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More from Clifford Stoll
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
~~~ 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
~~~
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
~~~ 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
~~~ 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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