by munaf on 7/22/18, 6:22 AM with 62 comments
by scalio on 7/22/18, 8:09 AM
> 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 cacophony more closely resembles citizens band radio, complete with handles, harrassment, and anonymous threats. When most everyone shouts, few listen.
> 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 obsolete. So how come my local mall does more business in an afternoon than the entire Internet handles in a month?
> 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.
by lordnacho on 7/22/18, 8:26 AM
When I was a kid in the 90s news and information was curated. If you read an opinion in the paper it was some guy who'd been writing for a long time, who'd done the background reading, and who normally presented things in a balanced way, whatever his leaning was. Nowadays you can find just about any extreme view, badly written in an aggressive or sarcastic tone, and ignorant of the history of the topic. It's not necessarily good to always have the sober and historically informed opinion, but it sure would be good to have it most of the time.
Not sure if he mentioned this, but it's also gotten a lot easier to find like minded uninformed people. I'm still undecided about whether flat earthers are all kidding, but if they aren't you can see how hard it's going to be to climb out of that intellectual hole. There's now conferences and loads of websites about the Bedford Level experiment, and all sorts of other flat earth tropes.
by emacsen on 7/22/18, 12:03 PM
His name is Clifford Stoll and he was a physicist and early Internet user. He wrote the book "The Cuckoo's Egg" which should be required reading for all sys-admins.
In the mid-90s, he saw the Internet as something akin to Fahrenheit 451 and began preaching how it would tear us apart as a society. To that end, he wrote Silicon Snake Oil and articles like this one, which combines philosophy and cultural observations (the mob mentality of the crowd) with nonsensical conclusions based on the current technology (ie that online shopping would never be a big thing). I was never sure if he genuinely believed that it wasn't possible, or if he was merely trying to make the web less appealing somehow to prevent it from happening.
Years later he started to sell Klein Bottles on his website. I'm not sure if he still does, but in the year 2000, you could order them from him and he'd take your order over the phone. I ordered a few and it was fun to talk to him.
by finknotal on 7/22/18, 8:01 AM
Beautiful example of article where the author was skeptical based on the wild west of the current state of technology. What current technology is the same? VR? Self driving cars?
by planck01 on 7/22/18, 8:06 AM
by gboudrias on 7/22/18, 8:06 AM
Still, a good lesson: It remains too easy to miss the forest for the trees. We never wanted salesmen or paper, what we actually wanted were products and information. In other words, it's easy to forget that the technology is not the product, just a vehicle for it.
by NegatioN on 7/22/18, 8:39 AM
It's quite hard to know who to listen to, and who is telling something objectively true in this environment, since everyone's voice has the same weight. And there are too many of them to sift through, so many probably end up listening to people who pander to them.
by EGreg on 7/22/18, 10:51 AM
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.
I have spent the last 7 years and nearly $1 million dollars building such a platform. It’s free and open source but we have yet to make the marketing for it. It needs to be clear how to get started with it, and a community needs to grow. Going to release it later this year. Maybe Nov 5th?
by bwldrbst on 7/22/18, 9:17 AM
Also, the fact that there's a typo directly above the phrase "Lacking editors, reviewers or critics" made me chuckle.
by ikt on 7/22/18, 8:11 AM
by _bxg1 on 7/22/18, 1:51 PM
by linkmotif on 7/22/18, 11:23 AM
by arisAlexis on 7/22/18, 10:37 PM
by adamnemecek on 7/22/18, 8:06 AM