There’s a great Slate article called “That Whole Internet Thing’s Not Going To Work Out” wherein Farhad Manjoo revisits an old Clifford Stoll article from 1995. The piece was entitled “The Internet? Bah!” The money comes right at the start:
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.
Generous Guffaws
We all get a good laugh out of it. Why shouldn’t we? The prediction was wildly inaccurate. What’s more, at the time I would have probably agreed with him. Back around 1991 I was graduating from high school and a friend of mine feverishly showed me something called “mosaic.” My response? A blank stare. How could it be better than Computer Castle BBS? From the Slate article:
Stoll’s column was unearthed by a blogger last week, and it quickly became the talk of Twitter. Stoll himself is humbled; in a comment on Boing Boing, he called his piece a “howler” and said he thinks back to it often as a reminder that he can be very, very wrong. But Stoll’s article is good for more than just a laugh. Terrible predictions can be instructive—in their wrongness, we can see the flaws of our own visions for the future.
Some Recommendations
The article is definitely worth the read. I’m so enamored of the future’s haziness. Here’s the author’s bullet-point rundown of how to improve our predictions:
- Good predictions are based on current trends.
- Don’t underestimate people’s capacity for change.
- New stuff sometimes comes out of the blue.
- These days it’s best to err on the side of optimism.
Accurate as a Groundhog
We’d all fall into these traps if we did more formal prediction exercises. Instead, we are spared the embarrassment of having our incorrect assumptions waved in our faces periodically. Thank god we have more sense… well, thank god you have more sense. I, on the other hand, do not.
Stoll’s prognostication fails in predictable ways. He doesn’t give enough credit to the possibilities of innovation, he doesn’t believe people can adapt, and he seems to disregard the long-term trends that were pushing the digital boom. Of course, Stoll is not alone in predicting a future that never came. Part of the fun of watching and reading old sci-fi is in seeing how old visions of today match up with the dreary reality. We don’t have flying cars or jetpacks, but only a few prescient visionaries—Vannevar Bush, William Gibson, and the makers of these educational videos from the 1960s—predicted anything like the Internet.
We shouldn’t feel bad. We’re all looking at the past similarly. We’re all (mostly) wrong about the future. Misery loves company and all that. At least we have our from-outta-left-field internet to keep us content.
