this was just like two years before going to PARC. I finished my PhD. I started thinking about this. I said, “If we’re gonna do a personal computer”—and that’s what I wanted PARC to do and that’s what we wound up doing [with the Alto]—”the children have to be completely full-fledged users of this thing.”
Think about what this means in the context of say, a Mac, an iPhone, an iPad. They aren’t full-fledged users. They’re just television watchers of different kinds.
…how successful is the iPhone? It’s about as successful as you can get, so that matches you up with something that is the logical equivalent of television in our time.
Around 1995, the Suits discovered the World Wide Web. Their reaction: this is going to be television on steroids! Media giants will rule the earth, as the Internet becomes a vehicle for mass entertainment.
At that time, the Geeks thought differently. The architecture of the Net was peer-to-peer. You did not need large amounts of capital to build a business. Instead, personal computers, with access to the Net, were putting the means of production in the hands of the individual. Government would be powerless to control or censor the Net.
As of now, doesn’t it seem like the Suits were right? Maybe they thought that some of the old media powerhouses would do better than they have done, and maybe they didn’t foresee upstarts like Facebook. But the industry structure seems much more oriented to mass entertainment than those of us on the Geek side would have expected.
I think this was basically inevitable, given the market. Most people don’t want to build web sites; they want a better way to watch TV, listen to the radio, and send greeting cards to their friends. The old Internet of the 90s was never something that was going to scale to the masses.
And it’s not the like Geeks’ Internet has disappeared. It’s just been overshadowed by the Suits’ Internet.
Most of the interview is actually about the iPhone, not the internet, although Kay does disparage the HTML standard too (calls it “reinventing the flat tire”). On the iPhone, I think Kay would say that the Geeks’ vision has disappeared, not merely been overshadowed. He agrees that, “Simple things should be simple, complex things should be possible,” which in this context means that one should be able to use the iPhone as a fancy TV without needing to learn anything but that one should also be able to use the iPhone for computing, if one is willing to learn computing. He gives an example that you can’t do an “undo” on the iPhone unless an app allows it and, more generally, “you can’t even find out how to use the iPhone on the iPhone.” The interview as a whole is actually quite interesting.
Open with a (nerdy) joke: I once has a friend who worked at the Midwest Research Institute, which did some work for NASA at that time. Like most corporate environments, the scientists frequently used the phrase, “the suits” to refer to management types, often with more than little acid in their tone. Well, one day, one of his colleagues walked in, all in a huff and full of bile, and said he was going to put the suits in the freezer until they broke into pieces. They actually did have a big, walk-in, extreme-low-pressure freezer for experiments, and so my friend immediately visualized the worse as a mental reflex. He was understandably shocked and told his colleague to calm down, don’t do anything crazy, and what had management done this time to get his so upset?
A few moments of mutual, total confusion later, he learned that his colleague was having frustrating trouble with leaky space suits under brief exposures to cold conditions, and so, indulging in a bit of a rhetorical flourish, he was merely expressing his annoying and saying that he was going to hang them in the freezer all weekend hoping the problem areas would become more apparent.Ba Dum, Ptsht….
Anyway, to answer the question, you have to break the internet apart into media and non-media categories.
When it comes to media (including social interaction media), the suits were mostly right. Most of the time most people spend on the media internet seems to be either consuming mass entertainment from major, mainstream content producers on just a few platforms (e.g. Netflix, Hulu, Amazon, Apple, etc.), or “multimedia socializing” via Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, etc. Few people are inclined to create content of any type, especially “literary culture” content.
There is something inherent in the economics and social role of media that really does seem to create an inevitable “power law” / “Average Is Over” / extreme inequality distribution, where most everyone tends to converge on the same few top outlets. There is a fractal essence to this phenomenon as well, which is that in any niche or subculture, one can observe the same distribution.
Similarly, my own impression is that if you take any group of humans or entities pursuing any kind of activities, the top 10% of any of those groups does not just perform a little better, but usually reflects a complete qualitative shift in being a “class above” in some important way. And if you take that top 10% group, then the top 10% of those people are also another class above the average for that subgroup.
Price’s Law.
I think even in the relatively early days of the Internet people were aware of power laws when it comes to content creation. Indeed, part of the point was that the Internet made financially feasible these “long tail” interactions.
I think the question now is whether infrastructure providers (CDNs, DNSs) and content distributors (app stores, digital marketplaces, etc.) will collude to block out the long tail?
Everyone may buy books from Amazon and get their news from Twitter, but does that mean that people will stop writing and reading blogs?
My hunch is that only about 20% of people strongly and passionately view the internet as a tool to “better” themselves, whatever that means. The other 80% of the people view it largely as an entertainment machine, or they view that as one of its most salient and noteworthy benefits.
It might be more like 10%, not 20%.
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Something I often wonder is what people did before television came along. A relative of mine in her 80s, who didn’t see television in her circles until college or afterwards, tells me there was much more sitting around talking. Endlessly. The opportunity cost of that behavior was low–what else was there to do?
There are always different choices for how to spend one’s time. Homer Hickam (Maybe in _Rocket Boys__ ) wrote that in his West Virginia town the men tended to view spare time as an opportunity to drink– or to tinker with machinery / gadgets. “Drink or tinker.”
One essay worth pondering is Paul Graham’s _Accelleration of Addictiveness_. TV is better than it used to be in terms of its ability to hold attention. Crack is more addictiveness than cocaine.
Experts on gambling say that slot machines (and casino marketing) are more enticing. Slots now provide more “near miss” experiences than previously.
http://www.paulgraham.com/addiction.html
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A final thought: people like stories. Steven Pinker and the late Denis Dutton have remarked on the human craving for stories / drama / epics that seems to be part of our evolutionary wiring. Now you don’t have to go see an opera or a play, or even read a book–you just flip a switch.
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A final thought is sports. Some people keep going with sports (performaning them) as long as possible. But what percentage?
Sports, music performance–I’m leaving things out. Politics. Pets.
I think we can separate out two things: (1) do small-timers have a viable way of publishing stuff without being part of a club. (2) is this a bigger deal, in terms of eyball volumes than traditional enternment.
The interweb still makes (1) true — there are various threats and challenges, but the mere fact mass-media are also on the web doesn’t change that.
(2) never was going to be true. But it would be interesting to see, if we added all mass-media up, whether over the web or not — then has it gained or lost importance relative to small-timer publication. My money is on loss.
Finally there is (1.5) the nature of mass media changes in order to move to the web. YouTube is primarily an entertainment machine, run by the largest comunications conlgomerate the world has known, but it works very differntly from a TV network. Small timers set up channels and try their luck. Most YT views are for a smallish number of popular videos, but Disney has little influence of which videos they — and Google has even less.
i think part of the issue is technical. It is almost always easier and faster to build and manage an Internet service as a centralized (usually server based) system. Given the importance of time to market and adaptability in this market, it is usually true that a centralized implementation will win out, at least in the beginning. Centralized systems are much more suit friendly, especially if you consider part of the suit domain to be regulatory.
Yes, the Suits won, money always wins I guess. At one time, most written content on the web was just bloggers (like yourself) with no ulterior motives. Now, bullshit blogs selling you something are the majority – marketing/advertising industry has taken over the internet wholesale just like TV before it.
And its not a “best of both” worlds solution simply because there is still good content out there. It takes 10x more effort to find good content than PR trash, and it gets harder everyday. So the internet has become much much worse.
I’m not sure what is to be done about it – ultimately its just the influence of money pulling the strings. People who wrote/created because they had something to say are drowned out by people who will say anything that gets ad revenue. When 20% of the ENTIRE US GDP is controlled by advertising/marketing… they have enough money to subvert any platform.
By the way, Kay might have predicted that the internet would just become fancy television. He says, “Suppose you want to make a lot of money. Well, just take the top 20 human universals and build a technological amplifier for them.” Human universals are things that we don’t need to exert effort to learn, and consuming entertainment doesn’t require exerting effort to learn. Kay might not have like the result, but he isn’t necessarily surprised by it.
The hard-geek vision is alive and well – there is the Ardunio and the Raspberry Pi. Those are real tools for real work.
There’s not really a Usenet any more. Pity. That was the seat of all the anarchy.
If you think the content landscape is all rosy, direct your attention to r/television on Reddit. Indeed, it may well be that Reddit and the like are the real innovation on a television-like media experience. But people there are fantastically grumpy about the strangest things.
Another related observation: the IT Suits in nearly all organizations would prefer to deal with interchangeable (and easily replaceable) sub-Suits with MSCEs managing corporate-blessed systems rather than unruly Geeks. Understandable, probably. But it narrows professional opportunities for Geeks.
The internet is a ubiquitous network. You can imprint other ideas onto it if you want, but that’s all it is.
The suits and the geeks both are getting nearly unlimited access to this network. A blog like this, or any web site, really, can be put up for almost nothing, and people can write or publish almost anything they want. Ideas expressed on blogs sometimes percolate up to the highest levels.
They can publish a video for virtually nothing too. Sometimes these emergent videos go viral. No one has to pay up to get it done.
On the other hand, suits get the same tool too. The internet allows anyone to publish content, but it doesn’t change the inherent dynamics of attention. We like famous people. We like great basketball a lot more than good basketball. We may like cat videos, but we also like photo-realistic scenes of dragons defeating armies. In a world where anyone can seek your attention, big has its place.
At least so far, no one has won or lost anything.
The internet is not a zero sum game. The geeks have won far more than the suits.
The architecture of the Net was peer-to-peer. You did not need large amounts of capital to build a business. Instead, personal computers, with access to the Net, were putting the means of production in the hands of the individual. Government would be powerless to control or censor the Net.
And how much censor is there on the Internet? Any reasonable opinion can be voiced and judging by the trash the Russian Bots were churning out you can get away with a lot on the internet. How many images were there of a Jewish person in a gas chamber with Trump holding switch? A lot. And there were not arrest here. So this is not government censorship.
The main issue is the private companies are doing the censoring as the government is not acting. So people liek Paula Dean, Google’ Damore or Colin Kaetpatrick have all suffered economically for their speech but there have been no arrest and the only area where the government was calling Colin a Son of a Bitch.
“full fledged user” sounds far too much like “owning the means of production”. Most people do NOT want the responsibility of being owners, nor of being full users — if that means doing work creating stuff.
Most folk DO want to be rich, like Spanish conquistadors wanted to own large swaths of land and have others do all the work; like aristocrats throughout history.
My 12 yr old son DOES do a little creation of game scenarios (for Age of Mythology), but that’s easy, half-entertainment, too.
Advertising needs to be more highly taxed, directly — and used to supplement SS funds (which are going to soon be getting less than they pay out).
Most middle class and richer folk buy more of what they want, than what they need. And all infotainment, including blog reading, is done because the consumer wants it.
One’s desires can be considered superior to another’s desires, but that’s a lot of what tribalism and divisiveness is all about. The internet allows folks to express more of what they want, including the horrible stuff (snuff films & rape, etc.).
Allowing the expression of desire might also lead to more attempts to fulfill the horrible desires. That might be true, but I haven’t seen clear evidence of this — altho coordination of terrorism does seem to be related.