In the winter of 1993, a group of us at Freddie Mac visited snowbound Albany, New York, to meet with some researchers at General Electric about their automated underwriting project. But while higher-ups were conferring, one of the nerds took me down to the basement to show me Mosaic, the first graphical browser for the World Wide Web. At that point, I became a net-head.
George Gilder’s Microcosm, which came out in 1989, taught me the economics of the microchip. Gilder liked to point out that silicon is just sand, so that the materials are not what is valuable. Instead, it is the ideas used to design the chip.
Ed Krol’s The Whole Internet User’s Guide and Catalog, published in 1992, was an outstanding introduction to the Internet. He explained a packet-switched network using the Pony Express as a metaphor. Anyone interested in getting a feel for what the Internet was like at that point, before the Web really took off, should get hold of that book.
Hal Varian was perhaps the most important influence. He maintained a site that offered FAQs on the Internet for economists. I wrote to him with a question, and he sent me an early copy of his paper with MacKie-Mason on the economics of the Internet. They pointed out that a packet-switched network reduces line usage and increases the use of switches. But switch costs were falling quickly relative to line costs, thanks to Moore’s Law. So you could predict that the Internet would take over telecommunications.
Varian also pointed me to The Economy of Ideas, an article in Wired about the way that the Internet was driving the cost of distributing information close to zero. This had clear implications for the future of publishing words, music, and so on. Varian and Carl Shapiro later published a classic book on this topic, Information Rules.
When I corresponded with Varian, he was in library science at Berkeley. In a previous life for both of us, he taught a one-quarter course in MIT’s graduate microeconomic theory sequence. In a subsequent life, he became chief economist at Google, where his contributions included work on the advertising auction.
The MIT alumni club of the greater Washington DC area had a series of dinner talks in 1993 that included one by Vint Cerf (who I believe was a last-minute substitute). Cerf explained how the Internet was governed, by the Internet Engineering Task Forces and the Requests for Comment (RFC’s), which settled Internet standardization issues. This might have been what first nudged me in the direction of libertarianism, because it showed how voluntary cooperation could solve problems. Where a government agency lasts forever and never solves the problem, with the IETFs, a committee would form, solve a problem, and then disappear!
But the Net in those days was a case of “When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro.” Wired Magazine was filled with futuristic, counter-cultural articles written by “Net-heads.” George Gilder took up a lot of space discussing prospects for increased bandwidth (this was when people like me were getting the Internet over regular telephone lines using 14.4 baud modems) in a series of articles that he later collected into the book Telecosm. He correctly predicted that phone lines would be replaced by cellular and that over-the-air television would be obsolete.
Internet World had a wacked-out hippie type named Christopher Locke. He foresaw the Web as a vast market. Reading him convinced me to quit my job at Freddie Mac to start a commercial web site. He eventually collaborated with David Weinberger, Doc Searls, and Rick Levine on a book called The Cluetrain Manifesto. One of their taglines was “Markets are conversations.”
One of the characteristics of a packet-switching network, and the feature that attracted the interest of the military long before packet-switching became economical, is that if part of the network goes down, another part of the network delivers the packets by a different route. This gave rise to John Gilmore’s famous metaphor that “The Internet interprets censorship as damage and routes around it.” And while I’m recycling quotes from that era, how about Williamm Gibson–“The future is here. It’s just not evenly distributed.”
There was a lot of this bigness-defying rhetoric in those days. Dan Pink wrote Free Agent Nation, in which he claimed that the Internet gave the “means of production” to freelance Internet workers. David P. Reed and others thought that the spectrum could be turned into a commons, communication devices could be made intelligent enough to avoid interfering with one another.
The net-heads were good at pointing at the way that the Internet would undermine a lot of legacy business models. But they did not predict the emergence of the Internet giants like Google and Amazon. I am still trying to figure out whether that phenomenon is natural and whether those firms will maintain their grip over the long term.
On the issue of surveillance and privacy, David Brin’s The Transparent Society was a big influence. He argued that forbidding surveillance technology was not a sustainable approach. In his view, our best hope was to live with surveillance technology, and the best way to do that was to ensure that ordinary people, not just governments or other large organizations, have the power of surveillance. The more I re-read Brin, the more I came to view him as an original and profound social thinker.
I launched a commercial web site in April of 1994, hosted by Electric Press. Rob Main of that firm taught me HTML in about an hour. Duffy Mazan was willing to extrapolate the growth of Internet nodes past the point where there would be more nodes than people. At the time it seemed absurd. Now it seems inevitable (if it has not already happened).
Someone else I followed was Dale Dougherty, founder of one of the first important web sites, Global Network Navigator. GNN and I collaborated on a couple of things, including coverage of Netscape’s IPO in 1995, which started the Internet stock craze of the 90s. What’s more, Dale was one of the first people to try blogging, and when I saw what he was doing, I knew I wanted to try it myself. My first blog was called “The Internet Bubble Monitor.” Begun in 1999, it lasted only until March of 2000, when the bubble popped.
Does Ray Kurzweil count as a net-head? I have certainly paid attention to his predictions, starting in 1999 with The Age of Spiritual Machines and proceeding several years later to The Singularity is Near.
Does Neal Stephenson count as a net-head? Snow Crash depicts a world where governance comes from corporations, not states. The Diamond Age describes a plausible world with extreme inequality, as most people get by on cheap goods manufactured using nanotechnology while the elites consume old-fashioned hand-made goods. That book also includes the “illustrated Primer,” sort of like an iPad (which came years later) with state-of-the-future artificial intelligence.
You should know that for every Net-head idea that I bought into, I rejected probably a dozen. For example, Howard Rheingold wrote a book called Smart Mobs, and it made me think “Mobs, yes. Smart, no.” Also, I’m skeptical that 3-D printing will turn out to be really significant. I am skeptical that blockchain will find a mass-market use.
“one of the nerds took me down to the basement to show me Mosaic, the first graphical browser for the World Wide Web. At that point, I became a net-head.”
I too was hooked after my first exposure, but from a completely different vantage point.
The 3 killer apps of Mosaic for a college freshman back in 1994/95:
1) music lyrics and artist/fan webpages
2) e-commerce wine (no id required)
3) porn (sorry, but gotta be honest).
https://medium.com/@robinbechtel/what-the-hell-was-megadeth-arizona-3519a751149d
“My first blog was called ‘The Internet Bubble Monitor.’ Begun in 1999, it lasted only until March of 2000, when the bubble popped.”
You missed out on a great opportunity to document the demise. F*cked Company dot com must have picked up where you left off.
This site was required reading back in 2000/01 for anyone working in Silicon Valley. Does anyone remember webvan.com?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fucked_Company?wprov=sfti1
A tiny correction: 14.4 kbaud.
Right! I saw that too – I recall using a 300 baud modem.
An AT&T style phone, call a number, hear the digital sound, fit the two I/O parts of the phone into rubber sockets and walaah! Can log in to the mainframe from a remote terminal. I was EPRI in Palo Alto, in a summer job (’78? ’79?) for data administration. Still remember the password: LOAFB
Leave of absence for baby – she never came back. I stayed in the Nuclear Power division until I graduated in ’82. But after Three Mile Island, and the movie China Syndrome, I knew nuclear power would not me my future.
Cherish those memories. China gives us a glimpse of the future under the new regulatory regime Obama and Zuckerberg will deliver: https://www.scmp.com/tech/policy/article/3117015/beijing-updates-internet-regulation-include-wide-swath-services-fake
Obama? The movie producer?
In his interview with Goldberg in The Atlantic in November, Obama said:
“The First Amendment doesn’t require private companies to provide a platform for any view that is out there. At the end of the day, we’re going to have to find a combination of government regulations and corporate practices that address this, because it’s going to get worse. If you can perpetrate crazy lies and conspiracy theories just with texts, imagine what you can do when you can make it look like you or me saying anything on video. We’re pretty close to that now.”
This following a previous exchange:
“Goldberg: Is this new malevolent information architecture bending the moral arc away from justice?
Obama: I think it is the single biggest threat to our democracy… …”
Since then he and his wife have made similar noise about regulation of speech and excluding dissidents from internet access.
Snow Crash depicts a world where governance comes from corporations, not states.
Haven’t read it, but seems plenty apt.
I think William Gibson’s Neuromancer series was plenty prescient: one global, interlocked corporation; drama provided by internal political struggles; the average guy either a cog in the machine, or hiding in the ghetto.
Don’t read Snow Crash. I read Anathem by the same author and loved it, so I thought I’d try Snow Crash and it was awful. Painful as hell to read.
The odd thing is that after reading Snow Crash I could see how his much later book had a lot of the same issues, but without the ensuing years of experience to iron them out to a level that was tolerable.
I strongly disagree. Snow Crash is very good. Creative and entertaining.
I searched for a quote to prove my point and this review was at the top of the search. Mirrors my view. Science fiction authors are often very bad at writing good characters, but it was really painful with Snow Crash.
—
A huge number of people in my direct friend circle love love love this book and Neal Stephenson in general. I have been bombarded with recommendations about it, told it’s a cornerstone of modern science fiction, and so on.
But, Jesus, I just can’t get into it. More than that, it’s the first book in a long time I actually had to put down. It actively annoyed me. The prose is awful, full of crap like “She is about to lambada this trite conveyance”, and awful ’90s phrases (“Smooth Move, Ex-Lax”/”Bimbo box”); the concepts are dated and with every introduction of new technology comes several paragraphs of in-depth exposition and explanatory waffle which really bogs things down. This doesn’t get any better once the Sumerian shit comes into play, which basically turns the middle of the book into a giant lecture or infodump.
The characterization is weak. Our hero is a guy who fights real well with swords and is also a super-leet hacker. His name is Hiro Protagonist. His room-mate is a Russian/Ukrainian dude called Vitaly Chernobyl. The other main protagonist is called ‘Yours Truly’ and although depicted more or less as a ’90s stereotype of a burned-out skater with breasts, doesn’t seem to do anything you might expect of a character so described, preferring instead to fuck anything that moves while regaling those around her with her witty repartee.
I was told it was a deeply funny book, but the only laugh I got out of it was apparently unintentional. When I read “she was standing there with her poon in her hand” I snorted so hard it hurt.
The guy can’t write action, turning what should be a fast-paced scene into a slow, jerky, boring slog.
Even the core concept — a samurai pizza-guy who also happens to be a pro hacker by the name of Hiro Protagonist(!!!) joined in adventures by a Bad-ass Teenage Sk8r Chick(!!!) seems like the sort of X-TREME thing a smart-ass 12 year-old would come up with, circa 1993.
I just…don’t get it. Am I missing something? I seem to be alone in actively hating this book.
Yes. This guy needs to get himself a sense of humor.
By the way, you mentioned Anathem. I found it difficult to get into — it takes several hundred pages to start to figure out what the heck is going on — but in the end I enjoyed it. Something Anathem and Snow Crash have in common is Stephenson’s tendency to put in a lot of detailed information that may be extraneous, but I find interesting.
What about Mondo 2000? Before Wired.
Also good was Tracy Kidder’s book The Soul of New Machine, on the development of a Data General mini computer.
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/7090.The_Soul_of_a_New_Machine
I lived a bit of that System Development developer lifestyle in the 80s, using UseNet more for on-line text games rather than much email. But was looking for relationships more than wealth.
Also learned Commodore 64 assembler in order to make computer games, but this, too, took up time.
Was getting obsessed with Libertarian Politics, too – where is Milton Friedman as an influence? I voted Ed Clark (’80) not Reagan, David Bergland (’84) and donated to Cato while it was still in Menlo Park.
Ayn Rand & Robert Heinlein (esp. The Moon is a Harsh Mistress) were more important than econ papers.
Stopping the terrible 70s inflation was a huge econ win. Not sure all the lessons & nuances were learned and correctly summarized.