

The Net Is a Waste of Time (1996) - mtrn
http://www.nytimes.com/1996/07/14/magazine/the-net-is-a-waste-of-time.html

======
jere
The headline had me cringing in expectation for a brain dead article, but how
stupid of me! It's fricking William Gibson. Almost everything he said in this
article seems to be spot on, then and now.

In case you have any remaining worry that Gibson is some crotchety "get of my
lawn" type, check him out on twitter. He is one the most prolific, bizarre,
and interesting users I follow: <https://twitter.com/GreatDismal> Recent
examples:

>Once saw fake Zippo lighters with Confederate flags _with_ swastikas in
Shinjuku. Mindless mashup getting it right anyway.

>I've had the tv-in-the-mirror in bathrooms of a few hotel rooms. Have never
turned one on. Feels like bad sci-fi prop-design.

>Fellatio illegal in 11 states. Lawmakers afraid to risk being known ever
after as "the blowjob senator", if they act to strike them down?

~~~
NoPiece
New York Times experimenting with link-bait headlines back in 1996.

~~~
dasil003
Link-bait is just a new word, the phenomenon must date back to the invention
of the printing press.

~~~
hayksaakian
Arguably, printed materials gave you more context along with the title,
without opening up the full article.

~~~
dasil003
Seeing the link is akin to passing the newsstand from a medium distance.
Clicking the link is akin to picking up the newspaper and seeing the small
print. Skipping the ad is akin to opening the newspaper to the continuation of
the story inside.

------
DavidAdams
If you'll read to the last paragraph, you'll find Gibson's very profound
conclusion: that the 1996 Web was the early "test pattern" for what he
predicts will be a world-changing, but "less fun" medium. How right he was.

~~~
SilasX
Less fun? Are you high? I get more intellectual stimulation of a single site's
content on one day than I've ever gotten from every dumbed-down newspaper
editorial I ever read before the Web took off.

~~~
danseagrave
I think Gibson meant the future www would be "less fun" relative to the
procrasination friendly "unsorted Global Ham Television" 1996 version

~~~
codeulike
I think the internet is more fun now - there is the boring mainstream but
there is also an absolutely huge lunatic fringe. The web now is more chaotic
than in 1994 because its so much more accessible to chaotic minds now. In 1994
it was all just monty python scripts and references to barney the dinosaur.

------
Tsagadai
The winning quote: "[sic] surfing the Web is a procrastinator's dream. And
people who see you doing it might even imagine you're working."

How many people are identifying with that premonition right this second?

~~~
TechNewb
Agreed. Golden.

------
wamatt
That was a mostly prescient and enjoyable blast from the past. One thing
though I was glad Gibson was wrong about:

> _"It will probably evolve into something considerably less random, and less
> fun"_

While his point was/is true of many systems and organizations, the internet is
one example that has really outdone itself in terms of sustaining an
unrelenting resistance towards a global monoculture.

Perhaps, like some older HN users here, when I go looking beyond the walled
gardens of social networks, I feel just as fascinated by what I read today, as
I did in the mid 90's.

~~~
d23
I decided to stick my head into the "firehose" of Facebook's public graph API
last night and ended up finding some strange spambots creating pages and
posting thousands of Amazon links. I followed the trail, trying to figure out
what they were doing and what the point was. No one had liked the pages, so it
didn't seem to make sense that they were building links to Amazon and not
their own site (which I could understand for SEO). Anyway, I ended up going to
the furthest reaches of the internet, never really finding an answer, but I
got that same feeling: holy hell, this is amazing!

It's like being an explorer, going where only a few people have gone before.
The internet can still be this, if you want it to be. You can still dig around
the trenches, take the back-roads, see what you find, see what's going on
behind the surface of the social networks and media.

God damn, I love it.

~~~
defen
Speaking of the furthest reaches of the internet - just last night I ended up
on a website dedicated to warning us about the coming race-war between
Neanderthal-humans (introvert/autistic/asperger spectrum), Cro-Magnon humans
("normal" people), and "melonheads" (psychopaths? maybe?). It appeared to be
entirely serious. You see, 40,000 years ago the melonheads decided that the
neanderthals needed to be wiped out, so they sent in a slave army of cro-
magnons armed with high-tech weaponry such as spear throwers. And then.....you
get the idea.

I love finding crazy stuff like that.

------
jgh
His book "Distrust That Particular Flavor" is full of his old articles, such
as this one, and his thoughts on them after looking back at them in 2012. I
really recommend it if you're into William Gibson at all.

------
masto
It's hard to remember what the Internet was like in 1996. I do it by
remembering that in 1997 I started an ISP to offer blazing-fast 56K dialup to
the indifferent grandparents of Long Island for $19.95/month. We had a
computer on display in the front of our office so the skeptical could poke
around and see what the web had to offer. Windows did not come with a browser
installed, so many of our new customers had to wait for us to mail them a
Netscape CD-ROM. People frequently got upset at us for high phone bills when
they discovered too late that their local calling area did not include our
POP. The writing was on the wall, of course.. dialup wasn't going to be around
forever, and I already had the future of telecommunications installed in my
apartment: ISDN.

------
phaus
It's actually pretty funny. I'm in the middle of writing a paper for my
philosophy class, about Pieper's Leisure, the Basis of Culture, and this is
the first article I click on when I start slacking off.

The points Gibson makes about the importance of down time are almost the same
as Josef Pieper's. I guess I'm still working on that paper after all.

~~~
primitur
Hail slack, brother! :)

~~~
aeontech
Praise Bob

------
Claudus
William Gibson is a strange person. I remember him making a comment at a
convention once where he said he was shocked at what computers looked like on
the inside, he expected them to be weird crystalline contraptions.

~~~
Claudus
Well, here's an actual quote: <http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/William_Gibson>

_"On the most basic level, computers in my books are simply a metaphor for
human memory: I'm interested in the hows and whys of memory, the ways it
defines who and what we are, in how easily memory is subject to revision. When
I was writing Neuromancer, it was wonderful to be able to tie a lot of these
interests into the computer metaphor. It wasn't until I could finally afford a
computer of my own that I found out there's a drive mechanism inside — this
little thing that spins around. I'd been expecting an exotic crystalline
thing, a cyberspace deck or something, and what I got was a little piece of a
Victorian engine that made noises like a scratchy old record player. That
noise took away some of the mystique for me; it made computers less sexy. My
ignorance had allowed me to romanticize them."_

~~~
guard-of-terra
It caught up to his expectations with SSD.

~~~
iso-8859-1
We still have CPU fans and cables everywhere, I still think it's pretty
Victorian.

~~~
morsch
Part of what makes tablets so futuristic.

~~~
exodust
Until computers stop generating so much heat that their cases become hot to
touch, they're just advanced Victorian 'engines' rather than exotic
futuristic. I love my SSD though, and we are getting closer to the crystalline
cyberspace decks.

------
mauricio-OH
I love how things have changed so much but they remain exactly the same. We're
still hooked - to our smartphones. We're still wondering what the experience
will be in a few years. Just like he did. Awesome.

~~~
lhnn
Makes me think of Snow Crash a bit... plugged in constantly to virtual
reality.

~~~
primitur
I just shipped my first AR app to a customer, and I have been having serious
Snow Crash moments in real-life, lately. As a mobile developer, all I can
think about now is the death of the native interface, and the new age of the
rule of Augmented Reality. Yikes, I've slipped and fallen into the digital
hole that is: reality with overlays.

For example I've quite literally got a little 3d animated ghost that sits in
the corner of my favourite hangout, which only I can see through my phone when
I point its camera in the right angle, which tells me the name of the track
being played on the house speakers .. it really is a moment like Snow Crash,
played out in real life, I have to say..

Up next, Finn the finger ..

~~~
aeontech
The audio ghost sounds awesome, any chance it's on github?

~~~
primitur
Nope, its only in my AR app, which has a very specific set of ImageTargets
only I have any interest in. ;)

But! Its an awesome tech, and I'm pretty sure its going to hit the store soon
enough. I'm currently working on ways to embed tons more stuff within the
target matrix .. its mind-boggling to think that any recognizable surface can
be the human interface mechanism, now.

------
pshin45
> _The Web is new, and our response to it has not yet hardened. That is a
> large part of its appeal. It is something half-formed, growing. Larval. It
> is not what it was six months ago; in another six months it will be
> something else again. It was not planned; it simply happened, is happening.
> It is happening the way cities happened. It is a city._

I've always loved metaphors comparing the Internet to a growing city. The Web
used to be a Wild West-style town that was ventured into only by the most
daring of people and businesses, but it's now become a much more established
and secure city, still full of possibilities, where everyone and their mother
wants to move and try to make their fortune, but at the same time has lost a
lot of its original "flavor" that made it so special.

And... I don't really know where I'm going with this...

~~~
prawn
I think it holds beyond that too. Still have the ugly neighbourhoods,
properties designed in a way that give away their age, dangerous parts of
town, etc.

------
mbubb
I was going to reply with something like 'The NYTimes is a waste of time
(2013)' - but that is a really good short piece.

------
negativity
God damn. I don't think I've ever disagreed with William Gibson.

This documentary from 2003 (really a long-ish interview) was pretty
interesting as well:
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_Maps_for_These_Territories>

------
taproot
> I COINED THE WORD "CYBERSPACE" IN 1981

Thats not something to be proud of..

~~~
thisone
I would say it is. I don't think you can talk the concept of the data driven
world without looking at how Gibson and later cyber-punk authors imagined how
it might be.

We may think that the word "cyberspace" is a bit twee now, but it was an
investigation about what the future might be. And it was a way to present that
investigation to an audience who most likely had little to no frame of
reference.

~~~
kaybe
It's funny how the only ones using the word nowadays are governments and
agencies.

'Cyber taskforce'? And you want me to take that serious?

~~~
thisone
Have you read Neuromancer?

I'm not quite sure how what you mention is related to the use of the word
cyberspace as Gibson used it.

~~~
kaybe
Yes, I have. As far as I know the word was not there before Gibson coined it,
so I'm assuming that everyone using it today refer back to that, whether they
know it or not.

I haven't been around in the English-languaged internet back then, so I don't
have firsthand information, but it seems to have been more commonly in use
everywhere in the past (I remember some hacker's handbook telling me not to
associate with people calling themselves 'cyberpunk', for instance). Nowadays
the only mentions I see are from governments who plan taskforces to anwer
"threats in the cyberspace", which, in my eyes, makes them look incompetent. I
think it's interesting that they use that terminology though. </rant>

How does that not relate?

------
spiritplumber
Obvious joke:

The NY Times Is a Waste of Time (2013) (news.ycombinator.com)

------
tlarkworthy
Neuromancer had the worst sex scene I have ever read.

------
coldtea
Even more true in hindsight...

------
mikaelf
They knew it back then!

------
zemanel
for some part of it, still true :-p

------
HunterV
Wonder what headlines we'll make fun of in 17 years?

~~~
sliverstorm
I think the headline is actually self-mocking. Pretty sure the author is not
actually arguing the net is a waste of time.

~~~
networked
Gibson's point seem to be that the 1996 Web is not so much itself a waste of
time as a great tool for wasting time, and that that's not necessarily a bad
thing. He also notes how this state of freedom and freeform-ness that
encourages "surfing the Web" is fleeting and will pass to be replaced with
something more conventional and structured.

I came back to this essay several times over the years and each time I read it
I take a moment to appreciate how true its core observation rings. It can be
considered a successful if somewhat vague prophecy about what the WWW has
since in large part become: a delivery mechanism for traditional, one-to-many
media. You could see that same thing happen in miniature on YouTube throughout
its short history: the many-to-many system of its early days has been
overshadowed by prepackaged shows. I'm not saying it's a bad thing
(personally, I enjoy some of the shows), but it's different.

------
alaskamiller
It's okay, kids these days are used to it. Just like how kids back then got
used to radio, pulp, and television.

~~~
GuiA
Have you even read the article?

~~~
alaskamiller
My point is that as the fidelity of signals become stronger we acclimate to
it. Turn back 6 years and the connectedest Gen Y lighting up on the internet
felt the same way, in the circles I traveled many espoused the same self-aware
sentiment as this, some even without the benefit of being Gibsonites.

Now that Gen Z is lighting up, crowding into Instagram, inheriting Reddit,
rebuilding Tumblr, you know what I see? The most connectedest again are
repeating the same sentiment and make believing they're the only ones in all
of history to hold such perspective.

It's the same generational gap meme. Over and over again. Eventually the Gen Z
grow old and grow out of using whatever trends charmed them. Then we get the
reverb about how awkward of phase it was in the aughts and 10's that we became
a generation addicted to black mirrors in the palm of our hands like the 70's
was about sparking up and 80's was about indulging in cocaine in social
situations.

And as I get older and on my march of filing out of the 18-35 demographics the
more I learn and realize it's always been this way, but took awhile for the
education to reveal itself. From the times of pulp fiction to radio surfing.
And it will forever be this way as each generation arrive.

Just wait until the babies having grown up entirely with glass become self
aware.

~~~
mbetter
I'm not sure what you're going on about.

~~~
wolfpackk
tldr: get off my lawn kids will forever be the sentiment of the current old
generation while lol we r so hip will be the sentiment of the 18-20somethings.
I don't think this realization is as profound as he is making it seem though,
c'est la vie

~~~
alaskamiller
Profundity is all personalization syntactic sugar these days anyway. La vie.

~~~
leoh
Wait, what? This made me laugh. May be true, but the way you said it,
"syntacti sugar"... So cynical...

