- dan
> Interactive television, VRML, Active X, network computers,
> "push" technology, agents, "social" interfaces, resource
> visualization, cryptographic payment mechanisms... [this]
> sad line-up of underperforming technologies should be under-
> stood not as serious attempts at innovation but as a kind
> of ritual, an expensive and counterproductive substitute
> for the chants and dances that healthy societies perform
> when they are placed under stress.
-----Original Message-----
From: Phil Agre [mailto:pagre@alpha.oac.ucla.edu]
Sent: Thursday, November 05, 1998 10:37 AM
To: Red Rock Eater News Service
Subject: [RRE]Digicash bankruptcy
[With the bankruptcy of Digicash, it is time to assemble the definitive
list of underperforming Internet technologies. The received wisdom is
that the Internet lies at the vortex of a historically unprecedented era
of intensive and disruptive technological change. A sober reading of
the
evidence, however, supports something much closer to the opposite
thesis,
viz, the Internet is a modest and useful new tool that, despite itself,
has given rise to an astonishingly wasteful mania whereby perfectly
good capital is plowed into one ill-conceived technology after another.
Consider: interactive television, VRML, Active X, network computers,
"push" technology, agents, "social" interfaces, resource visualization,
cryptographic payment mechanisms (aka "electronic commerce"), and others
that I hope you'll remind me about. Each of these has been the object
of a frenzy that has compelled all manner of smart people, and a whole
lot of dumb ones such as myself, to say things like, "boy oh boy, the
world is going to be completely different a year from now". This has
been going on continuously since the PR hype that accompanied the run-up
to the (failed) Communications Act of 1994 and then the (passed but then
catastrophically failed) Communications Act of 1996. It has been fanned
by Wired magazine, whose capitulation to Conde Nast has ended an era
that
should never have begun, and now it is marked by the bankruptcy of David
Chaum's Digicash. All right-thinking people were in favor of Digicash,
whose technologies were as intellectually elegant as they were socially
responsible. The problem is that the Digicash people were living in the
world of Alice and Bob -- a place where a mathematical proof can change
the world in perfect defiance of the dynamics (if you can call them
that)
of large, highly integrated institutions. Like many Internet-related
startups, Digicash existed only to the precise extent that the press was
writing about it, and now it doesn't exist at all. So right now would
be an excellent time for us to renounce the false idea that we are
living
in a time of unprecedented technical change. Yes, the Web has been
going
through a period of exponential growth. But no, that growth is not at
all unprecedented, and in fact it is running behind the penetration
rates
that earlier technologies such as the radio and gas cooking achieved
once
they started being adopted on a mass scale. (See, for example, Ronald
C.
Tobey's scholarly and absorbing "Technology As Freedom: The New Deal and
the Electrical Modernization of the American Home", Univ. of California
Press, 1996.) Nor has the underlying Internet changed at all quickly.
The Internet protocols that we use today are unchanged in their
essentials
from about 1982. In fact, once the real history of this era is written,
I think that 1982 will shape up as the true annus mirabilis, and 1994
will
simply be seen as the era when the innovations of ten to fifteen years
earlier finally caught public attention and reached the price point that
was needed to achieve the network externalities required for its large-
scale adoption. If we get out the rake and drag away all of the
detritus
of the underperforming technologies that I listed above, and compare our
times on an apples-for-apples basis with other periods of technological
innovation -- including the Depression era, for heaven's sake -- then I
think we will have a much healthier perspective going forward. As it
is,
people the world over have been propagandized into a state of panic, one
that encourages them to abandon all of their experience and common sense
and buy lots of computer equipment so that they will not be scorned by
their children and left behind by the apocalypse that is supposedly
going
to arrive any day now. No such apocalypse is going to occur, and all of
the TV preachers who have been announcing this apocalypse should
apologize
and give the people their money back. Yes, the world is going to
change.
Yes, information technology will participate, and is already
participating,
in a significant overhaul of the workings of most major social
institutions.
But no, those changes are not going to happen overnight. The sad
line-up
of underperforming technologies should be understood not as serious
attempts
at innovation but as a kind of ritual, an expensive and
counterproductive
substitute for the chants and dances that healthy societies perform when
they are placed under stress. Maybe once we get some healthy rituals
for
contending with technological change ourselves, we will be able to snap
out
of our trance, cast off the ridiculous hopes and fears of an
artificially
induced millennium, and take up the serious work of discussing,
organizing,
and contesting the major choices about our institutions that lie ahead.]
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