Why the Web Won't Be Nirvana (1995)(newsweek.com) |
Why the Web Won't Be Nirvana (1995)(newsweek.com) |
> 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 cacophony more closely resembles citizens band radio, complete with handles, harrassment, and anonymous threats. When most everyone shouts, few listen.
> 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 obsolete. So how come my local mall does more business in an afternoon than the entire Internet handles in a month?
> 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.
He clearly saw the wider limits of technology in relation to society. Liquid and online democracy has failed, we are in an age of autocrats that have weaponized online propaganda and misinformation to directly reach their voters. The freedom of the press increased online but it's quality dropped markedly, the cacophony effect is real. Alienation and engineering addiction are the name of the game for tech giants and their bottom line. Online self teaching is great for adults, but a very poor substitute and at most a complement to competent teachers in schools.
Give society a little time to react, this has only been a talking point for one election so far.
Imagine you are in the mid 90' and you say to someone that in the next decade we will have a camera, a video camera, a radio, a music and video player, a voice recorder and much more in just one pocket. Saying it like this make it look insane.
On the other hand psychological and social aspects are linked to our brains that didn't change much in the course of the human recorded history.
An iPhone would have been strikingly impressive in 1995, but few people would have difficulty grasping what it was, or that there might be a demand for it, especially not if they already possessed a Walkman and mobile phone, thought their next camera might be a digital one and had considered buying a PDA
In fact the reason people were predicting great things for future tech and the internet (which the author of this article is arguing against) is because it was technology already emerging - not some imaginary theoretical stuff.
Ok, the pace of change and the specifics (smart phones with high speed internet, eink displays, etc) might still have taken people by surprise, but the rest isn't that shocking. I mean back in the mid 90s I was building 3D websites in VRML and just assumed by the 2010s all sites would have a rich, communal, skeuomorphism interface. Clear I was wrong on some parts (thankfully) but not that far off the mark.
So the signs were already there but the author was too busy trying to imagine those predictions being utilised with then current technology. You could argue that is a failure of imagination on his part but I'm tempted to go further and say it was down right ignorant. He's clearly techy enough to understand the then current tech better than most yet failed to notice the emerging technologies. And he clearly witnessed the evolution of technology for the 10 years leading up to the 90s yet assumed hardware would suddenly just stagnate at that point. That was his biggest mistakes and ultimately why his predictions were so out of sync with what many others had predicted (yhise if whom did see the change happening and the future potential they had).
To be honest though, I do wonder how much of his comments where based on his own comfort zone and not liking a the thought of a digital future so allowed his own prejudices to bias his vision of the future.
The idea that there would be continuing improvements and decreases in size was taken for granted.
Mind you, the improvements in mobile performance, screen performance and cameras weren't all put together.
I feel this is most evident on Twitter. I see it in the indie gamedev scene: everyone trying to advertise their upcoming game or steam sale, trying to build an audience, but no one listening to anyone else's.
Another aspect being sold (implicitly or explicitly) is the democracy of the platform: anyone (commonfolk) can talk to anyone else (celebrities, CEOs), but the fact it's possible works against itself. There's so many voices no one really gets heard except a handful.
When I was a kid in the 90s news and information was curated. If you read an opinion in the paper it was some guy who'd been writing for a long time, who'd done the background reading, and who normally presented things in a balanced way, whatever his leaning was. Nowadays you can find just about any extreme view, badly written in an aggressive or sarcastic tone, and ignorant of the history of the topic. It's not necessarily good to always have the sober and historically informed opinion, but it sure would be good to have it most of the time.
Not sure if he mentioned this, but it's also gotten a lot easier to find like minded uninformed people. I'm still undecided about whether flat earthers are all kidding, but if they aren't you can see how hard it's going to be to climb out of that intellectual hole. There's now conferences and loads of websites about the Bedford Level experiment, and all sorts of other flat earth tropes.
On reddit this somehow doesn't happen. Every comment stands on its own and half the time what looks like a threaded conversation is various different users replying to each other.
I think something very important is lost there. Much as I'd like to believe so, I think the way my brain works is that no comment stands on its own and communication is heavily mediated by the knowledge and reputation of the other in relation to myself. Without that, so much that is valuable in the exchange of information, whether facts or opionion, or nuance, is lost.
His name is Clifford Stoll and he was a physicist and early Internet user. He wrote the book "The Cuckoo's Egg" which should be required reading for all sys-admins.
In the mid-90s, he saw the Internet as something akin to Fahrenheit 451 and began preaching how it would tear us apart as a society. To that end, he wrote Silicon Snake Oil and articles like this one, which combines philosophy and cultural observations (the mob mentality of the crowd) with nonsensical conclusions based on the current technology (ie that online shopping would never be a big thing). I was never sure if he genuinely believed that it wasn't possible, or if he was merely trying to make the web less appealing somehow to prevent it from happening.
Years later he started to sell Klein Bottles on his website. I'm not sure if he still does, but in the year 2000, you could order them from him and he'd take your order over the phone. I ordered a few and it was fun to talk to him.
From a miniature robotic warehouse under his house, no less:
https://techcrunch.com/2015/06/23/how-clifford-stoll-sells-k...
Beautiful example of article where the author was skeptical based on the wild west of the current state of technology. What current technology is the same? VR? Self driving cars?
Still, a good lesson: It remains too easy to miss the forest for the trees. We never wanted salesmen or paper, what we actually wanted were products and information. In other words, it's easy to forget that the technology is not the product, just a vehicle for it.
It's quite hard to know who to listen to, and who is telling something objectively true in this environment, since everyone's voice has the same weight. And there are too many of them to sift through, so many probably end up listening to people who pander to them.
What changed is the peddlers and powerful fools have bigger audiences now. There's less space for the niche con artist because all the marks are in someone's downline throwing all their money and credit at a lost cause.
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.
I have spent the last 7 years and nearly $1 million dollars building such a platform. It’s free and open source but we have yet to make the marketing for it. It needs to be clear how to get started with it, and a community needs to grow. Going to release it later this year. Maybe Nov 5th?
Compare this to Mastodon--which you dismissed with all other open source social networks--where the project lead thinks hard and openly about the accessibility and value of virtually every UX change.
Where is Mastodon today? What are its stats?
Also, the fact that there's a typo directly above the phrase "Lacking editors, reviewers or critics" made me chuckle.
It requires quite a lot of work though, and unlike the web, it probably can’t be done by one person in a basement. Which I think is important to it’s impact, because google probably wouldn’t have existed if it couldn’t have started small and gradually build its way up.
This may be why VR hasn't taken off yet. If it requires a lot of resources to create an experience using it, then you've limited the number of new ideas that can be built/tested.
Maybe it'll do better when more frameworks and engines for VR applications are a thing, and building one is as easy as making a website or mobile app is today.
Draw your own conclusions I guess.
>So how come my local mall does more business in an afternoon than the entire Internet handles in a month?
IOW, “It hasn’t displaced some other market already, so it never will.” It’s only a few steps away from “it has the volatility associated with being a small market, so it’s inherently flawed”.
With that said, I’m skeptical about whether it will find any large scale use myself, but it’s unfair to criticize it for the above reason.
In terms of reading, I guess in time the very thin screens that can be rolled up will hit the market.
In the meantime, I don't see any reason why we can't see arcade venues bounce back, with dedicated VR rooms using powerful projections rather than headsets.
I know I'd prefer a room with 360 VR projection done well, moving platform or chair to simulate driving, flying etc, and surround sound with huge cinematic range, than a headset with headphones.
The other issue with headsets is when sharing them, particularly public ones. There's a certain hygiene factor, if you know what I mean!
At least HTC Vive and PlayStation VR (if you are a console player) additionally come to my mind.
Out of the last few presidents one especially comes to mind when thinking about profiteers of misinformation.
I can also shop instantly all over the world, I do pay a tax to the bank for this, but it’s currently a lot cheaper than paying for most crypto transactions.
I guess with crypto, I would be free of the banking tyranny, but I actually rather like the security that comes with centralized banking.
The internet on the other hand changed the world. It made it possible for me to browse your product catalog, buy and pay for your products, almost instantly, even though you live in another part of the world.
Crypto never really had that, it wanted to uproot existing systems for political reasons, but the technology by itself, has frankly always been somewhat obsolete.
The internet was hard to predict because it was new, a currency isn’t exactly a new thing. Hell, blockchain isn’t even the first attempt at a decentralized currency.
Of course there are other arguments. I even suggested I agreed with that one. I was just pointing out one kind of fallacy, of using current low adoption as evidence of a fundamental flaw.
Latest Firefox and Windows 10.
>> "Where is Mastodon today? What are its stats?"
This is the wrong question before you ask about the goals of the platform and its users. Stats only let you compare it against something it might have no interest in being.
Your dismissal of it and other open source efforts is likely due to a goal mismatch. The fact that you spent so much money on it tells me you're probably aiming at a Twitter competitor.
I don't care about Twitter and its goals. I care about what Mastodon is and what I already do with it. It's self-funding and community supported. There are plenty of people on it, and it's still growing. It seems like someone's making a new thing with ActivityPub every month that I can interact with from my Mastodon account. That's all that matters to me, and seems to be enough for most of the people on it.
What we built is a GENERAL PURPOSE OPEN SOURCE SOCIAL APP PLATFORM.
Like Wordpress but for collaboration.
The goal is total reusability. You release an app for your community and install some plugins for various functionality. Then you throw some “tools” on “pages”. Apply styles. And you’re done. Your app works on the web on every device, can be released in app stores, integrates with notifications, contacts, etc. out of the box.
What sort of “tools” can you have in your apps? Well here is just a sample:
Chatroom
Chess game
Collaborative documents
Blogging
Group rides
Events and checkins
Role based access control integrated with contacts
Invites
Realtime updates
Offline notifications
Relations and indexing
And more. We provide a standard interface for people to basically collaborate with one another, and do it across domains too. Meanwhile developers can add new types of “streams” and “tools” for app developers and also startups can package and sell various apps to communities. Everyone can re-use code. Did you see the video?
No one's investing or expecting a return on a million dollars in investment with it. It's already a W3C standard. One popular piece of software (which you dismissed) supports it. Other promising attempts like Plume (blogging), Pixelfed (image sharing), and Aardwolf (Facebook-like) are in development. They're already revenue neutral (or better) from the Patreons and Liberapays that provide their funding.
From that perspective, your thing is just another closed-off ecosystem that doesn't talk to any other. Open source is not sufficient when we're talking about social media software. My new social graph is growing, and it's not dependent on someone expecting an ROI.
I understand you started this project before ActivityPub was a thing, and before anyone took federated social media seriously. But that's the hazard with starting early: sometimes something comes along and forces you to change how you think.
You missed the boat, and you don't realize it because you're busy building a yacht that holds smaller yachts. It's a nice yacht, but I like the growing network of party barges I'm on.
oAuth was pioneered by Twitter and took off BECAUSE they had clout. I have seen FOAF, Personas and tons of other things fall by the wayside without adoption.
No matter how popular your protocol gets, it's still your protocol. I have no interest in it. I can go back to Twitter if I want to have my social connections locked into someone else's platform.
I have been burned by enough companies that play up open source and development ecosystems, then close up when it's no longer convenient. Your own example of Twitter was built on developers making tools for it. Who makes apps for Twitter now but marketing companies? Virtually no one.
Wordpress is used by 1/3 of all websites in the world.
Our thing is like Wordpress not Twitter.
So while it doesn’t currently support the latest protocol du jour (XMPP? FriendFeed? FOAF? ActivityPub? PubSubHubbub? Scuttlebutt?) it actually WORKS and people can use it to actually build apps today that are on par with what they get in Facebook.
Like I said if all we wanted was to have a microblog we would be done very soon. As it is that is 1% of the functionality you need for realtime collaboration, offline notifications etc.
You go make your thing. I'll keep enjoying the platform I'm on.
I guess I don’t understand your point ultimately. Just because YOU like something specific for your needs doesn’t mean there isn’t a large opportunity for something that addresses a totally different need.