
Why the Web Won't Be Nirvana (1995) - Jschwa
http://www.newsweek.com/clifford-stoll-why-web-wont-be-nirvana-185306
======
rohansingh
There are two things to take away from this. The first is Clifford Stoll's own
comment when his essay resurfaced over in 2010. The whole thing is worth
reading [1], and it ends with:

> Now, whenever I think I know what’s happening, I temper my thoughts: Might
> be wrong, Cliff…

Secondly, while Stoll is wrong on many points in this essay, what's amazing is
that he hits on things that were definitely broken or deficient in 1995 and
had to be fixed to get us to where we are today:

* difficulty of reading on CRT screens

* lack of online payments infrastructure

* difficulty in searching and filtering through Web pages (i.e., search)

These were all very tough problems, and stacks of money have been minted by
Amazon, PayPal, and Google by tackling them. I'm impressed by Stoll's ability
to identify these problems clearly as early as 1995.

[1]: [http://boingboing.net/2010/02/26/curmudgeony-essay-
on.html#c...](http://boingboing.net/2010/02/26/curmudgeony-essay-
on.html#comment-723356)

~~~
WoodenChair
I don't find pointing out the obvious "amazing". Anyone who looked at a CRT in
1995 knew they didn't want to read a book on it.

~~~
Peaker
The deepest insights are often obvious in hindsight.

~~~
WoodenChair
Yeah but what I'm saying having used the web in 1995 is that his insights were
obvious then too.

~~~
Peaker
It isn't enough that they are obvious when they are pointed out explicitly.

If they were obvious, you'd find other articles/authors explaining the same
issues?

~~~
WoodenChair
I'm not going to go look it up for you, but there were plenty of skeptics in
the mid 90s of eBooks, online banking, and the accuracy of search engine
results. In fact it was probably the prevailing opinion of established
business interests, hence why the web took much of the old guard by surprise.
I'm not sure what you're arguing? Do you think the majority were visionary?

------
wehadfun
Baloney: telecommuting workers - WRONG

Baloney: interactive libraries - CORRECT

Baloney: multimedia classrooms - CORRECT

Baloney:electronic town meetings- CORRECT

Baloney:virtual communities - WRONG

Baloney:Commerce and business will shift from offices and malls to networks
and modems - HALF CREDIT (they both exist)

Baloney: freedom of digital networks will make government more democratic -
CORRECT (Governemts just clamp down on the internet)

no online database will replace your daily newspaper - WRONG

no CD-ROM can take the place of a competent teacher - CORRECT (No CD ROM can
keep kids off streets while parents at work)

no computer network will change the way government works - CORRECT (Goverments
will change the way computer networks work)

Finding the date of the Battle of Trafalgar takes 15 minutes - WRONG (0.18
seconds on Google)

Baloney:we'll soon buy books and newspapers straight over the Intenet. - WRONG

Baloney:instant catalog shopping—just point and click for great deals. - WRONG

Baloney:We'll order airline tickets over the network, - WRONG

Baloney:make restaurant reservations - WRONG

Baloney:negotiate sales contracts. - HALF CREDIT (Mix of phone, text, email,
and in person)

Baloney:Stores will become obselete. -CORRECT (stores are being built
everyday)

~~~
apolymath
I have to disagree with your comment about how CD ROMs aren't keeping kids off
the streets. That would be equivalent to saying video games don't keep kids
off streets. Kids these days don't sell drugs or commit crimes on the streets,
or even PLAY in the streets anymore, they sit in their room or friends room
and play video games all day. This is a common fact. Unless you're talking
about 3rd world countries where most people don't have a PC or internet or
even electricity.

~~~
6d0debc071
I never saw kids selling drugs on the streets. In schools on the other
hand....

------
mjolk
I hope others don't take too much away from an article that contains the gem:

"So how come my local mall does more business in an afternoon than the entire
Internet handles in a month?"

Human contact is nice and can't be replaced by our current technology. Don't
let this one, easy-to-make, statement let the rest of the contrarianism seem
correct. Mr. Stroll's vision for the future of the internet was short-sighted
and uncreative, but it's fun to see how far we've come.

Very related article in which the author eats humble pie:
[http://boingboing.net/2010/02/26/curmudgeony-essay-
on.html#c...](http://boingboing.net/2010/02/26/curmudgeony-essay-
on.html#comment-723356)

~~~
m3talsmith
I beg to differ: $61 billion gross for 2012 -
[http://techcrunch.com/2013/11/13/jeff-bezos-believes-aws-
cou...](http://techcrunch.com/2013/11/13/jeff-bezos-believes-aws-could-be-
amazons-biggest-business/)

~~~
mjolk
In what way do you beg to differ? You're just linking me to an article about
AWS profits.

------
spodek
Less than a decade later my father, a history professor, thought I was a fool
for thinking Wikipedia could hold a candle to Britannica for many reasons
similar to those in the article.

Obviously I didn't know what editing meant, how quality came about in
publishing, or what an encyclopedia was for. The value of the GPL was utterly
lost on him.

~~~
pekk
Wikipedia is a great place to publish your views with little real oversight,
as long as you get seniority, make a few external sites to link to, and squat
the relevant pages. The best part is that your message can be taken up well
because even adults think they can rely on it (no adult relies on Britannica
for anything, few own it anyway).

Maybe you were wrong and your father was right.

~~~
dicroce
I use Wikipedia nearly every day. I have learned a great many things that I am
able to immediately apply in my work (recent example:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boyer_moore](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boyer_moore))...
I guess its just a coincidence that this false information had the exact same
running time complexity as the real thing (O(n+m))?

~~~
WoodenChair
It might be an incredibly useful tool for learning new information, but that
still doesn't mean it's something I would rely on when publishing a non-
fiction document.

~~~
jimktrains2
You mean in the same way you shouldn't rely on any encyclopedia when
publishing a non-fiction piece?

------
mathattack
Clifford Stoll's writing should be required reading. He missed some of the
technological leaps of the past 18 years that improved adoption (this was pre-
pre-Bubble) but the many of the ideas of human contact do ring true today. I
was very surprised when I read this the first time around. He elaborated more
in Silicon Valley Snake Oil, also from 1995.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silicon_Snake_Oil](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silicon_Snake_Oil)

and

[http://www.amazon.com/Silicon-Snake-Oil-Thoughts-
Information...](http://www.amazon.com/Silicon-Snake-Oil-Thoughts-
Information/dp/0385419945)

~~~
gaius
SSO should be required reading for the current crop of "teach everyone to
code" types.

~~~
mathattack
I think they tell different stories, no?

SSO is about spending too much time online. "Teach everyone to code" is about
giving people marketable skills, and adding computer programming to the
mathematics curriculum. Why not?

------
notjustanymike
So I used to work on the Newsweek web ops team. This article gets linked about
once a year. Every year the comments are the same. Every year he has to admit
he was wrong.

LEAVE CLIFFORD STROLL ALONE!

~~~
shalmanese
Also, get his name right ;).

~~~
notjustanymike
Well shit.

------
mattgreenrocks
I'm not sure what lambasting this guy for being wrong adds to discussion.

Really, I want to see a sensible critique of the final paragraph. It is the
most interesting one. I see the Internet as fostering community, but never
replacing it. Most social sites today are atrocious, quality-wise, and suffer
the exact same symptoms he ran into.

~~~
nswanberg
Likely someone posted this not to ridicule Cliff Stoll, who is a wonderful and
charming writer, but to point out the similarity between his idea that the
internet is a poor substitute for existing systems and will not hold up to its
promises and the sea of incredulity about the idea of Amazon ever successfully
delivering via drone, or even Amazon suggesting that they will try.

I'd extend that comparison to the reflexive outrage about self-driving cars,
Google Glass, MOOCs, Soylent, Bitcoin, Wolfram|Alpha, Hyperloop, Tesla, and
similar interesting projects that, for whatever reason, are described as
doomed to failure or labeled as harbingers of the collapse of civilization.

Oh, and about that last paragraph. Cliff Stoll is almost entirely right--the
internet is a terrible substitute for many kinds of human contact if there is
a direct comparison between the two. That argument is still being made today.
Google Hangouts does not beat a face to face meeting with a friend or business
partner, following a live concert online is sad compared to being there, and
few would prefer "cybersex" to the real thing.

But where Stoll is wrong is the exact reason why the internet succeeded when
he thought it would fail. The internet succeeds where it can substitute real
life where the real life version is not possible. It should be easy to come up
with all sorts of those scenarios, including the ones Stoll mentioned.

------
Osiris
One of the reasons that this article may have wrong about the success of the
Internet is that he was judging the Internet based on its capabilities at that
time, rather than on what the underlying networking capabilities _may_ provide
in the future.

For example, he complains that it's too hard to find information online. His
searches returned bad results and made it hard to find what he was looking
for. This problem was solved (or began to be solved) only a few years later
with Google.

He also mentions that you can't "take you laptop to the beach". He missed out
on the idea that hardware would also improve until we have today's Kindles and
iPads.

The Internet of 1995 wasn't great, but the underlying technical foundation
allowed for growth and expansion that was unforeseen.

~~~
dccoolgai
True...I feel there is a subtle lesson in there today for all the folks poo-
pooing the Amazon drone announcement....

------
DanBC
A few people might not know that Clifford Stoll wrote "Cuckoo's Egg" which is
an interesting account that he alludes to in the first paragraph of this
article

> I've met great people and even caught a hacker or two.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cuckoo%27s_Egg_(book)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cuckoo%27s_Egg_\(book\))

It's a great book. Of the time, but still interesting.

EDIT:

> _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._

Well, he's right that most people didn't bother with digital books and it took
specialised e-book readers (and even then, a low cost device like the kindle)
for them to really take off.

Reading this article is a bit like watching science fiction made in 1985. We
have flying cars or human-simulation androids, but not flatscreen displays.

------
drdiablo
I think there is something very important that clifford Stoll doesn't talk
about. It's the power of having all our brains connected at one point, like
solar panels targeting light towards a sensor to multiply the amount of heat
transfer. We are all together in this thing called in the internet, and anyone
who has a good idea can share it. Anyone who likes someone else's idea can go
and help the person who had the idea. Most of all, people can combine ideas
together to make the most brilliant things and very act of combining ideas I
call it creativity. Ok fine the internet might not look so bright right now,
but let's remember that thanks to the internet, we were able to invent things
that would've never thought of, simply because the ideas weren't all there at
the same place, easy to combine.

------
PhasmaFelis
This thing is all over the web now, and the one constant is that everyone's
mocking the stuff he was wrong about but ignoring the stuff he was dead right
about.

------
bstar77
I love reading things like this... This guy saw obstacles that were
insurmountable while others saw obstacles that we begging to be conquered. And
now we know how it turned out.

------
nakedrobot2
Wow, he is nearly totally wrong on _every_ point! :-)

"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."

And to think that we have _really_ only just gotten started.... when I look
back a few blinks to 2005 and realize that there wasn't even anything in
popular culture known as Youtube... unbelievable!

The next decades are going to be amazing.

~~~
mhurron
> no CD-ROM can take the place of a competent teacher

No, I would say this is still correct. There is a feedback beyond yes/no
right/wrong that has not been able to be replicated in automated teaching and
training that a competent teacher can provide.

~~~
drcube
But certainly, CD-ROMs (or today's equivalent: Khan Academy and MOOCs) _can_
take the place of _no_ teacher?

There is free education to be had today that wasn't available in 1995. It's
not better than the face-to-face education we had then or now, but it's quite
a bit better than going without any education at all due to location,
circumstances or finance.

------
normloman
Most of these naysaying predictions didn't come true, but a few did. Computers
haven't replaced teachers and likely won't. E-commerce sites haven't replaced
brick and mortar stores (though they have swallowed a huge chunk of their
business) And I have never heard of anyone attending a virtual town meeting.

The author knew what was wrong with the internet in 1995, but couldn't imagine
the solutions we'd invent in 2013.

~~~
TillE
And we're still a long, long way off from the "information superhighway" dream
of the 90s. Wikipedia is good, but it barely scratches the surface of any area
of knowledge.

There's nothing technically stopping that (except for copyright), but the fact
remains that it hasn't really happened yet.

------
InclinedPlane
His biggest mistake is failing to understand that nothing is stationary,
especially technology. One must draw a distinction between the limitations of
technology in the moment and their fundamental limitations. Within only 5
years after the author's rant against the internet much had changed. The
number of people online grew by a factor of over 20. Computers became much
faster, broadband internet access became much more widespread, and the
internet in general became much more sophisticated.

By 10 years after his statements the internet was a much different and almost
completely unrecognizable place than the internet he was familiar with. The
same is probably true for the internet 10 years from now. It makes you wonder
how many "never"s, "can't"s, and "won't"s are bandied about today among the
cognoscenti about the possibilities of the internet which will be outrun by
the pace of innovation and change over the next decade.

------
digz
I had forgotten about Cliff Stoll for years... I remember reading his book
Silicon Snake Oil in 1995 and giving a presentation to my middle school class
about how simplistic the author's arguments were.

His argument and the degree to which he was wrong are among the clearest
examples of the power of capitalism in overcoming seemingly impossible
barriers.

------
fiskkastanj
What do we who are closer to tech than the average person see in the same
light now that people in our role saw the web in the early 90's?

My 5c goes to Bitmessage, the web (still. Biggest distributed computing
platform ever), Bitcoin, drones and 3D-printers. Preferably them all combined.

It's not like technical revolutions are uncommon anymore.

~~~
swswsw
Good list. i would agree with you that those 5 items are what to look out for
in the near future (the web, Bitcoin, drones and 3D-printers). I would
probably add wearable computing to the list as well.

------
Nicholas_C
>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 connections, try again later."

Wow, we've come a long way. I just pressed Ctrl + T, typed in "Battle of
Trafalgar", hit enter, and had the answer immediately. (21 October 1805)

Interestingly, if you type "Battle of Trafalgar date", Google gives you a
different date! It says 1824, which is the date when the painting titled
"Battle of Trafalgar" was completed. I suppose we may have a little ways to
go.

~~~
dragonwriter
> Interestingly, if you type "Battle of Trafalgar date", Google gives you a
> different date!

OTOH, if you search Google for "When was the battle of Trafalgar" you get the
correct answer ...

------
carlosgg
I think it's good to learn contrarians' opinions every once in a while. This
is the last book he wrote, I think. Although the subtitle sounds indeed like
heresy in this 21st century, I wonder what motivated his views back then.

[http://www.amazon.com/High-Tech-Heretic-Reflections-
Contrari...](http://www.amazon.com/High-Tech-Heretic-Reflections-
Contrarian/dp/0385489757/ref=la_B000AQ44MY_1_3?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1386013677&sr=1-3)

------
leokun
That background taskbar looks green and blue like windows xp. Is that right?
How could this be 1995 if that's windows xp.

~~~
lelandbatey
I'm pretty sure that picture was not taken for this article, since the photo
credit is to Youtube. So it may very well be a much more recent photo.

------
thoughtsimple
Cliff Stoll had his moment when he wrote Cuckoo's Egg. A pretty good tale of
his stalking a hacker and getting the FBI interested. He then squandered that
brief internet fame by becoming an internet naysayer and got another 15
minutes.

------
pyalot2
Almost no single prediction, critisism or estimate that held up to the test of
time. Moral of the story, don't play the prophet and try to predict the
future. The future is always stranger than anybody imagined.

------
talleyrand
Wow. I bet he wishes he could take that one back.

------
ErikAugust
Look at the photo.

Hard to have vision when your workspace is so cluttered.

------
smegel
> The cacophany more closely resembles citizens band radio, complete with
> handles, harrasment, and anonymous threats.

Fascinating.

~~~
asveikau
Anyone else bothered that he spelled "cacophony" wrong? "Cacophony" as in "bad
sounds"? Going by the Greek roots this is roughly equivalent to writing
"telephane".

------
apolymath
18 years later... Google has singlehandedly organized vast amounts of data on
the internet, along with wolfram alpha, thousands of hand-crafted
infographics, youtube & vimeo, twitter, and a handful of other services. The
internet is not only a nirvana but a way to simultaneously empower entire
nations of people against the veils of corruption that have befallen
civilization throughout human history.

------
gaius
Is that the real page title?

~~~
mathattack
Unless it's been changed, yes.

~~~
gaius
When I wrote that, the title was "hilariously stupid predictions from 1995".

~~~
adeptus
"1995 EPIC FAIL Internet predictions"... would be more appropriate.

Now is a good time to start collecting such web pages from bitcoin naysayers.
;-) ;-) ;-)

