Interesting how internet boosters in the late 90s/early 2000s told us the internet would revitalize democracy by making it so anyone could publish. I'm not aware of a single cynic who successfully predicted how things actually ended up turning out. Nor have I seen much of an attempt to revisit those early predictions.
> I'm not aware of a single cynic who successfully predicted how things actually ended up turning out.
Let's change that here and now! :)
I was one of the optimists in the very early 2000s when I attended a talk by Columbia professor Eli Noam. In 2002, he wrote an article in the Financial Times called "Why the internet is bad for democracy" which essentially predicted the world is we know it.
I immediately saw that he was right, at least with regard to the fact that it COULD turn out as it has, in fact, turned out. He fundamentally changed my view, way back then. In 2005 a version was published in a more academic context:
“Why the Internet is bad for democracy.” Communications of the ACM 48(10): 57–58 (2005).
Short, densely packed and to the point. It does seem very prescient, although I may be underestimating how clearly these tendencies could already be seen 20 years ago. I, for one, was definitely still in the techno-optimist camp back then.
"Free access to information is indeed helpful, which is why the internet undermines totalitarianism. But it undermines pretty much everything else, too, including democracy."
RMS has seen our troubles with non-free software as early as in 80s. What he has not predict that the software has find even more cruel way of shipping - disservices which do not even allow the freedom 0.
BTW the statement about democracy is not a lie - everyone knows some big and small revolutions happened after someone's post in social networks. Also such things as anonymous news sources, torrents and bitcoin has democraticized a whole lot of things in our lives.
You should play Metal Gear Solid 2, or at least watch the last codec call[1]. See how much you can apply what it talks about to the current year. This game came out a month after 9/11.
Also William Gibson and other cyberpunk franchises. A big recurring theme is the lost fight against corporate interests. A bit worse than the state our world is in right now but certainly where we're heading.
Card's idea that everyone could publish and excellent voices would be amplified was correct in premise, though it's conclusion was completely off. Classic XKCD parodied it brilliantly IMHO: https://xkcd.com/635/
Do you realise we have never had 'democracy' - we have 'representative democracy', a totally different thing. Thousands, perhaps millions of people, vote once every 4-5 years for one person to represent them on thousands of governmental decisions. That person is under no constraints to do what they said to gain your vote either - they can do the exact opposite with no repercussion.
Voting as we have it, is a highly abstract, meta "democracy", with 'the will of the people' effecting a meaningless level of force on the tiller. As per the design.
At least in the US, each person has a lot more than one representative they vote for, with multiple levels of government with different intended scopes. As much as that doesn't completely eliminate the problems you describe, I'd argue that that focus on only the first election listed in the ballot at the expense of the others is one of the (many) causes of how we ended in the state we are today. It's a lot easier for someone to be elected to represent you while ignoring your interests if you don't even know or care about the fact that they're running. If people cared more about local elections (and even federal elections other than for president), there would be at least some increase in pressure for legislative bodies to respond to the will of the people. Without that, the issue isn't even that they're going the opposite of what the people who voted for them want, but the the number of people who voted for them (or even for the candidates they're running against) aren't anywhere close to representative proportion of the population. We don't really know if representative democracy would approximate actual democracy because the people they're representing aren't the full population, but the small segment of politically active ones.
A new Strongbad email was published within the last month, to the surprise of probably everyone left who remembers Homestar Runner. The fun stuff is still out there; it's just not the only stuff there (and never was), and there's probably a lot more of that non-fun stuff too.
Fark and cracked in about 2007 were peak post development, profit motivated Internet. Homestar runner and albino black sheep (shout out to flashback for many fun dmt experiences) in about 2004 was peak fun Internet.
I remember when “browsing the WWW” literally involved scrolling through a categorized list of pages via a portal in Netscape. At the time, the only place I knew to get online was a single PC in the library at UNC Charlotte, where my mother worked. There was a sign next to it explaining what the World Wide Web was. I taught myself to play the guitar using ASCII tabs on the OnLine Guitar Archive.
I used to work on a CEF (Chromium Embedded Framework) integration for an in-house multimedia platform that was kind of like a game engine with distributed real-time rendering. We used https://html5zombo.com routinely to smoke-test: the animation and audio together made it easy to tell when machines were getting out of sync, or when we weren't pushing frames fast enough, or when the audio was broken (as pulseaudio and CEF version updates would often do). Good times.
I was hoping for more… maybe some ending cuts scenes, some recaps of adventures, maybe some cameos from developers… this just seems lazy and like my time/life was a wasted effort…
I remember back in the days the HTTP proxy of Sun Microsystems used to have a similar page when something went wrong. Always tried to find it again, but failed.
I remember when this was new and it was still possible to conceive of the internet as finite. Simpler times. Is it possible to view the internet as finite these days? Is it actually possible to turn out the lights (touch grass) these days?
The thing that finally let it sink in that things were growing at an inconceivable rate was when I realized my chances of mistyping a URL and being lead to a blank page was in the thousandths of a percent. Between giant companies buying up typos to prevent phishing attacks and holding companies domain squatting almost every single combination of words and phrases now has a viable URL. Even my former go to example for a useless URL that went unused for the seventeen years I knew it, "skeeble", actually goes to a Chinese domain squat now.
Dead Internet Theory seems the new iteration... not finite in extent but in novelty maybe, a small mirror maze with infinite reflections on a very small set of themes.
It was fun while it lasted.
For me the high point was Fark or maybe Homestar and the low point was obviosuly Facebook... or maybe the end of Democracy.
Interesting how internet boosters in the late 90s/early 2000s told us the internet would revitalize democracy by making it so anyone could publish. I'm not aware of a single cynic who successfully predicted how things actually ended up turning out. Nor have I seen much of an attempt to revisit those early predictions.
> I'm not aware of a single cynic who successfully predicted how things actually ended up turning out.
Let's change that here and now! :)
I was one of the optimists in the very early 2000s when I attended a talk by Columbia professor Eli Noam. In 2002, he wrote an article in the Financial Times called "Why the internet is bad for democracy" which essentially predicted the world is we know it.
I immediately saw that he was right, at least with regard to the fact that it COULD turn out as it has, in fact, turned out. He fundamentally changed my view, way back then. In 2005 a version was published in a more academic context: “Why the Internet is bad for democracy.” Communications of the ACM 48(10): 57–58 (2005).
Here's the FT version: https://www.citicolumbia.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/01/Why-...
That was startlingly accurate! Thanks for sharing.
Any idea if he's published anything recently? A quick Google seems to show a textbook a few years back and then not much recently.
Short, densely packed and to the point. It does seem very prescient, although I may be underestimating how clearly these tendencies could already be seen 20 years ago. I, for one, was definitely still in the techno-optimist camp back then.
"Free access to information is indeed helpful, which is why the internet undermines totalitarianism. But it undermines pretty much everything else, too, including democracy."
Indeed.
RMS has seen our troubles with non-free software as early as in 80s. What he has not predict that the software has find even more cruel way of shipping - disservices which do not even allow the freedom 0.
BTW the statement about democracy is not a lie - everyone knows some big and small revolutions happened after someone's post in social networks. Also such things as anonymous news sources, torrents and bitcoin has democraticized a whole lot of things in our lives.
You should play Metal Gear Solid 2, or at least watch the last codec call[1]. See how much you can apply what it talks about to the current year. This game came out a month after 9/11.
[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eKl6WjfDqYA
Related: https://www.dexerto.com/gaming/hideo-kojima-says-metal-gear-... (title: Hideo Kojima says Metal Gear Solid 2 became the future he hoped would not happen)
"AI will democratize education and information access as everyone will have their own personal tutor and librarian!"
History repeats
Earth by David Brin and Ender’s Game made some predictions in this area
Also William Gibson and other cyberpunk franchises. A big recurring theme is the lost fight against corporate interests. A bit worse than the state our world is in right now but certainly where we're heading.
I vaguely remember “The Nets” in Enders game but not how they functioned. What about Card’s portrayal did you find prescient?
Card's idea that everyone could publish and excellent voices would be amplified was correct in premise, though it's conclusion was completely off. Classic XKCD parodied it brilliantly IMHO: https://xkcd.com/635/
It did, then piracy happened, couple revolutions in Middle East followed, and the crackdown on English-speaking social media began.
Do you realise we have never had 'democracy' - we have 'representative democracy', a totally different thing. Thousands, perhaps millions of people, vote once every 4-5 years for one person to represent them on thousands of governmental decisions. That person is under no constraints to do what they said to gain your vote either - they can do the exact opposite with no repercussion.
Voting as we have it, is a highly abstract, meta "democracy", with 'the will of the people' effecting a meaningless level of force on the tiller. As per the design.
At least in the US, each person has a lot more than one representative they vote for, with multiple levels of government with different intended scopes. As much as that doesn't completely eliminate the problems you describe, I'd argue that that focus on only the first election listed in the ballot at the expense of the others is one of the (many) causes of how we ended in the state we are today. It's a lot easier for someone to be elected to represent you while ignoring your interests if you don't even know or care about the fact that they're running. If people cared more about local elections (and even federal elections other than for president), there would be at least some increase in pressure for legislative bodies to respond to the will of the people. Without that, the issue isn't even that they're going the opposite of what the people who voted for them want, but the the number of people who voted for them (or even for the candidates they're running against) aren't anywhere close to representative proportion of the population. We don't really know if representative democracy would approximate actual democracy because the people they're representing aren't the full population, but the small segment of politically active ones.
A new Strongbad email was published within the last month, to the surprise of probably everyone left who remembers Homestar Runner. The fun stuff is still out there; it's just not the only stuff there (and never was), and there's probably a lot more of that non-fun stuff too.
Fark and cracked in about 2007 were peak post development, profit motivated Internet. Homestar runner and albino black sheep (shout out to flashback for many fun dmt experiences) in about 2004 was peak fun Internet.
A good friend of mine, god honest truth, met his now-wife on Fark less than three years ago. Sure is somethin.
I still don't understand what happened to stumbledupon. That was INTERNET! for me.
The high point was the original useless pages (especially the uselessness of pi.) Its been downhill since then.
My minimalist version has a better domain name:
http://endinter.net/
The Internet is a mere 23 PiB according to the graphic. These days you can fit that on just a few racks.
Can even get it in a single rack if you use SSDs
A few ounces is all we need!
https://www.wired.com/story/weight-of-the-internet/
Me finishing browsing the final page of the WWW in 1993. "Well, that was fun. Back to IRC."
I remember when “browsing the WWW” literally involved scrolling through a categorized list of pages via a portal in Netscape. At the time, the only place I knew to get online was a single PC in the library at UNC Charlotte, where my mother worked. There was a sign next to it explaining what the World Wide Web was. I taught myself to play the guitar using ASCII tabs on the OnLine Guitar Archive.
I remember buying print magazines that published the hottest new URLs, with screenshots!
Reminded me of this commercial
https://youtu.be/_uXtWIg_A7M?si=h0FSN79T5SDoUuGm
https://zombo.com !!
Oh but reaching zombo.com is only the beginning. You can do anything on zombo.com!
I used to work on a CEF (Chromium Embedded Framework) integration for an in-house multimedia platform that was kind of like a game engine with distributed real-time rendering. We used https://html5zombo.com routinely to smoke-test: the animation and audio together made it easy to tell when machines were getting out of sync, or when we weren't pushing frames fast enough, or when the audio was broken (as pulseaudio and CEF version updates would often do). Good times.
I was hoping for more… maybe some ending cuts scenes, some recaps of adventures, maybe some cameos from developers… this just seems lazy and like my time/life was a wasted effort…
The developers never thought you'd make it this far.
What year do we predict internet.zip would be downloadable in say one day.
It occurs to me that downloading e.g. llama.cpp kind of is like downloading the whole internet? Or a very lossy-compressed version of it.
Yes I've thought the same. It's pretty cool. Not terribly functional but yeah
October 30th, 1969. After that it started to grow uncontrollably and quickly became unwieldy
Ha ha. I meant the particular snapshotted internet.zip with alleged file size on that site.
With a 100 Gbps connection, it would take 21.3 days, so it needs to get about 21x better than that.
I remember this used to be www.wwwdotcom.com but it seems the internet lasted longer than that page did.
Reminds me of this classic bit: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iDbyYGrswtg
I remember back in the days the HTTP proxy of Sun Microsystems used to have a similar page when something went wrong. Always tried to find it again, but failed.
https://thispageintentionallyleftblank.org/
Theres no way this is seriously the end of the internet? Is this confirmed?
more or less correct. after that, it's all rehashes of the same material as memes and social nonsense. It's all services, no content
Hmmm this isn’t https://endoftheinter.net
This is up since at least February 2006.
In 6 weeks that'll be 20 years ago.. how did 20 years disappear like that?
It became part of the hologram that is the universe and time....
I'm pretty sure the page itself has existed before then, just at a different location. For example, here's a page from 2000 that's in the Internet Archive that looks kind of similar: https://web.archive.org/web/20000115232652/http://www.shibum...
Recall the classic bash.org quote:
"I beat the internet. The last guy was hard."
Makes sense for the last guy to be a gooner, that's why the internet was born!
I mean, finally.
Now that we've reached the end of the Internet, enjoy instructions on how to get OFF the Internet.
https://doctorsensei.com/how-to-get-off-the-internet.html
I remember when this was new and it was still possible to conceive of the internet as finite. Simpler times. Is it possible to view the internet as finite these days? Is it actually possible to turn out the lights (touch grass) these days?
The thing that finally let it sink in that things were growing at an inconceivable rate was when I realized my chances of mistyping a URL and being lead to a blank page was in the thousandths of a percent. Between giant companies buying up typos to prevent phishing attacks and holding companies domain squatting almost every single combination of words and phrases now has a viable URL. Even my former go to example for a useless URL that went unused for the seventeen years I knew it, "skeeble", actually goes to a Chinese domain squat now.
Dead Internet Theory seems the new iteration... not finite in extent but in novelty maybe, a small mirror maze with infinite reflections on a very small set of themes.
omg I haven't seen this in years! :D
you came back? keep planting trees!
Why was it the end of the internet?
I don't understand.
Geez ... that's a heckuvalotta pron consumption ...