If the new commercialism does fulfill its promise and actually provide us with better quality interfaces and sources of information it would appear to lessen that driving need for help which I think helps bind us all together. If newcomers can avoid the painful rites of passage will they still be as cooperative with their neighbors? Will it be the same Internet when we don’t all share the same scars under our clothes and tell the same horrors stories to our children? I hope so.
Predictor: Deutsch, Peter
Prediction, in context:Peter Deutsch included the following remarks in an essay he wrote that was printed in the March 1994 issue of Internet World. From 1991 to early 1993, Deutsch was the Sun Fellow at Sun Microsystems, where he worked to define future corporate strategy. He was a co-recipient of the ACM [Association for Computing Machinery] Software System Award in 1993, and was active in ACM, IEEE, CPSR, and the League for Programming Freedom. He writes: ”If your nifty new plan to make a million off the Internet doesn’t seem to have at least some small component of sharing as part of its mandate, then you risk a flood of e-mail, angry Usenet postings and maybe even, if the crowd is angry enough, actual phone calls of complaint … Numerous large commercial entities have come to play in the Internet sandbox, with many more coming online every day. This raises real questions about whether we’re going to be able to preserve the potlatch culture in this new age of Mammon. I’ve even seen postings which refer to the current Internet culture as a ‘hothouse flower,’ as if it is something precious yet fragile that must be preserved against the interlopers who would do it harm … If the new commercialism does fulfill its promise and actually provide us with better quality interfaces and sources of information it would appear to lessen that driving need for help which I think helps bind us all together. If newcomers can avoid the painful rites of passage will they still be as cooperative with their neighbors? Will it be the same Internet when we don’t all share the same scars under our clothes and tell the same horrors stories to our children? I hope so. Of course, for those worrying about a flood of nouveau riche Internet entrepreneurs carrying off the tribe’s birthright, there’s still some time yet before we all have to pack up and head off into the sunset. I don’t yet see lots of millionaires pulling up to the IETF in big cars (although the flood of well-dressed sales people at Interop is starting to become a bit intimidating to those of us whose primary sartorial decision-making revolve around the choice between dark or light T-shirts each morning).”
Date of prediction: March 1, 1994
Topic of prediction: Economic structures
Subtopic: E-commerce
Name of publication: Internet World
Title, headline, chapter name: Preserving and Promoting the ‘Internet Culture’
Quote Type: Direct quote
Page number or URL of document at time of study:
http://www.cosy.sbg.ac.at/doc/eegtti/eeg_268.html
This data was logged into the Elon/Pew Predictions Database by: Anderson, Janna Quitney