William Gibson Predicts in 1997 How the Internet Will Change Our World (2019)
openculture.com
openculture.com
With corporations doing their best to remove that ability, and consumers gladly buying curated experience boxes, it all might culminate with an encapsulated silo park selling all you can eat broadcasting (think one-way directed stream, with consumer only getting to send back analytics). So in a way, Gibson got very many things right, maybe even the core thing. I remember thinking in the 90's "Oh, he got it so wrong, the Internet changes everything". Hah.
Alan Kay's "the computer revolution has not happened yet" is more relevant today than ever [1]. It's up to us to change that.
[0]I think JWZ (Jaimie Zawinski) spoke about that in "Coders at work", can't find the exact source.
[1]PDF: http://worrydream.com/refs/Kay%20-%20The%20Real%20Computer%2... There's also a youtube video of his presentation https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aYT2se94eU0
I hope this is succinct to show the fundamental difference between the ideas behind the Internet and TV.
Video was 60% of downstream internet traffic in 2019. "Go the way of the TV" as a metaphor may be interpreted in may ways. Early idealists saw TV as bringing Shakespeare to the masses. We know how that went.
Yes — it went well. Shakespeare wrote for mainstream audiences. There's bad TV just like there are bad plays, but there's plenty of great TV that will become tomorrow's classics.
There are great movies (I can't think of any released in the last 15 years though), worthy to be called Art and talked about for generations to come, but great TV? More like absolute brain rotting garbage that's contributing to our cultural degeneration and artistic suicide.
Mainstream Internet with the Facebooks and the Googles is not far behind.
And certain people threw absolute tantrums that Elvis and his gyrating hips on television was “cultural degeneracy” of the worst kind. Since they didn’t personally know anything of modern music they were sure that their generation had far better music.
Parents absolutely freaked out over packed stadiums of suburban kids singing along to Little Richard’s “Good Golly Miss Molly, you sure like to ball.” And you guessed it, they were crying about cultural “degeneracy.”
And certain people in the 60s and 70s stamped their feet in anger and shook their fists at the sky that Led Zeppelin was nothing but noise and the Beatles were admitting on television that they ...[audible gasp]... did drugs! They decried the “degeneracy” and that society was falling and that music hasn’t been good since their days when wholesome Elvis and Little Richard were popular.
In the 90s this group convinced themselves “degenerates” Marilyn Manson and Slayer and Rap were a sure sign that music was dead and that music hadn’t been good since the days when good music like The Beatles and Led Zeppelin were popular
Many in every generation are totally convinced that their generation was the last generation to make “good” music.
And perhaps more troubling, there’s a certain group of people who are obsessed with “degeneracy”
Yes. The masses got to see Shakespeare.
At school we spent a year on Julius Caesar. Now, the problem with these plays as literary material is that they're intended to be performed. The school was able (with support from parents) to ship students to see one performance of the play they were studying at a professional theatre (in our case a Royal Shakespeare Company performance) but for an entire year's English classes that's a pretty poor ratio.
However we could watch (video recordings of) several different TV adaptations of this work during class, we could see a staging with "authentic" Roman backgrounds and a cast dressed in togas, and we could see the same scenes re-imagined as a Present Day drama. Short of having us actually put together a performance ourselves (this was English class, not drama) I don't see a better way to actually teach these plays.
What I'm reading here is the usual nostalgia for an imagined past. If you wanted the Internet to make the masses suddenly better educated and more interested in expressing themselves then you've made a mistake just as if you expected the city park to make the masses healthier and more interested in running. This is infrastructure, it's necessary but not sufficient.
Also, surely the least healthy thing the Internet did so far was create the Twitter pile-on? Which is totally user ability to participate, create and learn, it's just that they will participate in hating today's Milkshake Duck, they will create memes and awful jokes about Milkshake Duck, and they will go out of their way to learn other reasons to believe that actually Milkshake Duck was always awful and anybody who thought otherwise ought to be next in the pillory.
> nostalgia for an imagined past
You can read it however you like, I have actively worked on making the imagined future, it just happens to be envisioned in the past as no better vision has somehow emerged. Do contemplate the reason.
General use computing with users in control is a humanist imperative.
Governments too. It's an international network but they all want to impose their laws on it. We'll probably end up with fragmented regional networks instead of a single global network. We'll probably see heavy filtering at the borders. Even if we use mesh networks to eliminate the need for centralized ISPs, they depend on radio to work so authorities can always track down and stop everyone running a node.
We are privileged to have experienced the true internet before the powers that be destroyed it. A true global network where data used to flow freely. I'll miss it.
That's a really bleak future. I wish there were politicians that fought to keep these kinds of freedoms.
I believe we'll eventually end up with ubiquitous technology empowering an ungovernable population or totalitarian governments that control all technology by force.
Watch this talk by the creator of lichess: https://www.infoq.com/fr/presentations/lichessorg-open-sourc.... Do you use Wikipedia?
I personally expect free and open software and services to win in the long run. I think we’ll also see more small companies like Craigslist that completely dominate their segment in a way that’s net positive to society without significantly warping our governments. And in some cases, corporations legitimately are the best stewards. I think that’s fine.
My point is that I extrapolate current trends very differently than you seem to be. You can start a complicated service easier than ever. We’ve reached a point where it only takes one motivated individual to seed a community, build something truly user-oriented, and completely supplant the corporate/profit-driven alternatives.
Generally speaking, I like your optimism. In the case of Craigslist, as great as it is, one effect has been the crashing of classified ad revenues for local newspapers... which, ultimately, warps governments through the absence of good, local, investigative journalism.
The Internet will always be run by geeks and technophiles and taking away the ability to tinker is akin to cultural genocide. It would be like killing off a whole race of people (the geeks). Even if the megacorps water the Internet down to a curated and sanitized version, there will always be pockets of the web run by indie developers who like to exchange techne[0] and advance the web.
governments forcing installation of encryption subversion. governments banning encryption. manufacturers looking to completely lock down what software is allowed to run on their devices. MS flirting with that direction for their os as well. Push for de-anonymization on the internet, from all directions.Internet of things that all call home and do tell.
List can go on for quite a while... "The cyberpunk we deserve", as the popular Russian meme goes.
>The electrons streaming into a child’s eye from the screen of the wooden television are as physical as anything else. As physical as the neurons subsequently moving along that child’s optic nerves.
He's from the school of American SF writing that Stanisław Lem criticised (Lem wrote actual criticism as well as his SF that's in the form of criticism of works that don't actually exist, which was translated as "A Perfect Vacuum").
I don't have much time for this myself, preferring writers to speculate about things they actually know something about - but he's been very successful.
The cells that "move along" nerves in the PNS to support neural development are Schwann cells that would not be considered "neurons", but that's a minor slip in terminology. The basics is entirely correct.
So now you've learned what was wrong with that sentence.
He's writing about how these things impact human life, and details like this don't really matter at that level.
He's shared many more follow up comments about those predictions and how things are shaping up differently since