A few months ago the author of this article, Clifford Stoll, wrote a short, thoughtful note admitting how badly he got it wrong:
"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"
Assuming the author really is Stoll, major props to him for admitting he got it wrong.
That was what struck me about the article. He saw problem after problem with existing technology. But rather than trying to fix the problems, he just threw up his hands and said "this is obviously impossible".
Meanwhile, a long list of now-billionaires saw the same problems and decided to address them.
That internet of things thing is promising, but imho no one has yet identified which problems the people really want to solve.
Ultra-cheap wifi/sensors/little_but_not_too_much_cpu/extensible modules are yet to come, what will happen when 4-5$ modules will be available?
I have had similar ideas for a long time, ever since I was passed the possession of the (defunct) skivsamling.nu. One idea, as a motivator, is for insurance purposes.
I can see a lot of applications, but for it to take off it has to be fun to do it.
Also, do you have an idea of how to identify each object?
as in, an internet of fridges and door locks and cars? good god, the viruses... let's put off the internet of objects until we have a web browser that isn't exploited every other month.
#6 I believe is just a truth of human nature. OpenCourseWare has no insight into your mistakes or personal leanings. A CD will never teach you kung-fu, or how to correct your poetry failings. General advice is all a book or CD can provide, they can't be personalized for you without the intervention of a human.
Maybe not change the way the government "works", but to say that internet didn't help Obama get elected is just simply false. In that sense the government of the USA is working differently because of the internet?
Well, if the internet helped Obama get elected and that counts as changing the way government works, then cartoons have also "changed the way government works" because Eisenhower had an animated campaign ad.
New media creates new ad venues, it doesn't necessarily change what sorts of people are elected to government or what they do once they arrive there.
The internet's ability to change government lies in its ability to connect people, where before you had two guys in a small town with no political power, they can all the sudden become a national force of thousands, two guys in each small town. Hasn't really caused a noticable change in governance yet though, in my opinion. I am young however, so my frame of reference is narrow.
> New media creates new ad venues, it doesn't necessarily change what sorts of people are elected to government or what they do once they arrive there.
My only disagreement would be with this. The people being targeted by these new ad ventures are usually either newly targeted because the venture is newly allowing them to be targeted, or newly targeted because the ad venture allows the targeting of more people for less money.
If new people are being targeted, and more people are voting that wouldn't have before then people are possibly in office that wouldn't have been before these new ad ventures.
I get the feeling that if Obama wouldn't have aggressively gone after my generation (born in the 80's) using means that we understand well (internet) then he wouldn't be in office. But this is purely my gut feeling. I also live in Portland, OR. Which is about as Obama crazy as it gets.
On the flip side though, I'm a "church goin'/Jesus lovin'" dude, and I still don't know anyone my age that didn't vote for Obama. Maybe one.
The thing he's railing against is technology-as-panacea, and he's right, except that he overreacts and wants to throw the whole thing out. The Internet will not solve all our problems. It's helping, though.
And for many of the ideas he snubs there was probably a startup that made it happen or helped it along and sold the shovels, and ended up also making somebody rich in the process.
In case anyone doesn't know him, Clifford Stoll wrote "The Cuckoo's Egg: Tracking a Spy Through the Maze of Computer Espionage", a book about his real experiences tracking down a group of computer hackers.
By the way, there's a bonus at the end of the book: he mentions Paul Graham (in the context of Robert Morris' worm). Was a pleasant surprise when I read the book.
His is one of my all-time-favorite TED talks. I also happen to agree with him on most of his points.
I currently make a reasonable living by untangling technology for people. Not only that, but I make another person's living doing it, and soon I'll be making yet another's, in spite of my many competitors all doing the same thing. I think this indicates some serious shortcomings in current technology, and a severe gap between technologists and non-technologists -- one which is incredibly difficult to communicate to technologists.
There are two different ways to read what he wrote. One is to take it in the way that most technologists would: when Clifford Stoll opens with, "The truth in no online database will replace your daily newspaper", you take the word "replace" in the most literal way possible, and say, "A-ha! But now we do have online databases replacing daily newspapers, so he was wrong!"
The other way -- and the one that I think is closer to his intended meaning -- is less favorable to technologists; in this case, no online database will "replace" our daily newspapers because online databases won't offer the same value. (Not more value, nor less value, but just not the same value.)
I think this is supported by his very next statement: "...no CD-ROM can take the place of a competent teacher..." And, again, I think he's exactly right. A competent teacher interacts with students in ways which technology has yet to offer.
And, some of his other statements are eerily prescient: "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. When most everyone shouts, few listen." ...This happens now, all the time, and yet I don't think it can be said that the average internet user is actually more informed about the topics on their favorite community site.
It's a cheap form of education, at best, the nutritrional equivalent of subsisting on a snack food and dessert diet.
"At best, it's an unpleasant chore: the myopic glow of a clunky computer replaces the friendly pages of a book." Again, readability on electronic devices is still a work in progress. ePaper and Amazon have made incredible strides, but many avid readers -- those that value the experience as well as the content -- still prefer a dead-tree book. For me, this has been something of an eye-opener recently: I started taking dance classes with my girlfriend a little while back, and the classes take place in a used book store. With my busy schedule and the internet at my fingertips, I haven't been visiting the book stores like I once did. But look! There's a great book on statistics! Oh, and Fluid Mechanics! Oh, and a sci-fi novel! And a history book!
Browsing Amazon just doesn't get quite the same reaction as wandering through the shelves of a good used book store. Amazon has other strengths; a local store can't possibly have a copy of everything, so if I'm looking for a specific title, Amazon might be a better bet. But, it doesn't completely take the place of a local store.
While he might have failed to predict the extent to which technology would evolve and invade so many people's daily lives, I don't think he was wrong to criticize technology's impact on those lives.
"I think this indicates some serious shortcomings in current technology, and a severe gap between technologists and non-technologists -- one which is incredibly difficult to communicate to technologists."
Personally I'm very aware of this gap, but I've never yet been convinced by the "serious shortcomings in current technology" part, except in a strictly commercial sense. Can you expand or provide references that might convince me?
Probably not, but I don't mind trying. Most of this is based off of my experiences with my various clients; I haven't kept anything better than mental notes, so this is also all off the top of my head.
First, let's have a unification of user interfaces. As it stands right now, novices find it incredibly challenging to tell when to left click, when to right click, when to click once, and when to double-click. They can't tell the difference between their "desktop" and their "web browser", and if you step back and think about it for a moment, it doesn't make any sense that they should have to.
I would also like to see the notion of everything in a computer being a metaphor for something in real life come to a blessed end. There's no reason that computers need to have a "desktop", and "files" and "folders" don't make much sense to novice users. Most of them are totally incapable of organizing their information in a useful way, and inconsistencies with file save and open dialogs don't help this. I often hear from people who just need help finding the file that they know they saved, but can't find on their computer. I've also had to reconcile vast hierarchies of folders for users that had been saving different versions of the same file to different locations.
I would like to see a new internet-distributed file system, where data is separated into regular chunks, and then those chunks are saved in multiple locations around the internet in a fast rootless node structure. Public chunks are unencrypted; private chunks are encrypted. To access all of your information from anywhere in the world, you simply sign in to a portal from any computer; your login decrypts a small chunk file which contains encrypted references to all the rest of your data. This would make the very idea of a "backup" completely obsolete and would solve data portability and storage issues for anyone with a broadband internet connection. It would also -- at least for a while -- completely halt viruses and malware.
I want to see consumer devices become more upgradeable and more modular. At least once a week I have to explain to a customer that their entire motherboard (or, often, laptop) needs to be expensively replaced, because the DC circuit failed, or a graphics chip overheated (thankyouverymuch HP).
I think there needs to be a serious effort to upgrade the communications infrastructure in the U.S.; I'm aware of the challenges presented by the geography in this country and current and past building practices. However, much of this build-out has already been paid for [1]. Instead, customers find themselves having to call tech support every time they think their email has stopped working, only to be told that their computer is currently in the process of downloading a 10MB attachment from someone.
I believe that there needs to be a much greater importance placed on performance in software. I think that the current commonly-accepted principles in software development -- ship early, ship often, and hardware is cheap so don't spend too much time making it fast or small -- is wrong-headed, and I think that's obvious to anyone who actually interacts with their customers on a regular basis. The fact that products like McAfee and Norton can have such massive impacts on system performance that the customer is left wondering what died and went to hell in their computer is a problem that needs to be addressed.
This is just for starters. I could go on like this for a long time. I think that all new construction should be wired up for gigabit, right alongside phone & power; I'd like to see cars with upgradeable powerplants; etc.
It's not that I think that current technology isn't improving, or that it's bad necessarily, but I do think there are many problems that it presents that its developers really aren't even aware of, or that they care to address. We keep getting more and more time sinks in the form of shiny new "social" networks where less and less of substance is shared in each iteration, while basic principles of design and infrastructure continue to languish in the shadows.
For the truly hardcore avid readers I know, their initial scepticism about e-Ink readers is overcome once they try it out and realise that the decrease in the romanticism of the experience is outweighed by the fact that they can take their entire bookshelf away on holiday with them.
For real readers, who get through a novel every day or two, the sheer mass of paper books is an annoying encumbrance.
I assume this was posted for folks to read and say "Look at the fool! Look how wrong he was!"
I find it much more interesting to find the parts in his essay that were true both then and now, for those are the parts where he stands the greatest chance of making a useful observation.
Reading it in this fashion, it looks as though we continue to confuse data for knowledge, images for experiences, and typing for human interaction. Not a lot of news there, but interesting nonetheless.
FWIW, though a lot of the details were wrong and changed over time, I’ve got to agree with his unhappiness about the oozing optimism of the time. A couple of examples he brought up:
* e-readers are still relatively new, and have not (yet) changed the publishing industry. That a screen can replace the printed page is still contested.[1] (Stoll: “At best, it's an unpleasant chore: the myopic glow of a clunky computer replaces the friendly pages of a book.” — I still hear things like this today.)
* The Internet has not yet revolutionized and re-democratized the government. (During the whole Google Fiber hub-bub, I heard many an optimist bring up this idea in my community.) Hell, in the United States, up to 25% of the population does not use the Internet.[2]
* I’m a self-driven learner but I don’t think I ever learned anything of practical application via an online course or a multimedia-driven online museum. Learning information is one thing, but I still think it’s hard to replicate the experience of in-person discourse and interaction. Just a personal observation.
Discounting a medium entirely is likely a poor choice since media (as in “formats for communication”) tend to last a very, very long time. All of the science fiction hopes and dreams tacked onto the medium? Not so much. These things take time, and Stoll was at least spot-on calling out things that were at best disappointing about the Internet in the 90’s.
I can believe that he couldn't find out the date of the Battle of Trafalgar back in 1995. I was curious to see how hard (or how easy) it is today.
First I went to Wolfram Alpha and entered "when was the battle of trafalgar?" The response was "21-10-1805" (plus some other information about that date).
Then I went to Wikipedia and entered "Battle of Trafalgar" to find the eponymous article, which begins: "The Battle of Trafalgar (21 October 1805) was a sea battle fought between..."
When I Google "When was the Battle of Trafalgar?" the Wikipedia article is the top result.
So answering that particular question is indeed much easier today, if you know where to look.
This is really another on the list of technological fixes that the author didn't forsee - search technology has improved massively since 1995. The data was likely out there - it's just it was hard to find.
We shouldn't be too critical, the following quote was probably true back then.
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 connectios, try again later."
I remember reading this article in 1995, in its context. And remember long discussion on mailing lists on this article. All these problems were real at that time. We overlooked most, because we were working to fix those. This article worked as a reminder of current situation at the time.
Back then I took it more as the author's expression of frustration than as prediction.
Your local cornershop does more business selling milk, cereal and cans than many non-internet non-startups. So I'm not sure how meaningful your point is.
What's really amazing is how right he was about how much was wrong at the time. The thing he missed is that a lot of those problems could be solved (and many have since been). But I think he can be forgiven for that. The people who had the insight to deliver solutions to those problems are mostly very rich now.
Who else would have agreed with him at the time of writing?
This is gold: it reads as if it were written today to troll us. It's almost freaky how nearly all of points have manifested, and some have even forced the obsolescence of their alternatives. I haven't purchased a ticket at an airline counter in many years; I'm not even sure if it's still legal :) I feel like I'm a holdout on the newspaper, but although I buy one almost daily, I still find that I get the majority of my news from online sources. The last time I visited a library it was to charge my blackberry so I could make a call.
It's probably possible to buy a ticket at the counter—though I wouldn't try paying cash—but what's definitely extinct are paper tickets. Since about 2004, it's all e-tickets.
IMHO, the Internet revolution only began with the web around 1995. The web (http) is the marvel we see today (Facebook, Gmail, Hacker News, etc). By the end of 1994, the total number of websites was still minute compared to present standards and Netscape was only founded in 1994. If the web didn't take off, the author probably would have been right!
Partly, we've learned to deal with it. The tools for searching for stuff we want have gotten better, and the amount of good content has improved, but we've also learned not to be surprised when our searches show up completely irrelevant junk.
Though most fads are not trends and most trends are not fads, there are the occasional instances like the Internet circa 1995 that are both fads and trends. The fallacy of youth is to treat all fads as trends; the fallacy of age is to ignore all trends as fads.
I knew a few people who thought that the internet was merely a fad, right up until around 2001. After that time it was clear even to the most hardened sceptic that the internet was here to stay.
At first I was going to mock this author, but then I realized this is one of those articles that needs to be analyzed one level further than just a cursory (mocking) glance. This is something you should read and always remember when you yourself are telling someone that something is impossible.
I was telling a friend that streaming video games would never be possible due to the inherent latency involved, but then onlive came and proved me wrong.
It just goes to show you that you should always be an optimist when it comes to predicting technology.
I think people saw this in 1995 and thought “what an idiot” and I think people are doing the same thing now. But in my opinion that’s a mistake.
What we should be seeing is that his points were valid in 1995 and are still valid today (except for the Cyber-business one which really was pretty dumb). The internet is still an unedited mess where answers are hard to find (if they aren’t on Wikipedia), people still don’t pay attention to government based internet initiatives (outside of SF) and classrooms have computers but generally don’t use them for anything but games.
That’s a sad commentary on our technological advancement.
If people had paid attention in 1995 we might have a Semantic Web by now, we might have forced porn sites and proxies into their own domain so kids could use the internet in the classrooms, we might have forced colleges to include “interactive digital design” into their curriculum for teachers and we might have an internet based government as opposed to a government that mindlessly throws datasets up that no one pays attention to.
So in my opinion the last thing we should be doing is writing this piece off as silly
I thought I would reply to your comment rather than just downvoting you.
How would forcing porn sites and proxies into their own domain make it any easier (or safer, for that matter) for kids to use the Internet in classrooms? If this is even technically possible, which I assure you, it is not, why should such things have to be legislated at all? Internet censorship and regulation does nothing to hurt and inevitably harms the free flow of information.
The piece is silly. Advocating that a highly censored Internet would have contributed to a Semantic web is silly as well.
We laugh now only because we witnessed first-hand the very fast innovation that happened in 15-odd years.
And who's to say that the semantic data from the beginning approach is the right one? Because we didn't have that, we got PageRank and Google: non-semantic data became a constraint leading to invention.
I agree that the piece is educational in some important ways. There are several criticisms he makes that are still valid, and we really should be taking this as a sign that we need to address these problems. But the part where I think "what an idiot" does reasonably come in is that he seems convinced that since the internet's problems were not already solved (and no solution was immediately obvious) that they never would be.
The easy example would be his dismissal of ebusiness. But more interestingly, he observes "Lacking editors, reviewers or critics, the Internet has become a wasteland of unfiltered data". It is just as true today that underneath it all, the internet is a mess of disjointed and almost entirely useless data. But that's no reason to think it's hopeless. It's just a problem, and one that we have made huge advancements in dealing with. E.g. PageRank. It's now trivial to find the date of the Battle of Trafalgar.
My point being: he addresses a lot of serious problems with the internet. Many of them remain serious problems today. But it's clear that in a big-picture kind of way, he really did miss the point. And that point is that problems get solved, often in clever and unforseen ways. We shouldn't write the piece off as silly, but we should take it as a lesson in shortsightedness and drawing the wrong conclusions.
Scanning thru the comments here looks like there are two of us who think most of OP's points were and are valid.
I guess most of HN readers (including me!) are living in a comfort zone of carefully selected sites and services, but it doesn't change the fact that most of internet content is a pile of bullshit.
And of course, nothing can be a substitute of a human contact, and no, social networking is not a human contact.
So are the most of published books, despite the editorial work put into them. And as the internet democratized publishing, it's just natural that there is more crap out there. I see that as a very positive sign of true freedom of expression.
social networking is not a human contact
This is rather silly point of view. Why isn't anybody discussing how talking in the phone "is not a human contact"
? People discuss, joke, argue, meet their future spouses, cuddle with their current spouses, all this and more in the internet. Of course that's not a substitute for kisses on a romantic dinner or for a good fist-fight at the bar, but that doesn't make communication over the internet any way less valuable.
Human contact isn't black & white, and there are tons of small important non-verbal things not only in fist fight or romantic dinner. Actually even a smalltalk carries lots of information of deep psychological value which is mostly beyond words. All this is cut off when you use internet or do a phone talk. It doesn't mean you can't use these media to do business, joke, set things up, but dear gods, please be honest to yourself and observe how many things are cut off and lost.
If you do it you will be able to admit that actually internet communication IS less valuable in many ways, despite the fact how much you wouldn't want to think like this right now.
This argument only applies if you replace in-person communication with internet communication.
Most of my communication on social networks is with people that I would otherwise not communicate with because they are too far away.I see only gain there.
Yeah that's a gain; besides, that's what we do right now.
But! Please look around and check how many people prefer this kind of communication with distant people when in the same time they could communicate in a more valuable way with people around them. That's what I'm trying to condemn here.
Social networking can give a more lasting value if someone is consciously treating it as a kind of trampoline to reach those people IRL finally. Which is huh 0.0042% of social networking usage?
Until internet access is a basic right of citizenship, and all citizens know how to use it, it will never become the basis for major government interaction.
If people had paid attention in 1995 we might have a Semantic Web by now, we might have forced porn sites and proxies into their own domain so kids could use the internet in the classrooms,
Or we might have tried teaching kids that information is not something to be frightened of, but that would be absurd, I suppose.
I would hire Clifford Stoll as a consultant - when he says "There is no future in this idea" I will put all my efforts behind it. He had 100% of his guesses wrong.
I've seen this article before and it always makes me queasy. I always get to this line "I've met great people and even caught a hacker or two." and have to go throw up.
OH! Neither did I. Thanks. Now don't I look stupid. In my defense the author isn't listed anywhere but the title tag. Which I didn't see. I've always thought it was just written by some jerk.
"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"
Assuming the author really is Stoll, major props to him for admitting he got it wrong.
Source: http://www.boingboing.net/2010/02/26/curmudgeony-essay-on.ht...