This shows how hard it is to be right about the future:
Visionaries see a future of telecommuting workers, interactive libraries and multimedia classrooms. They speak of electronic town meetings and virtual communities. Commerce and business will shift from offices and malls to networks and modems. And the freedom of digital networks will make government more democratic. Baloney.
Most of those came true.
You don't know what to ignore and what's worth reading. 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."
And yet.. the substance of it is so true. When everyone has a voice, it's hard to know what to listen to. Merit tends to rise, but so does misinformation. The weirdest part is, misinformation != lying. Most people spreading misinformation genuinely believe it.
Stripe's founder mentioned that the internet is probably going to trend back toward "dinner party" type apps rather than "town square" type apps: lacking editors, people you know tend to be a reliable source of information. It's also possible to express yourself without fearing criticism. I wonder what the next 30 years will be like.
It's interesting that he wrote this as a user of the internet for 2 decades in 1995. So between 1975 and 1995, the pace of change was just not that great. Then between say, 1995 and 2015, a lot changed indeed. Faster connections, ubiquitous wireless internet, e-readers, fast laptops, smart phones, e-commerce explosion, video portals and streaming, social media, etc.
It feels to me the pace of change has slowed though. Maybe that's the way innovation goes. Sometimes in big bursts but mostly incremental.
I agree that small group conversations are probably the next wave of social media, because you need that circle of trust to be fully expressive.
If I had to guess, I would say we will perfect VR over the next couple decades and that we will replicate some of the brick and mortar experiences that way, but it will still not ever quite replace in person interaction. There's always going to be that uncanny valley between the cyber world and the real world.
The "web" generally refers to http/html which were extremely new in 1995, much newer than generic tcp/ip networking. The first netscape navigator was released in 1994!
I agree. I remember hearing Clifford Stoll interviewed on the radio around 1995 and reading reviews of his book "Silicon Snake Oil," which was published the same year, and thinking that he was obviously wrong. It was just such a game-changer for me to be able to sit in my home in Tokyo, and, through a dial-up modem, get information I needed from throughout the world—information that otherwise would have required a trip to a major library or bookstore, if it was even available there. And to be able to find people interested in chatting about topics that no one else in Japan would have cared about. The Internet was clearly the future.
Cliff's viewpoint was definitely contrarian, but on the other hand many people thought that the internet would be a kind of utopia - either full of rational speech leading to better decision-making in the real world, or even a separate independent "nation" that governments could never control. Neither of those turned out to be fully true either.
When the internet was handles you could say anything and rarely worry it would follow you back in life. Now people use real names on social media.. which makes it about defining what imagine I want to be.
For some reason the myth that in the old days of the internet people used "handles" or nicknames and not real identities crops up here all the time. I can only assume people making the claim weren't on the internet in the 20th century and/or were on AOL.
On the Facebook of the 1990s, Usenet, people routinely posted with their real name/identity and real email address, and message headers showed each server the post passed through from its origin, the IP address of the poster (which could and did result in doxxing) and often an "abuse@ISP" email address to complain about the post/poster.
True, but that was for convenience, not because we thought we needed to have a "real identity". (IP addresses were later, ISPs were much later, but yes, UUCP hops were recorded. FWIW, my UUCP paths ended in something close to my legal name.)
Remember some of early Usenet, I wouldn't be surprised if some people had taken advantage of Californian naming laws (at the time, one could use almost any name one wanted, as long as it was consistent and not intended for fraud) to make their legal name more consistent with their online handle.
Mark V. Shaney is an example of a user who was not using their real name/identity (nor even had one).
Quaxity quuxity,
Teitelman's InterLISP
Has a DWIM feature that's
Really a screw;
MacLISP has evident
Superiority,
Letting its customer
Mean what he do.
As a teenager at the time it was impressed on us how important it was to not use our real name on the internet. I didn't use my real name for anything on the internet for at least 10 years after I started using it.
University logins were handles (usually close to "real", but not tied) in my time. I firmly believe the whole real identity thing has always been driven by advertising considerations.
(Our undergrad computing lab had donated CAD workstations, so someone came up with a graphical display of the room, showing who was logged in where. The TA was displeased with me after figuring out that I had set my avatar to the "unoccupied" graphic. IIRC, he added a square outline for logged-in workstations to the display, around the same time.)
> Stripe's founder mentioned that the internet is probably going to trend back toward "dinner party" type apps rather than "town square" type apps
Isn't that already happening in the last five years, with more and more people abandoning "public" social networks and spending much more time in private friend chat groups?
> This shows how hard it is to be right about the future
Back in 1995 I remember I was very skeptical about what was then called radio modems. I thought that radio wasn't reliable and that Ethernet cables were there to stay forever. I didn't see laptops (let alone smartphones much later) becoming a thing. Though funny thing is, today in 2020, my laptop is connected via Ethernet at home. WiFi interference and congestion can at times become unbearable in a typical residential apartment block. You don't even know who or what creates interference so I was kind of right back then, but also terribly wrong in the long run.
I missed the practical aspect of radio communication within a short range, and I missed the trend that computing devices will get smaller and more portable over time. We thought at the time that computers will get more powerful but the size factor and the "desktopness" won't change.
The lesson for me is: don't try to predict the future of technologies. You can't just take a trend and extrapolate into the future: trends make unexpected turns and jumps all the time. This seems to be the only thing that's reliably predictable: that sudden turns and breakthroughs happen all the time and that each turn and breakthrough discovers some new practical aspect of a technology that was impossible to see in advance.
Without criticism how can there be improvement? Criticism isn't a bad thing. Criticism leads to self reflection which leads to self improvement. At least it should.
Personally, I'd rather listen to 1 person criticize me than 10 people who praise me. That 1 critical person's going to have the most valuable thing to say that leads to improvement.
To an extent, note I'm talking about reasonable criticism, not assholes.
I agree with you, except that I like criticism when it challenges my thoughts and gets me to improve. On the internet you're at risk of losing your job over things you said 10 years ago, or getting death threats from random strangers. Criticism is great when it's well thought out and well intended. When it's an opinion someone formed seconds ago based on an image or a news headline or an image of a news headline, there's probably nuance that they're missing and their angry response just makes things worse
> Stripe's founder mentioned that the internet is probably going to trend back toward "dinner party" type apps rather than "town square" type apps
I've always been more inclined towards dinner party type experiences, but no one in my social circle has agreed. They all prefer the town square.
One of my best app experiences to date was with Snapchat, when it first became popular. Several of my friends started using it, and it became a way to share funny or interesting things we saw in our day to day. If I saw something that I thought Dave and Jess would find interesting, I'd just send it to those two. Because it was so ephemeral, it was great for small things -- the sort of things it wouldn't be worth creating a group chat for. It was the equivalent of walking down the street with a small group of friends, pointing at something you noticed, and saying "check that out".
Eventually, both Instagram and Snapchat started pushing the story format, and seemingly overnight the experience turned from a dinner party into a town square. No one was sharing with small groups of friends anymore. When you add to your story, it's for everyone to see. I never understood why my friends saw that as a replacement for what we had before. I think perhaps, for most people, the desire to be heard and noticed by a crowd outweighs any benefits that sharing with a smaller group might bring.
> When everyone has a voice, it's hard to know what to listen to. ... The weirdest part is, misinformation != lying. Most people spreading misinformation genuinely believe it.
Mostly agreed. There also many times when people should look at what they just wrote and say, "maybe I don't know enough about the topic to publish about it."
To choose a non-controversial topic: I have recently found the time to explore programming for microcontrollers. So much of the information that I come across is a simple rehash, to the point where it is clear that people are writing about their own experiences as soon as they learn about it. There is no depth of knowledge, which is problematic when the accuracy of information depends upon the details.
The problem of figuring out who to listen too usually comes down to figuring out who to filter out. In some cases it may be easy to do because the tone or content indicates the scope and accuracy of their knowledge. Unfortunately, it is a time consuming process since you have to hear what they are saying before you can decide whether they are worth listening to.
Can I ask, since I am curious, why misinformation != lying?
To me, I have always found that the statement "truths are the best lies" is very correct.
To me, you can tell a little bit of truth, and leave a large amount of true information unsaid. However, that does not mean that the whole encompassing "truth" - whatever you end up expressing in the listener's mind as a whole - is true. This is not about whether they believe, but how they perceive. Whether the listener believes is another story.
Is there some kind of curated newsletter that sends out articles that are 20+ years old when predictions that they made are relevant? I'd love to read stuff like this regularly.
It's easy to dunk on Cliff Stoll for this, but a lot of the stuff that he was wrong about didn't really get PROPERLY solved until almost 20 years later!
The World Wide Web as we think of it today (browsers accessing websites over HTTP) was still nascent.
SSL was only just announced 1 year earlier.
The first Kindle wouldn't show up until 12 years after.
And until the COVID pandemic most of the world still would have thought we weren't ready to effectively telecommunicate for work full time. (Arguably a lot of us still think that it's not sustainable long-term)
Meanwhile, the late 90's were full of big dreams and exceedingly high expectations about what the Internet could be capable of, and the gap between expectations and reality is what contributed to the .com crash of the early 2000's
Meanwhile, meanwhile, on a key subject which is the nature of TRUST of information on the Internet, we've come full circle as the last 4 years have shown that more access to better information does not guarantee a better informed populace if powerful forces with an interest in manipulating others have access to powerful platforms like Facebook where they can target their misinformation to the most radicalizable group.
I would bet most people on this forum would not be able to predict accurately the next 25 years of technological progress, and if we tried, most of us would look as ridiculous as Cliff Stoll. His mistake was saying everything with as much certainty as he did.
Interesting how in the middle of the 80's they were still talking about malls as something novel :)
Malls made town centers decay, sometimes even disappear. Towns definitely lost their uniqueness as pretty much every mall is the same.
I love the internet and how it allows anyone to do almost anything without leaving home... but at the same time, I hope that spaces where people go to physically interact do not ever disappear (at least while we're confined to a physical, biological body, that is).
"When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably 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."
> Yet Nicholas Negroponte, director of the MIT Media Lab, predicts that we'll soon buy books and newspapers straight over the Intenet. Uh, sure.
Oops.
> Then there are those pushing computers into schools. We're told that multimedia will make schoolwork easy and fun. Students will happily learn from animated characters while taught by expertly tailored software.Who needs teachers when you've got computer-aided education? Bah. These expensive toys are difficult to use in classrooms and require extensive teacher training.
>> These expensive toys are difficult to use in classrooms and require extensive teacher training.
> Also oops.
As far as I know, the use of computers in the classroom is still an unsolved problem let alone all teachers knowing how to do it.
>> Students will happily learn from animated characters while taught by expertly tailored software.
And thus there is no problem in closing schools for months because of COVID-19? Watching recorded lectures and filling in multiple-choice forms does not cut it.
There is a hockey substitution going on in education (in the Us) this year where many teachers are leaving. The change is being driven by two factors: fear of getting coronavirus and discomfort with teaching via internet. My wife changed jobs and got a raise as a result.
His mistake was in criticizing reading books online, shopping, libraries, and classrooms as if they would forever use the technology of 1995.
He did not have the vision to understand that technology would progress ... for example, beyond the lame experience of reading a book on a giant CRT monitor into a magical experience where I can read any book ever published, instantly, and in the dark next to my wife while she sleeps.
Reading an article from 1995 with its original typos and all. Its funny reading someone criticising the lack of proper editing when there are a couple obvious misspellings by the author.
Mark my words, in 6 months, I too, will repost this classic article and get those sweet sweet HN points.
As a bonus I will also post:
"No wireless, less space than a nomad. Lame" article
Visionaries see a future of telecommuting workers, interactive libraries and multimedia classrooms. They speak of electronic town meetings and virtual communities. Commerce and business will shift from offices and malls to networks and modems. And the freedom of digital networks will make government more democratic. Baloney.
Most of those came true.
You don't know what to ignore and what's worth reading. 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."
https://imgur.com/0T2fBEv
And yet.. the substance of it is so true. When everyone has a voice, it's hard to know what to listen to. Merit tends to rise, but so does misinformation. The weirdest part is, misinformation != lying. Most people spreading misinformation genuinely believe it.
Stripe's founder mentioned that the internet is probably going to trend back toward "dinner party" type apps rather than "town square" type apps: lacking editors, people you know tend to be a reliable source of information. It's also possible to express yourself without fearing criticism. I wonder what the next 30 years will be like.