UPDATE: Welcome BoingBoing readers!
Just came across this article from Newsweek in 1995. It lists all the reasons the internet will fail. My two favorite parts:
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.
…
Yet Nicholas Negroponte, director of the MIT Media Lab, predicts that we’ll soon buy books and newspapers straight over the Intenet. Uh, sure.
If Newsweek is as good at maintaining the journalism industry as they are at fortune telling, they should be around for a long time.
The Internet? Bah!
Hype alert: Why cyberspace isn’t, and will never be, nirvana
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.
STOLL is the author of “Silicon Snake Oil–Second Thoughts on the Information Highway” to be published by Doubleday in April.
243 Comments
March 9, 2010 at 8:41 pm
This was a column by Stoll and his personal opinion, not the position of Newsweek. Newsweek just published it.
March 9, 2010 at 11:17 pm
[...] Leave a Comment Categories: Awesome, Not Quite Grasping the Concept and Science Some intrepid soul has dug up a hilarious Newsweek article from 1995 describing how this newfangled Internet thing is [...]
March 10, 2010 at 5:12 am
[...] Why the Internet Will Fail. [...]
March 10, 2010 at 8:02 am
[...] a an essay in 1995 explaining why the internet will fail. This has been unearthed recently by the ThreeWordChant blog, and discussed on BoingBoing – and most likely elsewhere too, especially in the form of the [...]
March 12, 2010 at 2:41 pm
[...] Why the internet will fail (from 1995) « Three Word Chant! Hype alert: Why cyberspace isn’t, and will never be, nirvana [...]
March 13, 2010 at 4:31 am
Brilliant find! The Internet: a fad which is certain to go out of fashion any day now. Any… day… now……
March 13, 2010 at 9:15 am
This is a fascinating look at the fog of the future. How often we assume that today’s current technical challenges are tomorrow’s impossibilities.
Barely five years later, Google came on the scene and solved the “internet filtration” problem.
By the time he wrote this article, CDNow had already launched it’s affiliate (think: Salesman) program. And barely a year later, Amazon launched it’s historic affiliate program.
I wonder what today’s equivalent of the Stoll prophecy is.
March 15, 2010 at 4:05 am
Sure, that article sounds like written by a total tool today. But when I saw the author’s name, I’ve remembered him from somewhere.
Here I find where I’ve been remembering him:
http://www.ted.com/talks/clifford_stoll_on_everything.html
He may be crazy, but certainly not a clueless tool.. It’s ironic he is somewhat of a total crazy-nerdish-scientist type of guy, and he had written ‘that’ by then
March 16, 2010 at 10:29 am
Found myselfself here seeking some thing completely different, but ended up to be a cool read anyway, so I guess sometimes it’s ok that you can’t use a search engine properly.
March 17, 2010 at 6:55 am
Hi! I want to say thanks for an interesting site about a subject I have had an interest in for a long time now. I have been lurking and reading the posts avidly so just wanted to express my thanks for providing me with some very good reading material. I look forward to more, and taking a more active part in the discussions here.
March 17, 2010 at 11:33 am
In a world where Internet access has become as unremarkable a part of daily life as telephones and televisions, it’s easy to chuckle at Cliff Stoll’s forecast. But back in the neolithic days of 1995, it wasn’t at all clear that the Net would become anything more than a plaything for geeks. The few people who had any kind of access used dialup, and transmitting pictures — not to mention audio or video — was a challenge. For most people who went online, the preferred avenues were the “walled gardens” of Compuserve, AOL and Prodigy, as well as local bulletin boards (BBS), which were more user-friendly than straight Internet services. As the Net was still dominated by academics, any type of business or political use was frowned upon. Unless you were affiliated with a university, access was metered by the minute, which made any activity other than checking email *very* costly. The Web was sparsely populated, and most of the best content was accessible through Gopher (remember that??). And as for mobile devices, recall that in 1995, that meant “car phones” whose calls were billed at a dollar a minute.
Sure, Stoll was way off. But his greatest sin was falling victim to the conventional wisdom of the time. Not being a businessperson or economist, he lacked the vision to see the possibilities of e-commerce, including how it could transform or even destroy entire industries. Not being a student of pop culture, he couldn’t imagine the power of viral media and social networking. But then again, most people in 1995 weren’t thinking this way either.
Finally, in the wake of the dot-com crash of 2000, I seem to recall many people saying how Cliff Stoll was spot-on…
March 21, 2010 at 11:48 am
yet cliff sux
May 25, 2010 at 4:36 am
At the age of 10 years old (in 1995) I would have called this asshole out on his bullshit because he claimed he “even caught a hacker or two”. Hahaha. I would have massed IM’ed his ass with a phished AOL account. And the beauty about it was that back then you could just *67 the dial up number and you got a new IP address every time you signed on. Even connecting with him in an IM conversation would reveal his IP address giving me some hardcore backdoor access (with AOL’s shitty security). If by “caught a hacker” he meant “got pwned by a hacker” (even though the term “pwned” was far from being invented at the time… shit.. “owned” didn’t even exist yet) This article was laughable. I wish I read this when I was that young, I would have called his ass out. The only problem is that I wouldn’t have had the opportunity because youtube didn’t exist yet, and the mainstream media was terrified of statements like the one I just made so it wouldn’t air anywhere (and if it did, I would probably get arrested immediately for cyber terrorism). I want to find this guy and pee on him. A thousand dicks to his religion
May 29, 2010 at 7:20 pm
Uum, no…. Do some research…
He actually did catch a hacker, and it was a quite important one seeing as the hacker was trying to get into the defence system and the NSA and CIA and MI and FBI had no clue what to do. And he was using a bit better sytem than AOLs. Read the guys book.
I’m pretty sure you woud’ve been the one being “pwned” because you, sir, are a moron.
March 18, 2010 at 10:46 pm
awesome blog
March 21, 2010 at 12:20 pm
Wonderful blog, i want to read your blog posts when I can. Is there a way to have these sent to my email and then i can read it when i want to? let me know please.
March 23, 2010 at 1:22 am
[...] / Youth plugged in nearly most of the day: study / Time to start taking the Internet seriously / Why the internet will fail (from 1995) Share [...]
March 25, 2010 at 3:53 pm
Good site,have a fine day
March 26, 2010 at 7:18 am
Oh my God! This one jerk at work was basically stating to me this same specific issue. Anyhow, considering that I’m about to quit this crap-lousy company, I guess I shall give you a hook up. Not very many folks know about this key fact, but you could possibly get a $1,000 gift card for no cost at the present time, kind regards of the sluggish district administrator. These guys will do all sorts of things for extra business!!
March 27, 2010 at 10:14 am
[...] “Why the internet will fail (from 1995)” – A really fun piece to read in retrospective of15 years; made me wonder about some of my skeptical thinking. [...]
April 1, 2010 at 1:15 pm
By the way, thanks psixaos for giving that link : http://www.ted.com/talks/clifford_stoll_on_everything.html, actually that’s where i come from…
I think this means : anyone, (i mean anyone, even who seems to have knowledge, and who is trusted by almost everyone) can just be wrong.
April 3, 2010 at 7:40 pm
[...] 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 [...]
April 4, 2010 at 3:25 pm
as if the internet is a phase, the internet will gradually digitalise everything and cause everything to get a whole lot better.
April 6, 2010 at 8:43 am
It’s really easy now to criticize his findings and thoughts about the internet. He has some good points talking about the search for the date of the Battle of Trafalgar.
Even today, there’s a lot of garbage on the internet, practically anyone can publish some information from unverified sources. It has both good and bad sides.
As to internet failing, well, let’s be honest the internet of 1995 did fail, did it not?
April 9, 2010 at 9:08 am
Yeah the internet was lined up to be pretty shitty, but then I few months after this post I was born and it all changed mwahaha. Also the web was invented…
April 15, 2010 at 7:01 pm
[...] když už jsem u těch predikcí: Why the internet will fail (from 1995). Nj internet will fail, to jste [...]
April 23, 2010 at 10:18 am
Nice blog. Maybe you should try to monetize it with
April 24, 2010 at 8:35 am
I totally agree with Barbara’s comment. Many thanks for sharing such an topical article with all of us. I’ve bookmarked your blog will come back for a re-read again. Keep up the very good work.
April 24, 2010 at 2:36 pm
I’m an olde tyme computer science guy involved with computers starting with punch cards and paper tape with holes in it, so I remember pretty well the shifts in thinking regarding the Internet.
The standard protocol stack for Internet provided a conduit for e-mail between companies, a way for software on one machine to talk to software on another machine, and a way to publish static pages that other people could see in a browser. This all required programmers.
We exploited this conduit by developing software that let people make financial exchanges and this was driven mostly by a proliferation of porn sites.
That trend continues today, although it has exploited our social nature as much as our sexual nature by making us feel more connected to each other and to things we care about.
The reason early computer folks considered it a fad I think was because:
(1) they didn’t forsee how convenient it would become for non-speciallists to create and share content
and …
(2) they underestimated how compelling it would be for people to feel more directly and constantly in touch with each other
And also I think …
(3) they may have suspected that people would not WANT to be constantly available to each other electronically even if it became possible and that this would not be a good thing neccessarily.
We have made “Internet” as it is today much more than a fad obviously, but we have perhaps done so by a combination of leveraging a subset of our abilities and changing our standards and expectations.
We are changing _ourselves_ and the way we live and work to adapt to our technology as well as providing technology for our own needs, and I think the former is what the earlier forecasters often failed to envision.
Or maybe they just didn’t want to think about that possibility. I know it still scares me somewhat.
May 7, 2010 at 2:12 am
[...] >> Zum Abschluss: Why the internet will fail (from 1995) [...]
May 13, 2010 at 1:27 pm
I have to admit, I shared more or less the same opinion, at the time.
May 24, 2010 at 8:20 pm
Some of his points are still very valid. We have not yet, and hopefully never will reach, the exclusively cyber environment that he envisions others envisioning. Yes, commerce has moved heavily to the internet, and social networking is massive and sprawling. But stores aren’t obsolete, and the average everyday person networks online with people he has met in real life. The portion about education is still completely true. Educational electronics are expensive and impersonal and unfit to an environment where the actions of both teacher and student can have great impact. His concluding statements of “No interactive multimedia display comes close to the excitement of a live concert. And who’d prefer cybersex to the real thing?” are entirely true today. Yes, I enjoy streaming concerts, but I’d attend a real one hands down. The internet has made us more connected, yes, but it hasn’t rendered reality obsolete as this article seemed to have thought it might. That future is still looming, however, and while it does much of this is very relevant.
June 3, 2010 at 9:32 pm
Oh boy, I love Al Gore. How do you think he is handeling the seperation?
June 25, 2010 at 5:35 am
The internet is for porn.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T-TA57L0kuc
Andy, June 3, 2010 at 9:32 pm:
Durpa durrrr Al Gore never claimed he invented the internet.
http://www.snopes.com/quotes/internet.asp
You do humanity a great injustice when you repeat things you are told without first verifying their authenticity.
July 2, 2010 at 10:24 am
As a publisher of traditional magazines, I found this article to be very short sighted even for 1995. The reality is, the printed product is going away. It may not happen in 5-10 years but it will happen and smart publishers are looking at ways to capitalize on this inevitability. As a company, we are working on publications that will never be printed in the traditional sense and there are publishers that are way ahead of us in this space. I imagine a day very soon, perhaps with my great grandchildren’s generation, where absolutely everything is done online and the technology will exist to deliver hard goods as instantly as we download music or computer programs. I just hope I am still alive when this happens because the opportunities that will be available will be endless.
July 8, 2010 at 3:54 am
[...] Why the internet will fail (1995) Een artikel uit Newsweek uit 1995 vertelt ons waarom het internet zal falen. [...]
July 23, 2010 at 8:23 pm
1995 has been served
July 26, 2010 at 5:29 pm
Just for fun, I googled the date of the Battle of Trafalgar and got the answer: October 21, 1805 in .25 seconds.
August 3, 2010 at 8:26 pm
It’s absolutely amazing how even major publications of that time were so short-sighted.
My social circle and I suspected at that time where the Internet was heading, and we’re very glad we were proven right.
Today, the Internet has become an indespensible research, and relaxation, tool that is in practically every home and office, and over the years its even worked it’s way into our mobile devices, which is not only awesome but very convenient.
So where will the Internet go in the next few years? We can’t wait to find out.
Cheers,
FJ Torres, Founder
The Cheap Home Insurance Quotes Information Center
August 20, 2010 at 8:34 pm
[...] article, astonishingly titled Why the internet will fail, runs down through the many reasons why Internet would be something we would all get over soon [...]