It might all still go the way of the TV [0]. We've been seeing the demise of general computing in real time. The current generation may be the last that got to pop the hood on the internal workings of the Internet, from inspecting HTML source of a web-page to disassembly of whatever was running it, if source code was not available (or at least port scanning and possible stack bashing).
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.
This is way more bleak than the reality, IMO. The biggest tech companies are thriving on the back of free software, and producing a bunch of free software themselves in the meantime.
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.
> 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
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.
> With corporations doing their best to remove that ability
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.
I wonder if this will give rise to more darknets. Perhaps one day communicating across the border without sharing that communication with your government will be treated the same as smuggling.
That's a really bleak future. I wish there were politicians that fought to keep these kinds of freedoms.
Yeah, it's bleak. The truth is free computing and communications are subversive technologies. They allows us to lock them out, to evade their controls and laugh at their authority. They make laws, people make technology to get around them. With every iteration, the tyranny required to maintain the same level of control over the governed is increased. They won't tolerate these games for much longer. Even more importantly, technology allows us to effectively organize opposition to those in power and that's something they absolutely won't tolerate. Western governments are already surveilling even peaceful protesters.
I believe we'll eventually end up with ubiquitous technology empowering an ungovernable population or totalitarian governments that control all technology by force.
In my opinion totalitarian governments willl not allow an ungovernable population to exist anywhere on the globe. Also, a majority of the population will not care as long as they're fed and amused. It's still just about food and games.
I don’t really understand. In your TV analogy, what is analogous to looking at HTML source code? Looking at composite video on an oscilloscope? You seem to imply that at one time we had a more open age of TV, but now TV is all locked down, and you’re worried that the same might happen to the Internet and/or computing?
The Internet and WWW may be seen as to be de-evolving from open standards, open access, and user ability to participate, create, and learn.
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.
> Early idealists saw TV as bringing Shakespeare to the masses. We know how that went.
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.
I would direct you towards Kay's original argument.
> 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.
> 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.
Mention one great TV show that even remotely compares to Shakespeare. Maybe the Sopranos. Maybe. That's pretty much it.
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.
We have to remember that certain people were wholly convinced that Jazz in the early 20th century was evidence that the Jazz generation with all of its “degeneracy” would destroy civilization because the music in their generation was somehow pure or whatever.
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”
Well, there used to be "cable access" shows where you could apply to broadcast your own program to a local audience. People today may be familiar with the concept as a plot point in the movie "Wayne's World". Of course having a Youtube channel in the modern era is a similar concept which can reach a much larger audience.
Could you use your standard TV to take a part of a broadcast, edit at will and re-send it? Key is, even for cable TV, you had to apply. Add the need to have special, extra gear. The internet silos today, removing access at whim and limiting what users can do on their platforms, are essentially taking on that role of a broadcaster while avoiding responsibilities imposed on publishers, a clever trick.
I hope this is succinct to show the fundamental difference between the ideas behind the Internet and TV.
The Internet is largely run by the geeks and is a sort of mecca for geeks, all pepped up on caffeine, or some even enjoy using illegal nootropics to create websites and this would give them superhuman unfair advantage over the general population. (Of course you have to be intelligent in the first place for nootropics/stimulants to really shine).
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.
Pockets of resistance will always remain, absolutely. Shall having a general computing device be a crime then? Quite possibly.
Today:
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.
I started reading that essay, and then ran into two back-to-back howlers:
>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.
Not sure what's wrong with that sentence. A CRT screen works via an electron gun (cathode) literally shooting an electron beam at the screen; then the screen emits even more electrons towards the viewer and the typical glow is experienced as a side effect of that.
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.
The things streaming into the child's eyes are photons. If the electrons from the cathode stream into the child's eyes you're charging the child up with electricity and it'll get a nasty shock when subsequently grounded.
So now you've learned what was wrong with that sentence.
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.
It tickles me to know that, for all the future-gazing technology-laden stories he spun, that his seminal novel Neuromancer was composed on a typewriter
So-called hard science fiction writers do not seem to make more plausible predictions about the future. It's not clear they are even trying to, since plausibility doesn't necessarily mean entertaining. The so called hard science fiction writer just throws some references to math or physics among the implausible world building.
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