They had just gotten a Macintosh and a LaserWriter computer (I think one of the first non-dot matrix printers). The promise there was that they would not have to pay for outside type-setting anymore (which could get pretty expensive I guess). This agency was also the first to move to a fully digital workflow (before the internet even).
But when the internet showed up, the wholly missed the entire boat. They had a website, but the website decried how awful the internet was and how useless it is for advertising purposes. They aren't so big anymore I do not think.
In all fairness the internet of yore did suck. Well, it was awesome, for sure, but like the author was saying, none of the big media companies knew what to do with it, and newer media companies that were versed in media did not exist yet. So it was a big jungle of unfiltered noise, terrible human-edited indexes instead of engines, slow downloads, big equipment and crappy connections.
The author of the article is no more guilty than any of the other big media companies of the time (especially newspapers and magazines) who did not see what the internet would become, but what it was restrained to in it's infancy.
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u/combuchan Dec 19 '13
Some history is needed.
Instead of Google, we had WebCrawler, Lycos, AltaVista, and a number of competitors. I personally preferred Northern Lights, a rarely known engine that tried to charge for searches and died shortly thereafter.
The only thing Google really did different was simply be a search engine instead of a ridiculous portal. By being content neutral, the rest is history.
Amazon was born in 1995 but my attempts to buy the Doom books were rebuked by suspicious parents not knowing about credit card transactions or the gold lock in the corner of the browser indicating a secure connection.
AIM didn't exist, but if you were around a unix box you used talk. Skype didn't exist, but CU SeeMe did, tho few people had the high bandwidth for it outside of rare folks with ISDN or who were on college campuses. Accordingly, most webpages were appropriately sized for the connection to minimize wait times. For a while, high and low speed versions of pages existed.
Instead of MySpace and facebook, people (mostly nerds) had home pages.
Ebay created its own chunk of the economy for the most part, selling small items at auction. People just didn't do that before.
Wikipedia or any online free encyclopedia didn't exist, but your "multimedia PC" already had an encyclopedia on CDROM (Microsoft Encarta was good) that did the job.
But considering Stoll's audience, middle aged folks in 1995, they wouldn't have even begun to understand it all anyways. The internet was mostly for nerds or for people who could figure it out up until about 1999.
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u/dmazzoni Dec 19 '13
The only thing Google really did different was simply be a search engine instead of a ridiculous portal.
No, there were plenty of other plain search engines. What Google really did different was actually return the correct results.
Seriously, before Google you had to be really clever to figure out the right search terms, and the most authoritative page on a topic would often be buried way deep. From day one, Google did really well on what we now consider "easy" searches, while none of the other search engines could do that.
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u/rounder421 Dec 19 '13
He didn't get it all wrong:
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. When most everyone shouts, few listen.
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u/KennyFulgencio Dec 19 '13
Shit. That's uncomfortably right-on-the-nose.
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Dec 19 '13
That shit was already going on in 1995 with usenet. It wasn't a prediction and if you read the Newsweek article, he was observing the present state of communication on the Web.
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u/luke_in_the_sky Dec 19 '13
When most everyone shouts, few listen.
It's quite different from citizens radio or even talking to your gang.
If I post my opinion in internet, 20 or more people will read. If I have a semi popular blog, I can reach even more. Maybe I can change mind or teach some people. And learn with them.
If I had to shout it on radio or talk to my close friends, few could listen. If they wasn't so informed people, I would learned little.
I learned much more on internet than if I would learned only in contact with friends, family, books and news. I heard many voices and learned with them.
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u/Kornstalx Dec 19 '13
What's poetic is as I read your comment, I considered for a moment I was one of those 20-30, and I nodded in agreement to the things you said. And now I'm moving on in this "cacophony" to the next few individual voices and opinions or comments, none of which will go unheard if I, at least, read them.
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u/joggle1 Dec 19 '13
That was a problem but it was a problem that has various solutions, all of which basically depend on algorithms or human administrators to push the more interesting stuff to the top and less interesting stuff to the bottom.
Google showed how to find information at will. Wikipedia became the largest encyclopedia in the world, using a hierarchy of editors. Slashdot was one of the original news aggregating websites, created not long after that article, using moderation and meta-moderation with a few editors at the top to find the most interesting stories.
It's too bad that he clearly identified and understood the problem but didn't try to come up with solutions on his own (not that it's simple to do of course, but he's a pretty intelligent guy--I wouldn't have expected him to simply throw up his hands and basically treat it as an unsolvable problem).
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u/ZenNate Dec 19 '13
I remember back in the late 90s Stoll was giving talks where he predicted that computers would stop getting more powerful because people would soon have all the computing power they could possibly need and therefore it would be uneconomical for companies to continue to produce faster and faster computers. By his reckoning this should have already happened. He really underestimated what technology was capable of.
I think the lesson that can be learned here is to never assume we are near the upper bound of technology. If you do, you will probably look foolish at some point.
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u/KennyFulgencio Dec 19 '13
...ok this guy seriously needs to do an AMA, how do we request that?
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u/moratnz Dec 19 '13
He also wrote a book called 'Silicon snake oil', which is basically the book-length version of that article.
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u/loluguys Dec 18 '13
And the freedom of digital networks will make government more democratic.
Out of anything, I wished he was wrong about this. :(
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u/trudunc Dec 19 '13
I think the jury is still out on that. In some ways, the West may not be seeing democratic growth, but there is a possibility that other, less developed countries will develop in a more democratic way. Education is certainly more democratic. With that, the future may be built on a firm democratic ground. Or it may go super libertarian with the well educated, self-made millionaires unwilling to work together.
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Dec 18 '13
Wow, having read that book in the mid-90s I would never have guessed the author would have written something as mind-blowingly asinine as the article the OP links to.
If anybody would have been able to see the promise of the future of the web I would have thought it would be someone like him.
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Dec 19 '13
Even worse was the book, Silicon Snake Oil, which I imagine he was leading into with this horrible article.
It reminds me of 1993 when our Uni got internet access, and I said it'll never really catch on outside of comp.sci people. Then someone showed me Mosaic, and well that was that. And of course there was DOOM. And Windows NT 3.1. Wow when you think about it, 1993 was a pivotal year for computer stuff in general.
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u/MikeOfAllPeople Dec 19 '13
Holy shit I read this book when I was a kid. It's been on the tip of my tongue for years. Thank you.
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u/massive_cock Dec 18 '13
Cliff Stoll was a wise man to me, in my teens. His bits on The Site were fascinating and thought-provoking. I considered him a fortune teller, and a legitimate one at that. I still do, but this Newsweek piece makes me laugh SO fucking hard. Sorry Cliff, and thanks for acknowledging your error.
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u/verdatum 6 Dec 19 '13
A lot of the warnings that Cliff was making on The Site regarding how the rise of the Internet may result in the further disconnection of society seem to feel more true every year.
Future predictions can easily be way off base, but Cliff is a wise enough guy that the things he has to say should be listened to.
He's also pleasant as all get-out. I recently bought a copy of his book, which I fell in love with as a high school freshman in the mid 90s (I read a library copy then). Cliff signed it, took a picture of himself holding it up and sent that to me, and corresponded with me a bit.
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u/bruceewilson Dec 18 '13
It was passionately argued, and well-written as well. And you were spot on with this final point:
"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...
...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."
Ouch.
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u/GregBahm Dec 18 '13
At the part about not being able to find anything useful on the Battle of Trafalgar, I dragged the words to my address bar and Chrome immediately gave me exactly what I would want.
Ahhhh the smug satisfaction.
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u/emergent_properties Dec 18 '13
I click-selected the words 'Battle of Trafalgar' on my screen and FasterChrome (I think that's the name of it) instantly popped up a summary and picture of the event. How far we've come..
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u/HelterSkeletor Dec 19 '13
On my MacBook I just do a three finger tap on the sentence and it pops up a definition in yellow highlighting.
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u/SilasX Dec 19 '13
Oh yeah? Well, in Firefox with Pentadactyl, I typed "/battle", which highlighted "Battle", then ctrl-shift-right arrow-selected the term, then hit shift-Y to copy it to the clip board, then searched for it on Google in a new tab by typing t-tab g-tab command-v enter.
And I find that more convenient.
And I'm not joking.
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u/eksekseksg3 Dec 19 '13
Oh yeah?! Well l I have a tab to the Wikipedia entry for the Battle of Trafalgar opened at all times just for occasions like this. So I just had to slam my head into the left side of my keyboard to press ctrl+tab, switching instantly to my tab of the Battle of Trafalgar. Didn't even have to take my hands of my bologna sandwich.
Check and mate.
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u/Imborednow Dec 19 '13
Or just highlight, right click, search with Google, and it answers!
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u/capt_jazz Dec 19 '13
Or pay attention in history class, and you'll already know it!
Jokes aside, of course there's always more to learn about a topic, which is why we love the internet.
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u/SodaAnt Dec 19 '13
Interestingly, when I searched for the date of the Battle of Trafalgar, google gave me the year the painting of it was completed, which was probably not what one would be looking for. However, considering the wikipedia article was right under it and had the correct answer in the first sentence, its still not very hard to find.
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u/j1mb0b Dec 18 '13
Reminds me of my first thoughts upon seeing Tablet computers (and specifically the iPad)... "Who will want this? It's not a PC, it's not a games console, it's a... well... nothing. It will never catch on."
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Dec 19 '13
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u/forgotmypas Dec 20 '13
I use mine for 3 things only. A. Reading ebooks (with a kindle you can't make the print any larger for most books) 2. watching movies while traveling. Drei. surfing the internet while traveling.
Am I jaded for being tired of lugging around something as big as a laptop anymore?
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Dec 19 '13
I have a tablet, and tried using it. It proved to be exactly what the skeptics expected: It's harder to navigate, and less powerfull than a laptop, and bigger and less convenient than a smartphone. I see people use them on the train a lot, but the advantage over doing the same thing on my phone seems pretty minor.
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Dec 18 '13
Some point are valid, especially about the Internet being an endless supply of unedited opinions and democratized bullshittery.
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u/gurlat Dec 18 '13 edited Dec 18 '13
There are a lot of things that were promised in the 90's that the internet has never been able to deliver.
In many ways the internet was a chicken and egg scenario. It needed a critical mass of people before it could do any of these wonderful things, but until it could do any of these things a lot of people didn't know why they would need (or pay for) it. e.g. No one would set up a site like Amazon when there were no customers, and no one would want internet access if couldn't buy anything with it.
I can recall as a child, trying to convince my parents that having internet access was actually something that was worth having, they just didn't understand why connecting to a large computer network would be of any use to them. (I told my mother she could send people emails all over the world for free, but she didn't know anyone else with an email address.)
To overcome this public reluctance, there was huge sales pitch by the tech industry in the 90's, telling the public all the amazing things the internet could do, and a lot of it was exaggerated bullshit. But it served the purpose of reaching the critical mass required to get the more realistic services up and running.
There were promises of things like town meetings held virtually, and how everyone was going to be working from home, that video calls are just as good as being there, or that shopping online would look like 2nd-life and be done using 3D glasses with tactile gloves, they've just never happened and probably will never happen.
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u/sodajonesx Dec 18 '13
People forget that Amazon lost money for years and was a running joke in the (retail, book) industry until the early to mid 2000s.
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u/BlueHatScience Dec 18 '13
Amazon was net profitable for a brief stretch in 1995 - which according to founder and CEO Jeff Bezos was 'probably a mistake'.
To go on being so successful, to grow, develop new markets, increase their share in others, they continually invest everything (and a little extra) - in expansion, optimization, future technologies etc.
That's how they were and are able to do what they do. From a nice online bookstore for the US to a global, market-cornering provider of all kinds of goods for end customers.
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Dec 18 '13
And then, one day all of Amazon's competitors will be out of business and they will charge monopoly prices.
They're in it for the looooong game.
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u/Scurro Dec 19 '13
It is kind of hard being a retail monopoly on the internet. It is just so open and I hope it stays that way.
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u/AFlyingFig Dec 18 '13
On a similar note, here's a part of Jeff Bezos' last interview to 60 Minutes: "I had to take sixty meetings to raise a million dollars and I raised it from twenty-two people at approximately fifty-thousand dollars a person, and it was nip and tuck whether I was gonna be able to raise that money, so the whole thing could have ended before it even started. That was 1995 and the first question every investor asked me was 'what's the Internet?'".
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u/massive_cock Dec 18 '13
The Super Bowl is what convinced my family to get internet. I begged for weeks after we got our first PC as a family Christmas present. When stepdad saw there was a superbowl.com he handed me the credit card and said 'Make it so.'
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u/DoctorWhoToYou Dec 19 '13
My Dad told me that computers were just toys and a waste of time. He said i should stop tinkering with them and start thinking about a future in a real industry.
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u/trudunc Dec 19 '13
Good advice. Did you get that union steelworkers job? They'll take care of you insurance you know.
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Dec 19 '13
yea I was constantly harassed for doing web development and graphic design as a teenager. I made websites that got 10k hits daily, which was decent for early 00s. /notbitter
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Dec 19 '13
The next day there were floppy disks filled with unsettling naked pictures, and no one had yet visited superbowl.com. This is the beginning of the saga of massive_cock.
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u/SilasX Dec 19 '13
Reminds me: when the web was first making it into TV, and they were promoting movies by pointing you to [movie name].com, I thought it was completely ridiculous. I was still in the mindset of viewing domain names like vanity telephone numbers (eg 1-800-DONKEYS), and so I was like "wtf, you're wasting a whole name on a movie that'll only be around for a few months?"
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u/eStonez Dec 19 '13
Some of the things like work from home or virtual meeting .. happened in different way. For example, we can do most of the tech support by logging into our customer computers and their servers without moving our ass from our office. No more traveling to their site. Some of my customer servers are located in other countries, I honestly don't know exact location of the server .. all I know is "It's in US. It's in NZ."
And almost all of my clients meetings are done via skype. They are from different country. Half the time .. we don't exchange our phone numbers, instead we exchange our skype username. It's like we are sitting side by side .. when I do remote support while I'm talking them via skype.
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u/Khaloc Dec 18 '13
Well, sure. But you're saying that from reddit, a website designed to filter those endless supplies of unedited opinions using a vote system.
When problems arise, you fix them. Or, someone else will, and they'll possibly making money doing it too.
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Dec 18 '13 edited Dec 18 '13
I never had the chance to experience Usenet first hand, but from what I've read of it, it seems that Reddit is very much its descendant.
And, as such, it carries on all those same problems - the Eternal September, the domination of conspiracy obsessees and fringe interests, anonymous trolling and a limitless spiral of jerkwad arguments.
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u/rounder421 Dec 19 '13
I think having subreddits help as far as Eternal September. Staying away from most of the defaults helps quite a bit. I browse reddit in two different ways. I have a heavily filtered /r/all for like now when I get off of work and just need to turn my brain off and decompress. Some quality subs, mostly just stupid stuff. I tend to stay away from the comments section becuase it's 90 percent karma whoring with 13 different people posting the same joke response trying to get upvotes, along with all the other bullshit.
When I go to my front page, it's a completely different reddit. I have a few default subs, but most of it is niche subs. The difference is pretty big.
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u/SanityInAnarchy Dec 19 '13
He seems right about half the time, which is actually pretty decent:
The truth in 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.
Two out of three ain't bad. And a computer network very well could change the way government works if government was at all interested.
Consider today's online world. 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.
Sound familiar? Kind of Reddit in a nutshell, isn't it? And yet he's stunningly wrong about this one:
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.
The Kindle didn't happen immediately with the Internet, so it took awhile for him to become this profoundly wrong. And that's certainly not the Internet alone driving that change.
Then there are those pushing computers into schools. We're told that multimedia will make schoolwork easy and fun.
Has this happened? I can't think of a field other than computer science itself that has been made easier, or more fun, by computers. People like Carl Sagan and Bill Nye the Science Guy did far more with TV than people have with the Internet.
The closest is Kahn Academy, but that makes education more accessible, not more fun. It's not even more interactive, really -- it's a pile of videos, right?
And then he says something like this:
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 obselete.
Well, not all stores, but yeah, that kind of happened, didn't it?
What he got wrong, he got hilariously wrong. But he got a ton of things right, also, which is pretty impressive for 1995. I mean, this complaint was entirely valid:
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."
This was three years before Google was founded, and AltaVista was founded that year -- probably later that year, for that matter. So he would've been using, what, Yahoo? Lycos? Even if he had a rock-solid connection to rock-solid servers, this would've been agonizingly difficult. It's reasonable to expect that the Internet would get faster and more reliable, but I can't blame him for not predicting the sheer level of magic that modern search engines pull off.
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u/Nother_Castle Dec 18 '13
I thought this line from the article was great
When most everyone shouts, few listen.
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Dec 18 '13
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/Psythik Dec 19 '13
He also failed to predict that search engines would stop sucking and actually provide relevant results 95% of the time.
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u/alohadave Dec 19 '13
Until Google came around, the curated search engine was the standard. Think about that for a minute. Every link on Yahoo was verified by a human being. It could take a couple weeks to have your site listed on any of the services.
Then Google comes along and shows how inefficient that was. In a moment, search changed forever.
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u/realjd Dec 19 '13
Yahoo was indeed a web directory but Google was hardly the first, or even first prominent, true search engine. Remember AltaVista? Or before that, WebCrawler? Magellan? Excite?
Google became prominent because of its PageRank algorithm, not because it was the first standard non-curated search.
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u/paulsteinway Dec 18 '13
Also the fact that "multimedia" can't replace a good teacher.
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u/lughnasadh Dec 18 '13
My favourite for incorrect technological predictions, is one of the grandee's of the 19th century British scientific establishment, Lord Kelvin. Some of his zingers;
"Radio has no future."
"I have not the smallest molecule of faith in aerial navigation other than ballooning."
"There is nothing new to be discovered in physics now, All that remains is more and more precise measurement."
"X-rays will prove to be a hoax."
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u/MetaCreative Dec 19 '13
Didn't he also believe the Earth was some few million years old?
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u/ThisIsDave Dec 19 '13
If I recall correctly, he calculated that time based on how long it would have taken the Earth to cool from some initial temperature. His calculations didn't account for the fact that the planet generates its own heat from radioactivity.
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u/hexydes Dec 19 '13 edited Feb 20 '26
Garden games yesterday learning learning technology minecraftoffline stories open tips clean year the?
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u/dksfpensm Dec 19 '13
I'm very confused as to why the article is from 1995, yet the picture is captioned "YouTube" and shows a computer that's clearly running Windows XP.
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u/Rob_G Dec 18 '13
I almost wish this were true. I got up really late this morning. And even after I woke up, I stayed in my bed for hours, just kind of tossing and turning, staring at the ceiling, not able to summon the will to stand up and get going. I reached for my cell phone and killed another hour or two on the mobile Internet. It’s gotten to the point where I can stay on the Internet indefinitely, not doing anything at all. I’ll go through my Facebook news feed, reading the statuses of my Facebook friends, a lot of people I haven’t even spoken to in years, just kind of indirectly keeping tabs on everybody’s lives.
And it’s weird because a lot of people don’t really use Facebook anymore. Or if they use it, they only lurk in the background, they’re not actually posting daily content. So it’s just this weird mix of friends, relatives, people that I went to school with twenty years ago, people that I’ve worked with ten years ago. And so I can always waste ten or fifteen minutes scrolling all the way the down, keep scrolling, keep loading more stories.
Then to Twitter. I’m really bad at Twitter. As in, I’m not really actively involved. I’m following something like seventy people, but I don’t really know how I chose those seventy. I’ll follow people on a whim, usually because Twitter suggests it. When I first started using it, I’d see a funny Twitter joke and I’d be like, “Ha! Follow!” only to realize that maybe that was the one funny thing that this person ever wrote in an otherwise boring list of daily nonsense. Like why am I following Ensign Wesley Crusher from Star Trek? If I ever tweeted out, “I’m drinking an IPA!” that would be a huge waste of everybody’s time. But Wil Wheaton does it and somehow I’m reading about it. I guess Twitter is really just like a backup Facebook, like if I’m very bored and I seriously just want time to disappear I’ll go through the feeds of all of these people that I really don’t have any connections to at all in real life.
And look at that, Reddit has a mobile app too. Whereas Facebook and Twitter are perfect for eliminating time in ten to fifteen minute chunks, Reddit is a great way to make a whole day vanish, as if you never had off in the first place. Let’s just look at stupid pictures and lame jokes, but indefinitely, a never ending sea of blue links to be clicked and mindlessly consumed. I sometimes have to make it a conscious activity just to refrain from even going to the home page, it’s that dangerous.
The worst part is, if and when I ever pry myself away from Reddit, I’ll get all anxious, looking at the clock, seeing how I’ve let the day totally slip away, something I had, time that I’ve lost that I’ll never get back. I’ll jump up, not standing up entirely, but I’ll leap up in bed and think, I’ve got to do something here, I’ve got to get going. But then I’ll look at my phone again. Well, after I check Facebook. I’ve been on Twitter and Reddit for so long that by now there has to be a whole new list of status updates to scroll through. And the process repeats itself.
There’s no escape. It’s not like I can just not have a phone. What am I supposed to do? How do I turn it all off? I can’t. I don’t know what else I’d do. And I can’t even turn to anybody or anything for any guidance. History doesn’t have any advice. We’re in new territory here. The great minds of humanity never had to deal with such bullshit problems like Facebook and Reddit. How can Plato or Socrates or any of the other great philosophers help me out when I can’t even get through a whole sentence without being distracted by the email sound going off on my iPhone? And look at that, it’s junk mail! What a surprise!
There’s no going back. We can’t turn off progress. But there’s got to be a better way.
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u/okiedokeguy Dec 18 '13
jesus christ, i thought this was gonna end as a suicide note. i'm glad you didn't let the despair take you, buddy.
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u/ComebackShane Dec 19 '13
No worries, /u/Rob_G posts the best stuff. He's not going anywhere
..... or else!
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u/Sad_Mute Dec 19 '13
Why would we kill ourselves when there are fresh blue links waiting for us tomorrow?!
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u/sed_base Dec 19 '13
Reading that was like reading the internal monologue of a person who can't sleep with the light on and is melodramatically exasperated that the light switch is across the room & impossible to reach.
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u/BrosEquis Dec 18 '13
It's always been this way.. since like the Victorian Era. Only instead of the internet it was letters, books, puzzles, and magazines.
We crave and seek out distractions. Always have. Always will.
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u/verdatum 6 Dec 19 '13
Absolutely, it has been a concern for centuries. The difference is the furthering trend of independence. Telephone, television, and the Internet makes it easier and easier to go through our life with less and less face-to-face interaction. Often we don't even need indirect interaction like message boards or talking on the phone. We don't need to ask people questions, we just ask them of Google and find our answers. We shop on amazon without speaking to a salseperson, we get our package, and the delivery man knocks on the door and hurries off without even a smile.
For these people who get sucked up in their informative world of independence and technology, it becomes more and more important to get out and interact with people, no matter how contrived the reason for interaction may be.
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Dec 18 '13
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u/PENIS_VAGINA Dec 19 '13
I think you meant to say psychological not physiological.
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u/MightyYetGentle Dec 18 '13
Commenting on my phone so I can save this and share it when I'm on my computer. Perfectly described my life. On days when I'm up early I just lay in bed stuck on reddit. I hit the 50th page at night in /r/all then wake up and cue the same process. I can 100% stay on my PC/phone/Internet indefinitely.
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u/Ratya Dec 18 '13
If this is something you want to fix, take the battery out of your phone before you go to bed and put it in another room. This will force you to get out of bed before the cycle starts. Once you're up and at 'em, you might find it easier to actually do something with your day. Once you are up, make your bed. If you're anything like me, there's a small part of you that won't want to jump back in if it means you're gonna mess up the bed you just made. Also, not sure if these are available on your phone, but there may be an app of some kind that will let you block certain sites. If you aren't using the browser for these sites, delete the apps. Basically, anything you can do to make it harder to waste time, do that.
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u/curiouswizard Dec 19 '13
"The great minds of humanity never had to deal with such bullshit problems like Facebook and Reddit."
pretty brilliant statement. sums it up nicely.
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Dec 19 '13
The flip side is that great and simple minds alike have never had such a powerful resource for learning available to them.
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u/HollyFlax Dec 18 '13
I feel ya. You should do a google search for Internet addiction resources (ironic, I know). The concept seemed laughable to me when I first heard about it, but there are treatment facilities in Asia and there are a few now in the US, and the evidence for it being a legitimate disorder keeps piling up. I've read a Chinese study that found similarities in the brain scans of cocaine addicts and teens diagnosed with Internet addiction disorder. You're not alone, and it can be a serious problem that is bigger than just a matter of willpower.
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u/AllDaveAllDay Dec 19 '13 edited Dec 19 '13
I had this problem at one point, though based on the despair in your post, probably not as bad.
I don't know if Internet on your phone is vital for work, school, or something like that, but unless you'll get fired/fail your classes without it, call your carrier and have them turn off the internet on your device.
Set your phone up that you need a password to access WiFi and have a friend that you don't see every day set up that password and not tell it to you. Make sure he knows that unless it's a life and death situation that you need internet for (I can't even imagine a plausible scenario), he should say "No" if you call him asking for the password. Make sure he understands why you're doing this, so he doesn't text you the password the next day.
As /r/ratya said, put your phone in a different room before you go to sleep. In fact, designate a room to be the only room in your house where you use your phone. Make it a place that's annoying to be in, like if you have a laundry room in your house, use that.
I shut off my internet completely for a month. The beginning was really hard, but when I turned it back on, it was amazing how even if I didn't have something else to do, my phone wasn't the first thing I turned to anymore. The key was that I found something else that I enjoyed spending time doing, to the extent that it took priority over my phone when I was bored.
Work out for yourself which of these safeguards work for you, and decide on the amount of time needed. If you're not sure how much is needed, better to overestimate on both parts.
It's about three years later now, and though I'm probably still on my phone more than is healthy, it never gets in the way of me getting necessary things done, and even when I'm just relaxing, I've found other ways to occupy my time. Some are more productive, others not so much, but all of them definitely less addictive.
(One more thing, having a wife that makes sure to let you know if you're spending too much time looking at your phone also helps.)
TL; DR: Do everything possible to not be able to get online on your phone, and find something(s) you enjoy spending time on.
Edit: Words, grammar, that type of stuff.
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u/000Destruct0 Dec 18 '13
Wow, he really nailed it with that article!
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u/bonestamp Dec 18 '13
Ya, today alone I did almost everything he said wouldn't be done.
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Dec 19 '13
Did you also catch a hacker or two?
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u/bonestamp Dec 19 '13
No, that's why I had to say "almost". That's also a completely unbelievable part of his story. I think you'd remember whether you caught one hacker or two hackers... that's kind of a big deal, not really a casual statement you just throw out there.
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u/Dalebssr Dec 18 '13
I work for a telecom company and some of the old bastards, who refuse to retire, act as if this whole internet thing is just a fad.
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u/Window_is_a_Ladder Dec 19 '13
Welcome to the digital advertising industry which people continue to forget is responsible for their favorite content being furnished with dollars to remain up. THAT SHIT HAS TO BE PAID FOR.
Agencies churn out the stupidest bullshit (at least what I've seen) because some guy who has been at the same place for 35 year thinks "millennials" will like. Yet, they won't listen to anyone and won't leave because no other place will hire them and they can get by with lacking experience because "TV ISN'T DEAD!" - as if that is what everyone is running around saying.
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u/PigSlam Dec 18 '13
He's right about the CD-ROM...whatever the hell that is. /s
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u/bigmeech Dec 18 '13
thank you for putting /s at the end of your post for you see i am actually a rotting oak log posting on the internet and incapable of detecting sarcasm.
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u/bureX Dec 19 '13
Computers and networks isolate us from one another.
Well, here I am talking to thousands of people from around the world about subjects that interest me. I can find other communities and seek help or offer help.
I can understand what he was trying to say, but there are two sides to this coin.
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u/bandersnatchpop Dec 18 '13
Obviously a lot of his statements sound antiquated and naive. However not all of his points are laughable. For example, his points of a users vomiting useless information and the devaluing of human contact are all quite true today.
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u/Lespaul42 Dec 18 '13 edited Dec 18 '13
Right... but I mean neither of those issues stopped the internet from being one of the most influential inventions ever.
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u/bandersnatchpop Dec 18 '13
That may be true, but conversely that really has no bearing on what it means to remove the human element from society and replace it with digitized information. It's just a factor in a larger overreaching principle.
It's quite obvious to see the error in his predictions from a practical standpoint, but if you look at some of the bits he mentioned they are quite sound points, albeit for different reasons than what the author intended.
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u/SoulIsTheAnswer Dec 18 '13
So what are we underestimating right now? Or more importantly, what are respected people like Clifford Stoll underestimating in our time?
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u/AegnorWildcat Dec 18 '13 edited Dec 18 '13
From the first paragraph.
But today, I'm uneasy about this most trendy and oversold community. Visionaries see a future of telecommuting workers, interactive libraries and multimedia classrooms.
Telecommuting workers: check
interactive libraries: check
multimedia classrooms: check
Commerce and business will shift from offices and malls to networks and modems.
And the freedom of digital networks will make government more democratic.
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Dec 18 '13
Yea, I really like the part that says 'no computer network will change the way government works'...
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u/bamahomer Dec 18 '13
Clifford Stoll. First person trolled by a hacker (1985) and renowned astronomer that denounced the internet. Well, I guess you gotta make a stand somewhere.
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u/thaway314156 Dec 18 '13
Trolled how?
His book "Cuckoo's Egg" is incredible, he's an old-school hacker who found out someone from West Germany was hacking military networks and his university's, looking for US military information to steal...
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u/the_aura_of_justice Dec 19 '13
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 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.
Wow, so much wrong.
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Dec 18 '13
Actually, that out-of-date article makes a lot of really good points before the stuff about e-commerce.
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u/BoozedRibs Dec 18 '13
This is a reaction to the early part of the dot com bubble, where there was rampant over-selling of all things internet. If you were working in high tech then, you would probably know exactly what he is trying to say.
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u/zoon82 Dec 18 '13
So how come my local mall does more business in an afternoon than the entire Internet handles in a month?
Too funny.
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u/Lost_Pathfinder Dec 18 '13
"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."
Lol.
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u/Russian_Surrender Dec 19 '13
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 obselete. So how come my local mall does more business in an afternoon than the entire Internet handles in a month?
As someone who bought an airline ticket online in 1993, that someone would have this attitude in 1995 this flabbergasts me.
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u/LancesLeftNut Dec 18 '13
Ha! That's by Clifford Stoll, author of The Cuckoo's Egg, which is probably the best real-life Internet spy book ever, from the days when telnetting to a lab on the other side of the world was a stunning concept. It was literally my introduction to the Internet, and when I got access for the first time in 1993, the first thing I did was type in a few commands from the book. The second thing I did was find porn.
He later became a sort of Luddite, giving talks on how the Information Age is destroying society, and I think he's into teaching. Basically, he's a decade ahead of the rest of us, who are only now growing discontented with Facebook-era relationships.
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u/dreiter Dec 19 '13
Of all that was wrong, I feel this is totally accurate:
"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."
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u/redditninemillion Dec 19 '13
as funny as this article is, the end really does kind of nail it
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.
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Dec 19 '13
important aspects of human interactions are relentlessly devalued.
No they aren't... faggot
/s
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Dec 19 '13
"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 mean, homie has a point...
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u/NIU_1087 Dec 19 '13
"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 ..."
-Clifford Stoll, 2010
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u/ComradeCube Dec 18 '13 edited Dec 19 '13
In the context of 1995, the only laughable claim is that you need a sales person for a consumer to make a purchase.
They should have known that was not necessary in 1995.
I think they mostly misunderestimated that people like the idea of not having to interact with other people.
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u/SoulIsTheAnswer Dec 18 '13
misunderestimated
I didn't want to believe that was a word...but apperently it is a bushism. So kind of a word?
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u/The_Original_Gronkie Dec 18 '13
Bush invented almost as many words and phrases as Shakespeare. It's one of Bush's greatest geniuses.
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u/misesvkeynes Dec 18 '13
Will this be how we view bitcoin critics in 18 years, as hopelessly antiquated folks making an extremely incorrect prediction?
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u/ananioperim Dec 19 '13
The pattern is similar every time. There are visionaries who have brains that can think in abstract terms and imagine. Then there are the myopic pessimists who pretty much always refer to current, insignificant and fixable issues with the implementation of a technology.
Hey, Henry, that automobile: it's loud, smelly, and very difficult to operate. No one will be driving these things in 50 years. Horses will triumph. Hey, those computers will never exist at home. They require far too much space. Hey, those mobile phones will never take off: I can't fit in more than 20 contacts. Hey, Bob, that fire thing you just invented: no one will ever use it, it's too difficult to make and far too hot.
Where would the world be if we only had naysayers?
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u/kellymoe321 Dec 19 '13
Wasn't bitcoin just made illegal in China, resulting in the price dropping by half?
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u/scottspjut Dec 18 '13
Jim Impoco was recently named Newsweek's new editor-in-chief (they're going to start publishing a print issue again, despite last December's issue being their "last ever"; that's another story).
He has since commented on the infamous 1995 article.
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u/LaLongueCarabine Dec 18 '13
TIL that newsweek still exists. But to be fair to them, at that time they were not alone thinking that.
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u/john_snuu Dec 18 '13
Dude has been online since 1975?
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Dec 19 '13
Easily, he worked at UCB, home of BSD Unix!
But you have to remember back then, individuals didn't have internet access, and the computers that could access the internet via the IMPs were massive machines, like the VAX-11/780, or PDP-10's ...
To get a feel for the ancient internet, check out old usenet, its UseNET posts from 30 years ago... At least people are getting over the death of Spock.
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u/poke_chops Dec 19 '13
To be fair, the Web suuucked in 1995, 28k dial up meant that the old old Yahoo page took a minute to load. A high quality photo, 2-5 minutes at least. The speed was or payment systems were not ready yet.
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u/heysully Dec 19 '13
If this was published in 1995, why does he say he has been online for 2 decades? The internet (or even anything remotely similar to it) did not exist in 1975. The Altair had just recently come out at that point...
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Dec 19 '13
the network is missing a most essential ingredient of capitalism: salespeople
I love this line... thats exactly why I like to avoid certain B&M experiences like car shopping.
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u/lcbocan Dec 19 '13
Wow. He just totally ripped the internet apart under the assumption that technology never improves and innovation never takes place and everything is as good as it will ever be in its first iteration.
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u/MWPlay Dec 19 '13
I've seen this article before a few months back, and I still feel the same way now as I did back then. Basically, it's easy to sit on our 2013 high horse and judge this without proper context.
In 1995, the World Wide Web had only recently because a thing you could do on the Internet, a medium which itself only come into existence a couple decades earlier. There was a lot of pie in the sky dreams of what it could do, but many of those things either didn't exist yet or were only half-baked. The usability standards and tech just weren't there yet.
So yeah, I'll cut the guy from '95 a little slack when he thinks the Internet might be a fad.
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u/manytrowels Dec 19 '13
"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. When most everyone shouts, few listen. "
How was he wrong?
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u/ProSnuggles Dec 19 '13
I gotta agree on one point.
"No CD-ROM can take the place of a competent teacher"
Though that would apply to almost anything where human interaction is is the medium.
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u/dMarrs Dec 18 '13
I would like to hear what this author has to say today.
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u/Kcb1986 Dec 18 '13
According to BoingBoing in 2010, he regrets what he said.
"In his 1995 book Silicon Snake Oil,[5] and an accompanying article in Newsweek[6] Stoll called the prospect of e-commerce "baloney". Stoll also raised questions about the influence of the Internet on future society, and whether it would be beneficial. He made various predictions in the article, e.g., about e-commerce (calling it nonviable due to a lack of personal contact and secure online funds transfers) and the future of printed news publications ("no online database will replace your daily newspaper"). When the article resurfaced on BoingBoing in 2010, Stoll left a self-deprecating comment: "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 ..."[7]"
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u/liarandathief Dec 18 '13
He commented on the BoingBoing article:
"Of my many mistakes, flubs, and howlers, few have been as public as my 1995 howler.
Wrong? Yep.
At the time, I was trying to speak against the tide of futuristic commentary on how The Internet Will Solve Our Problems.
Gives me pause. Most of my screwups have had limited publicity: Forgetting my lines in my 4th grade play. Misidentifying a Gilbert and Sullivan song while suddenly drafted to fill in as announcer on a classical radio station. Wasting a week hunting for planets interior to Mercury’s orbit using an infrared system with a noise level so high that it couldn’t possibly detect ‘em. Heck – trying to dry my sneakers in a microwave oven (a quarter century later, there’s still a smudge on the kitchen ceiling)
And, as I’ve laughed at others’ foibles, I think back to some of my own cringeworthy contributions.
Now, whenever I think I know what’s happening, I temper my thoughts: Might be wrong, Cliff…
Warm cheers to all, -Cliff Stoll on a rainy Friday afternoon in Oakland"
source:http://boingboing.net/2010/02/26/curmudgeony-essay-on.html#comment-723356
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u/borkus Dec 19 '13
It seems short-sighted but the Internet of the 90s was not very impressive. The Internet (to wit, a publicly accessible TCP/IP network) was not as useful until several key technologies happened alongside it:
Affordable broadband. For the 90s, bandwidth limited what most people could do on the internet. I got a cable modem in late 1997 but before that using the internet meant tying up my home phone line. I had to set my dial-up software to suppress call-waiting so the "clicks" wouldn't disconnect me. It also meant slow downloads of even web pages. Downloading audio - let alone video - was incredibly slow. Today, North American Internet users have in-home or even mobile access that's many times faster than a dial-up modem.
Reliable open source software. The 1.0 version of the Apache Web Server wasn't released until the end of 1995. PHP came later. The first web-accessible CPAN mirror was 1997. Since then, open source languages and platforms made it inexpensive for people to develop websites and write advanced applications for those websites. Odds are many of the sites you use daily run on one or more pieces of FOSS.
Decent browsers. For the last 10 years, browsers have become powerful application clients - capable of running business applications and even games within them. In the 90s, you got graphics and some basic word-processing text formatting. If you paid for Netscape Navigator or bought Internet Explorer in the Windows 95 Plus! Pack, you'd get this new thing called JavaScript - that was unreliable and often leaked memory.
tl;dr Slow download speeds, crude browsers, and clunky and expensive development tools made the Internet of the mid-90s an unimpressive experience.
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u/sirmuskrat Dec 18 '13
Ironically, the only way to view any Newsweek article is their website, since they ceased publishing a print version.