--- begin forwarded text From: "Thomas Junker" <tjunker@phoenix.net> To: dbs@philodox.com Date: Thu, 5 Nov 1998 21:32:24 -0600 MIME-Version: 1.0 Subject: Re: FYI: Digicash bankruptcy Reply-to: Thomas Junker <tjunker@phoenix.net> Priority: normal Sender: <dbs@philodox.com> Precedence: Bulk List-Subscribe: <mailto:requests@philodox.com?subject=subscribe%20dbs> X-Web-Archive: http://www.philodox.com/dbs-archive/ On 5 Nov 98, at 14:32, Nahum Goldmann quoted Phil Agre as having writ:

[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.

Is Agre a friend of Metcalfe? One wrings his hands over what other people choose to risk their money on in Internet technology development and the other solemnly predicts that the Internet will implode. If those two guys ever get together, the ambient lumens will dim for miles around. NRO will be repositioning satellites to check out the grey hole of pessimism laying like a blanket over their meeting place.

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.

Yeah, right. Listen to this guy and die. That's his message.

...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...

Had this guy been commenting back then, he would no doubt have been wringing his hands over all the silly things being done with radio and all the failed ideas and ventures. Checking out those future-fantasy clips from the '50's is instructive... I *still* don't have a kitchen or bathroom as spiffy as what they were telling everyone they would have a few short years -- I don't have a constant-temperature shower or cleverly designed foldaway shelves, tables, trays and ironing boards hidden in every nook and cranny of the kitchen. In fact, looking at one of those on video got me in the mood to go back 40 years so I could look forward to having those neat things. More importantly, though, as great as the utility of radio has been in many areas, it has mostly been a one-way incoming pipe for the average person. Its greatest utility value in that mode has probably been news delivery, but that is highly overrated. If you tune out the news in all forms for two weeks, you will be a lot less stressed and realize that, by and large, what makes the news doesn't care a whit about you, and if you con't care a whit about the news, no pieces of the sky fall in. If radio hadn't been regulated as badly and suffocatingly as it was, and if people without propellors on their heads could have used it to communicate with friends and associates over long distances instead of waiting for telephone operators to call them back to tell them a trunk had become available for their annual long distance call to Mamain Toledo, perhaps radio would have had a hugely greater impact than it did. Radio came, radio was monopolized, and it became just another flavor of newspaper or magazine. Now gas, there's a revolutionary development! Convenient, yes. Revolutionary, no. Were we able to cook before gas? Were we able to heat before gas? Did gas mean that Father no longer had to trek to an office or factory to earn his living? Were we suddenly able to shuttle business documents back and forth between Passaic, New Jersey and Jakarta at zero incremental cost? Did gas perhaps enable millions of people to shift their modes of work and cut the ties with fixed offices? Maybe gas enabled multimedia communication, as in Smell-o-Vision? Geez! So it was convenient. So lots of people rushed out and utilized it in a short time. So? What did it change? It may have made some industrial processes cheaper or more feasible. It made some very uninteresting aspects of life less time and attention consuming. <yawn>

Internet protocols that we use today are unchanged in their essentials from about 1982.

Isn't that like denigrating all of wheeled transport by pointing out that gee, the wheels we use today are unchanged in their essentials from about 4000 B.C. (or whenever)? And your point is...?

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.

Can you spell M-O-S-A-I-C?

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.

Yes indeedy, that's what we should all do when we need a lift -- drag out Dad's or Grandpa's Depression scrapbook and get some *real* perspective! That'll drive out that pesky optimism and make us thankful for not having to run down the road chasing the family farm as it blows away in the wind. Yessirree, those pics of Uncle Dwork selling apples will straighten us right up and dispel those silly fantasies of interconnecting the world, working from Tahiti, or making a killing with a killer Internet app. There oughta be a law! It should be illegal to offend good, pessimistic outlooks by running around in circles showering ideas and developments like sparks.

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

Where does this guy *get* this stuff? How many people do we *know* who fit this description, hmmm? Even one? Well, OK, but Aunt Mabel doesn't count -- she invested in bull semen, too, though we all thought she did it with just a tad too much enthusiasm.

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.]

Oh, geez, I can hear this now, around 1725 or 1750... people in England and on the continent, naysaying the wild and wooly schemes and hopes for opportunity and fortune in the new world. It must be part of the curse of the human condition that we have to have gloomy people like this hanging on the coattails of invention, being dragged kicking and screaming into a future they cannot avoid no matter *how* loudly they complain. Regards, Thomas Junker tjunker@phoenix.net http://www.phoenix.net/~tjunker/wang.html The Unofficial Wang VS Information Center --- end forwarded text ----------------- Robert A. Hettinga <mailto: rah@philodox.com> Philodox Financial Technology Evangelism <http://www.philodox.com/> 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA "... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity, [predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'