
Vint Cerf sees his invention reflected on Black Mirror - evo_9
https://www.npr.org/sections/alltechconsidered/2018/02/20/583682937/the-father-of-the-internet-sees-his-invention-reflected-back-through-a-black-mir
======
lucideer
Is it usual for the perspective of NPR articles to be this bizarrely biased?:

> _... in retrospect, some of the decisions his team made seem hopelessly
> naive, especially for a bunch of geniuses._

> _They made it possible to surf the Internet anonymously — unlike a
> telephone, you don 't have a unique number that announces who you are. We
> know how that turned out. People with less lofty ambitions than Cerf used
> that loophole for cybercrime, international espionage and online
> harassment._

The primary bad actors on the internet are not individuals exploiting
anonymity.

~~~
headmelted
The reason the Internet has become so successful is in large part due to
optional anonymity.

Clearly NPR and myself have very different views on what makes the Internet
what it is.

Also, I love me some Vint Cerf - and his contributions have unquestionably
been massive - but no one person invented the Internet. Please let's leave the
cult of personality for the "unwashed masses" as NPR calls them.

~~~
wjoe
I've noticed that American articles cite Vint Cerf as the "father/inventor of
the internet", while British press give the same titles to Tim Berners-Lee. Of
course both were instrumental, but as you say, many people and teams were
involved in the creation of what we know as the Internet today.

~~~
headmelted
Being in the UK I don't see a valid claim to TBL's involvement in the creation
of the Internet.

I see it more as Vint Cerf being instrumental in the creation of the Internet,
and Tim-Berners Lee of the world-wide web.

Now, if any one person _were_ to be credited for the creation of the Internet
as a whole, that honour would undoubtedly go to Al Gore.

Exhibit A: [https://goo.gl/X8D3yb](https://goo.gl/X8D3yb)

~~~
michrassena
It's such a great piece of political rhetoric that pushed the false idea of Al
Gore claiming to have "invented the Internet". If you accept that Vint Cerf
was a key person in the creation of the Internet as we know it, you'll
probably be interested in his opinion of Al Gore's actual role.

[https://web.eecs.umich.edu/~fessler/misc/funny/gore,net.txt](https://web.eecs.umich.edu/~fessler/misc/funny/gore,net.txt)

Here's an excerpt from the first paragraphs:

Al Gore and the Internet

By Robert Kahn and Vinton Cerf

Al Gore was the first political leader to recognize the importance of the
Internet and to promote and support its development.

No one person or even small group of persons exclusively "invented" the
Internet. It is the result of many years of ongoing collaboration among people
in government and the university community. But as the two people who designed
the basic architecture and the core protocols that make the Internet work, we
would like to acknowledge VP Gore's contributions as a Congressman, Senator
and as Vice President. No other elected official, to our knowledge, has made a
greater contribution over a longer period of time.

~~~
headmelted
I should maybe mention that I meant this in jest - I think very highly of Al
Gore and the joke was intended to allude to Cerf's high opinion of his role in
the early days.

I don't think Al Gore claimed to have literally invented the Internet, and
believed that was the gag this whole time.

Have people been walking around thinking he actually believed that this whole
time?

------
DyslexicAtheist
Ethics scholars: _" The artists are the ones who recognize the fundamental
truth that human nature hasn't changed much since Shakespeare's time, no
matter what fancy new tools you give us."_

Tech: _" we can solve all problems with blockchains and an ICO / token sale!"_

------
Vaskivo
[OFF TOPIC]

Am I the only one who thinks Black Mirror is not that good?

I've seen around five episodes and the only one I genuinely thought to be good
was the very first one.

1 - The technology is extremely vague. There is no way to really gauge it's
impact besides what the writer explicitly shows.

2 - The episodes are extremely moralist. They usually take a stance of "Look
How Bad This Is", usually using appeals to emotion. They don't show the other
side, the good side of that concept.

3 - In my opinion, the story of most of them is uninteresting. The most
egregious is the "eye camera" one. The whole episode drops you hints of how
that technology affects society, but we are focused on a lovers quarrel.

4 - None of those show anything really new. If you removed the new concept, it
would be _really_ easy to replace it with known stuff. In a world with a new
disruptive technology they write people acting like they always did!

5 - This is mostly my elitism, but I hate most people's reaction to it. They
see the episode, adore it, and just take it at face value. I watch it, think
it's crap, and spend the next hour discussing it and thinking about it. Most
people don't think beyond what is shown on the episode. I fear that that,
coupled with (1) and (2), is making people fear technology [1].

(I have to add that the last minute of the "robot boyfriend" episode are so
nuanced, subtle and insidious that I'm amazed the writers managed to slip that
through. Especially how dumbed down the whole episode was)

/rant

[1] I think people should be careful with technology. I have a bit of "privacy
paranoia". But that should come from reason.

~~~
tialaramex
Most people find that they like some Black Mirror episodes a lot more than
others, it's inherent in the nature of this type of anthology SF format.

The people being people thing is _right_. A good antidote to the sort of
beliefs we easily trick ourselves into here is to go read Samuel Pepys
personal diary. Read about a year's worth, doesn't matter which bits, start in
1666 if you want to actually connect events to history (that's the year of the
Great Fire of London). Pepys is over 350 years different in time from us. Yet
he's not really different at all. He worries about money, he suffers illness,
he moans about incompetent people, he lusts after pretty people who won't
sleep with him (and to be fair, some who do). I say Pepys partly because he
wrote this stuff down for his own records, whereas most earlier writers have
an audience in mind and so we must assume they self-censor, and partly because
he wrote just after English had settled down, his meaning is easy to follow
without a modern translator between you adding their own interpretation.

------
nukeop
I stopped reading when I got to the bit presenting possible anonymity as
something bad that is only exploited by criminals and government spies. We
should be thankful they allowed that (and it's not a "loophole") as it allows
us to avoid countless ways in which giant corporations are attempting to
undermine our freedom by tracking our every move on the internet. Luckily
thanks to this design feature, it's easy to throw off their trackers, even
though they work tirelessly day and night to invent new ways in which to spy
on us.

~~~
vitorfblima
Big tech is more concerned in how to make the most out of all the data we give
them willingly.

------
camillomiller
Just to distract you all from the very bad reporting... Have you ever noticed
that cerf looks uncannily like ecorp’s CEO in Mr Robot (phillip price, played
by michael cristopher)?

~~~
skocznymroczny
I think it's a common thing in TV/cinema. The villain in Skyfall looked
similar to Julian Assange. The villain in Tomorrow Never Dies was pretty much
Steve Jobs.

~~~
andruby
Jonathan Pryce looks similar to Steve Jobs? Sorry, I don't buy it.

------
apo
Black Mirror takes Frederik Pohl's advice in directions I've never seen it
taken before in a series:

 _A good science fiction story should be able to predict not the automobile
but the traffic jam._

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rhizome
This is an odd title for the piece, which is essentially three puffy
descriptions of three unrelated peoples' relationship to the internet's
potential.

------
wcarss
How did all three of these people end up being interviewed for this, and why
would so little of what they actually say and think make it in here?

The story about the artist and the scientist, the wise visionary and the
foolish tinkerer, is a tired and unrealistic trope being forced onto events
that have nothing to do with those themes.

The internet was not "designed without unique identifying numbers", and no
lack of such facility is what has led to or what would lead to "all this dark
stuff" \-- everything about that construction is wrong. It's nonsense. It's
most upsetting to hear that wrongness presented as fact via a nearly-all-
context-cut discussion clip with Vint goshdarned Cerf, because if you said it
this way right to him he'd be like, "well, whoa, wait hold on".

It's also absurd to imply that the internet was designed in a vacuum, or
without thought to its implications, or by just one or a few people, in any
short span of time. Beyond that, the things the design of the internet may
have been hopelessly naive about are far more complex than and different from
"it could allow Bad People to operate anonymously". Some may be directly the
opposite!

Gibson did have a remarkable vision in Neuromancer, but that absolutely did
not have to do with imagining Russia vs the US at its time of release in
_1984_. Warring meganational companies had been featured in many earlier
dystopian novels: Bester did it in Tiger, Tiger! (aka The Stars My
Destination) in _1956_, Brunner did it repeatedly in Stand on Zanzibar and The
Sheep Look Up from the start of the 70s. These were not the new ideas! In
Neuromancer the world was different, the space, the mood, the means, the
words. These were cool and unique and new -- the combination of all of this in
a pretty package is what made it predictive and powerful and popular.

Why is Black Mirror even involved here? Because it's dark? I love the show,
but it has come to have very little to do with taking our nature 10 minutes
into the future and a lot more to do with "spooky SciFi", and it's never been
a far-out predictive powerhouse. Maybe Gibson's name just wasn't enough for
the editor? Black Mirror does add that click juice. Maybe it's thematic. Is
the piece going to challenge us to think through consequences of decisions
deeply and have higher standards for ourselves and society, the way the show
once did?

No, instead, we get a whole 7 minute audio narrative that will play as a
timefiller between segments, with the trite payoff that "only artists know
human nature never really changes, even with some new toys." mixed in with
just a sprinkle of "it takes all stripes".

Did it actually take talking to all of Vint Cerf and William Gibson and
Charlie Brooker to get there? Did presumably several minutes (I hope not
hours) of their much more interesting words and thoughts get cut so we could
hear the journalist's baseless or cliché ideas instead? Just for more woo-woo
pessimism? It's like asking Elon Musk to comment on a local science fair
rocket and concluding that the next generation holds promise.

Imagine the possibilities we _had_ here: hearing Vint Cerf and William Gibson
actually reflect meaningfully on what Black Mirror means to people today in
the context of their works, and what it suggests for the futures of literature
and technology. Imagine if all three people interviewed had a real discussion
together! That could be a real and lasting contribution to the human canon.
But we got this instead.

Maybe these guys had nothing better to be doing. Maybe this tech writer and
their editors just don't know about IP addresses, or at least think that no
one listening does or should, that it's too complicated for regular people and
correspondence with reality doesn't even matter. Maybe no one is even
listening.

But people _are_ listening. Someone who isn't steeped in the technical world
may hear this piece and from its total lack of depth or nuance assume it is
obviously-true. They may take away that "the internet's creator didn't even
think about its consequences! Tech people are so clueless. Just shows you that
Black Mirror is true. The future sounds bad."

Something this banal and stupid presented by NPR, and making direct use of the
time of these amazing people for it, is a sign (among so many others) that
we're setting the bar far too low on intellectual curiosity, on journalistic
character, on technical literacy, on societal introspection, and hell, on
basic imagination.

~~~
klez
I think the article is awful, but I upvoted it anyway because I hoped it would
create some fine discussion about the themes.

So let me try to transform this thread into something useful: what do you
think about the current state of the internet and its culture vis-a-vis what's
being presented in neuromancer and other cyberpunk novels?

------
jbmccready
The mindset I believe we should have when trying to answer a question like "is
anonymity on the internet a good thing for society?" should not just be
thinking up situations where it might empower people but also to consider "how
well is society equipped to deal with this kind of change?" does humanity have
a lot of cultural experience dealing with technology that enables this type of
situation? I think the answer in this case is no. There is not a lot of
historical or cultural precedent for how we interact with each other
anonymously. New systems with new rules enabled by new technologies take time
for culture to incorporate in good ways. Therefore it would have been better
imo to separate the introduction of being able to communicate digitally from
the introduction of being able to communicate anonymously. Conflating the two
makes the situation more complicated and harder for us as a society to ensure
these technologies are being used in beneficial ways.

------
sexy_seedbox
> First is the man...

Trying to find "second" in the article, nothing found. Is this bad writing?

------
drake01
Vague article, clickbait: Vint Cerf, Black Mirror. The article is vague. Avoid
if you can.

------
austincheney
The Black Mirror episode they are talking about certainly exists in various
forms. I recently deleted my Reddit account out of similar aggravation.

Ideas aren't more valid due to votes in a millenial's echo chamber. Stupid
popular things aren't necessarily less stupid out of popularity by a similarly
uninformed collective.

~~~
donkeyd
> Ideas aren't more valid due to votes in a millenial's echo chamber.

Whenever a new iOS was announced I'd search the docs to find out whether it
allowed Pebble to get more interesting functionality on the OS. Usually the
result would be that no interesting API's were added. People would downvote my
summaries because they didn't want to know the truth...

