Re In 1995, this astronomer predicted the Internet's greatest failure

["Dave Farber" <dave () farber net>]

---------- Forwarded message ---------
From: Andy Oram <andyo () oreilly com>
Date: Wed, Jul 26, 2017 at 8:10 PM
Subject: Re: [IP] In 1995, this astronomer predicted the Internet's
greatest failure
To: Dave Farber <dave () farber net>


If people are looking for earlier predictions about the course of our lives
under networking, they might be interested in this frequently circulated
story that I wrote back in 1999:

http://praxagora.com/andyo/wr/ghost.html
The Ghosts of Internet Time

It did not prefigure the fake news of today, and I don't claim to be the
networking expert Stoll was, but a lot of the piece still seems to
resonate. Volunteers routinely translate it for me--there are about 10
translations so far.

Andy

Andy Oram  |  Editor
O'Reilly Media, Inc.  |  617-499-7479 |  oreilly.com

[image: oreilly_email_logo.png] <http://oreilly.com/>



On Sat, Jul 22, 2017 at 10:11 AM, Dave Farber <farber () gmail com> wrote:

> Begin forwarded message:
>
> *From:* Dewayne Hendricks <dewayne () warpspeed com>
> *Date:* July 22, 2017 at 9:07:24 AM EDT
> *To:* Multiple recipients of Dewayne-Net <dewayne-net () warpspeed com>
> *Subject:* *[Dewayne-Net] In 1995, this astronomer predicted the
> Internet's greatest failure*
> *Reply-To:* dewayne-net () warpspeed com
>
> In 1995, this astronomer predicted the Internet’s greatest failure
> And, of course, we trolled him for it for decades.
> By Rob Howard
> Jul 18 2017
> <
> https://medium.com/the-mission/in-1995-this-astronomer-predicted-the-internets-greatest-failure-68a1c3927e46
> >
>
> Twenty-two years ago, astronomer Clifford Stoll made a huge mistake.He
> challenged the popular notion that the Internet was a force for good, and
> he was ruthlessly mocked by just about everyone.
>
> On the surface, you can see why his 1995 Newsweek column has been maligned
> for decades. Some of the problems he presented — like the challenge of
> taking secure online payments in a world before PayPal, and irrelevant
> search results before the days of Google — have been solved, or at the very
> least we’ve grown accustomed to their remaining flaws. That made his
> article easy fodder for mockery by technology columnists every time an
> anniversary rolled around.
>
> The problem for the people who chose to troll Stoll, however, is that a
> lot of his predictions and criticisms of the web were spot on. Read this
> quote from 1995, and tell me it couldn’t be written (and praised) today:
>
> “Your word gets out, leapfrogging editors and publishers. Every voice can
> be heard cheaply and instantly. The result? Every voice is heard. The
> cacophony more closely resembles citizens band radio, complete with
> handles, harassment, and anonymous threats. When most everyone shouts, few
> listen.”
> This was written in reference to Usenet, an early Internet message board,
> but could apply to Twitter, Reddit, and countless other social platforms
> today without changing a single character. A few months ago, Ev Williams,
> the founder of Medium and co-founder of Twitter, said almost the exact same
> thing:
>
> “I thought once everybody could speak freely and exchange information and
> ideas, the world is automatically going to be a better place. I was wrong
> about that.”
> In the same article, Williams told The New York Times: “The Internet is
> broken.” If only someone had seen this coming.
>
> As a scientist, Stoll had been using forms of the Internet since its
> inception in the ’70s. He wasn’t off-base in calling it a “wasteland of
> unfiltered data.” He was 20 years ahead of his time.
>
> For all the progress and quality-of-life improvements we’ve seen with the
> rise of Internet-enabled technology, the Achilles’ heel is that we’re now
> universally plagued by information overload. That’s made us more anxious,
> more angry, more ideologically divided, and more confused about reality
> than ever before. Stoll dismisses the notion that “the freedom of digital
> networks will make government more democratic,” realizing that unfiltered,
> unlimited information leads not to a more knowledgeable and thoughtful
> populace, but to a cultural addiction to non-stop digital stimulation.
>
> [snip]
>
> Dewayne-Net RSS Feed: <http://dewaynenet.wordpress.com/feed/>
>
>
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