The internet is going to fail

NYSpeed Automotive NYSpeed Off Topic
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from newsweek:

by Clifford Stoll

       After two decades online, I'm perplexed. It's not that I  haven't had a gas of a good time on the Internet. I've met great people  and even caught a hacker or two. But today, I'm uneasy about this most  trendy and oversold community. 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. Do our computer pundits lack all common sense? 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.

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. When most everyone shouts, few listen. 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.

What the Internet hucksters won’t tell you is tht the Internet is one big ocean of unedited data, without any pretense of completeness. Lacking editors, reviewers or critics, the Internet has become a wasteland of unfiltered data. 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 connectios, try again later.”

Won’t the Internet be useful in governing? Internet addicts clamor for government reports. But when Andy Spano ran for county executive in Westchester County, N.Y., he put every press release and position paper onto a bulletin board. In that affluent county, with plenty of computer companies, how many voters logged in? Fewer than 30. Not a good omen.

Point and click:
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. Sure, kids love videogames–but think of your own experience: can you recall even one educational filmstrip of decades past? I’ll bet you remember the two or three great teachers who made a difference in your life.

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.

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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Personally I thought Super Solvers - Treasure MathStorm was an excellent learning experience.

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typo in the 4th paragraph about unedited data done on purpose?

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Feb 27, 1995 … The internet was already starting to make waves at that point. This is just some r-tard that didn’t want to be replaced by the blogger that newsweek hired the week before.

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this really isnt even worth putting effort into a discussion.

edit: just realized its from 95. this dude had spent 2 decades online and had that bad of an outlook? I was thinking while reading it “has this guy never heard of google?” apparently, he hadnt.

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yeah… here is the recent newsweek follow up article.

“What’s the most wrong you’ve ever been?” - by Nick Summers

Let’s Talk About the 1995 NEWSWEEK Piece That Says the Internet Will Fail
Nick Summers

What’s the most wrong you’ve ever been?

I mean really wrong. Not, like, getting-the-capital-of-Illinois wrong. Not predicting-the-Mets-to-win-the-World-Series wrong. I am talking wrong wrong, a realm of inaccuracy known not even by Columbus (when he thought he’d reached the Indies) or the guys who thought New Coke was a good idea.

What I’m saying is that there’s wrong … and then there’s Clifford Stoll’s NEWSWEEK essay about the Internet from 1995.
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Let’s get this over with. Here is a list of things Stoll calls “baloney” on—each and every one of which has a thriving utility in 2010:

* telecommuting
* interactive libraries
* multimedia classrooms
* electronic town meetings
* virtual communities
* taking a computer to the beach
* getting books and newspapers online
* e-commerce, online shopping, and e-payments
* booking airline tickets and restaurant reservations
* cybersex

Stoll also complains at length that it is nigh on impossible to use this Internet contraption to find the date of the Battle of Trafalgar. The headline—THE INTERNET? BAH!—reads as if Montgomery Burns was working the NEWSWEEK copy desk that night. And so on. You get the idea.

Most Americans are not in the habit of sending around 15-year-old NEWSWEEK columns, but they make an exception for Stoll. This is an essay that will not die—the only thing worse for a writer than an essay that no one remembers. Stoll’s “Bah!” lives on in tweets— “a hilarious cane-waving Newsweek article from '95. Can’t stop laughing”—and blog posts and never-ending e-mail chains. FW: FW: FW: FW: FW: fwd: fwd: Newsweek on why the internet will fail - bananas!! In March 2008, the piece received 3,663 Diggs. Decca Records didn’t get this much heat for passing on the Beatles.

It’s getting to be a little much. Our Mark Coatney, who is something of a living rebuttal to Stoll in that he mans NEWSWEEK’s Twitter and Tumblr feeds all day, blogged about this last week, after seeing a NEWSWEEK/Internet/1995/morons tweet for the umpteenth time. “While this does crack us up,” Coatney wrote, “… in many ways, Cliff Stoll wasn’t wrong. The Internet really did suck then, and it really was a huckster’s paradise. But the fatal flaw in his argument was his assumption that it was never going to get any better.” Today, undoubtedly, we all have beliefs about the future of the digital age that would seem hilarious when viewed from 2025.

Now, what does Stoll have to say about all of this? Oh, right, I can use the Internet to find out. The answer is that he is being a good sport. He saw his folly highlighted on Boing Boing last week, and contributed this comment:

“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”

If Cliff Stoll was an Internet curmudgeon, then he has aged into a magnanimous one. A class act, on the Web? In 1995, no one could have predicted that.

http://blog.newsweek.com/blogs/techtonicshifts/archive/2010/03/02/let-s-talk-about-the-1995-newsweek-piece-that-says-the-internet-will-fail.aspx

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The internet is really going to fail in a couple years when we run out of IPv4 ip addresses…

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The lack of general person to person social skills is IMO a growing problem.

Though I think much of that problem is at the hand of the parents not the internet.

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was that guy really on the internet in 1975 or is something screwed up with the article’s date?

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IPv6 baby!!!111

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he was online, but not on the internet.

Clifford Stoll is now legendary, he went to Vegas and put it all on black, then red hit.

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Yup.

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lol, and he was from buffalo.

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I have a feeling we will run out of IPs and then there will be a scramble to get IPv6 moving.

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the internet will become an exclusive club when ipv4 runs out of ips

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I want to get 255.255.255.254 as my IP

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:frowning: I wish I knew the significance of that

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it sounds like he wants the united states to turn into china where theyre monitoring the internet and making sure a lot of sites are blocked.

or not. i dont even know. hes all outta wack though.

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I think he was kind of a tenth right in that the whole tech bubble popped. People were ridiculously too optimistic about the internet economy.

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You want a subnet mask for an IP?