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Internet hustlers invade our
communities with computers ... The key ingredient of
their silicon snake oil is a technocratic belief that
computers and networks will make a better society. [But]
the most important interactions in life happen between
people, not between computers. - 1995
~~~
The places where computer labs are
being built are where the music room and the art room
used to be. Soon it will be where the gym used to be. In
20 years' time we'll have a country full of
computer-literate people who will have lost touch with
what's important in society. - 1995
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I doubt our offices will be replaced
by minions working from home. The lack of meetings and
personal interaction isolates workers and reduces
loyalty. Nor is a house necessarily an efficient place to
work, what with the constant interruptions and lack of
office fixtures. Perhaps it'll work for jobs where
one never has to meet anyone else, like data entry or
telephone sales. What a way to turn a home into a prison.
- 1995
~~~
Electronic referenda on current
events would further shorten the event horizon for public
policy. Instead of political changes every few years,
policies would be voted on every few months. This is
hardly the path to long-term planning. The electronic
constituency would be a most fickle electorate. -
1995
~~~
Computers will deviously chew away
at libraries from the inside. They'll eat up the book
budgets and require librarians who are more comfortable
with computers than with children and scholars ... The
result won't be a library without books - it'll
be a library without value. - 1995
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This bookless library is a dream, a
hallucination of online addicts, network neophytes, and
library-automation insiders ... Such a dream assumes that
... books are all digitized and available on the
computer. They aren't. They never will be. -
1995
~~~
Every roadway has been built
explicitly to lessen traffic, yet today's traffic
jams are worse than ever ... In the same way, I doubt
that adding bandwidth to the Internet will solve future
bandwidth crunches. Indeed, we'll only find more
people trolling the Net, trucking larger files across the
wires. - 1995 The truth is no online database will
replace your daily newspaper, no CD-ROM can take the
place of a competent teacher and no computer network will
change the way government works. - 1995
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A computer-screen newspaper will
never take the place of a real one read over a cup of
coffee. And "networking" with role-playing
electronic personalities will never replace face-to-face
conversation. - 1995 I'm not against the Internet. I
just want people to be more skeptical about it. People
are skeptical about nuclear power and genetic engineering
and a lot of other areas but they blindly accept the
Internet. We techies should be more honest about what
computers can do and what they cannot do, or else we are
setting ourselves up for a big pie in the face. -
1995
~~~
I suspect Big Brother won't have
an easy time tracing us. Many important computers will
forever be off-net. Most have such weird data structures
that it's just not worth the effort to correlate with
other databases. And untrustworthy information pervades
the system. Our privacy will be protected, as it always
has been, by simple obscurity and the high cost of
uncovering information about us. - 1995
~~~
Bit-heads talk about digital cash,
but that can only show experimental systems with fancy
names like DigiCash and First Virtual. For a long while,
it's funny money ... A network address isn't
associated with a physical location, so it's open
turf for fraud ... network-authentication software can
never give the same sense of trust as a face-to-face
business transaction. No computer network with pretty
graphics can ever replace the salespeople that make our
society work. - 1995
~~~
Our schools face serious problems,
including overcrowded classrooms, teacher incompetence
and a lack of security. Local education budgets hardly
cover salaries, books and paper. Computers address none
of these problems. They're expensive, quickly become
obsolete, and drain scarce capital budgets. Yet school
administrators want them desperately. What's wrong
with this picture? ... Today's standard connections,
Ethernet and coaxial cable, will be obsolete within a
decade. - 1995
~~~
You wake up one morning to discover
that your handwriting's gone. You can't sign your
name. Your business has lost its letterhead, envelopes,
checks, logos, and even the ink in your pens has
disappeared. You open your mouth, and no sounds come out.
You can no longer shake hands, frown, snicker, or laugh
out loud. Oh, you can still communicate, using the same
uniform style imposed on everyone: ASCII text. The only
difference between your messages and another's is
their contents. You spend your life developing your
public appearance: it shows in your handwriting,
signature, voice, clothing and handshake. You leave all
this behind when you send e-mail. - 1995
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The Internet is composed of
extraordinarily cheap and parsimonious people who will go
way out of their way, for example, to avoid spending 50
cents on a long-distance phone call. You've met them.
I think they will be equally stingy with their digital
cash. People don't trust sites on-line. If I go down
the block and buy something from a merchant, I trust that
when there's cash exchanged, I'm going to get the
goods and I'm not going to get ripped off. On-line
I'm not so sure about that. The business that's
here today, it can disappear tomorrow, change its e-mail
address. I may easily get burned. That's not to say
don't make World Wide Web browsers. They're fun,
they're enjoyable, but they're grossly oversold.
- 1995
~~~
The Internet is not the key to the
future. It's not going to provide great, wonderful
information. Instead, it will continue to provide a
rather mundane view of our very, very mundane world. -
1995
~~~
In the next 10 years, somebody will
figure out how to charge for information over the Net, so
you won't get things necessarily for free. That will
have several good effects, including a way to pay authors
for their work. And because of the economic incentive, it
will become easier to filter out the good from the bad. -
1995
~~~
I don't believe that phone
books, newspapers, magazines or corner video stores will
disappear as computer networks spread. Nor do I think
that my telephone will merge with my computer, to become
some sort of information appliance. - 1995
~~~
The bloom is off the road ... I
don't think it ever was blossoming ... It's
promoted in a way that's bogus: That it's a
virtual community, that it's good for business, that
it's good for society, that it's good for
education. Within each one is a grain of truth, but not a
beachful of truth ... We've been sold a bill of
goods: that it's better to have a virtual experience,
an experience via computer, rather than a real experience
of walking among the trees. I think it's real
worrisome. - 1995
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