More and more people are looking to computers to save the world, but the people who run them certainly don’t know how. Nobody’s in charge, not even Google, though everyone in the dot-com world pretends.
Nobody imagined the vastness of the Internet, not even the kids who built it, or we wouldn’t be running out of addresses. We are in a world nobody designed or expected, driving full tilt toward — a wall? a cliff? a new dawn? We must choose wisely, as if we could.
On the one hand, we are getting bread and circuses, vast freebies unimaginable scant years ago — free e-mail, phone calls and maps, acres of picture space. On the other hand, somebody or something is reading your mail, and that same somebody or something is looking for new ways to control your future.
Some things are more and more fabulous, some things are more threatening and oppressive, except we don’t all agree on which is which. Are Facebook and Google marvelous ways of communicating, or a threat to our privacy? Yes!
In the face of all this, it is absolutely impossible to say what will happen.
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ReplyDeleteby Theodor Holm Nelson
More and more people are looking to computers to save the world, but the people who run them certainly don’t know how. Nobody’s in charge, not even Google, though everyone in the dot-com world pretends. They’re all too busy with I.P.O.’s and market share, trying to start fads or come up with idiotic names.
ReplyDeleteNobody imagined the vastness of the Internet, not even the kids who built it, or we wouldn’t be running out of addresses. We are in a world nobody designed or expected, driving full tilt toward — a wall? a cliff? a new dawn? We must choose wisely, as if we could.
On the one hand, we are getting bread and circuses, vast freebies unimaginable scant years ago — free e-mail, phone calls and maps, acres of picture space. On the other hand, somebody or something is reading your mail, and that same somebody or something is looking for new ways to control your future.
Some things are more and more fabulous, some things are more threatening and oppressive, except we don’t all agree on which is which. Are Facebook and Google marvelous ways of communicating, or a threat to our privacy? Yes!
In the face of all this, it is absolutely impossible to say what will happen. So let me try.
ReplyDeleteDECONSTRUCTING THE INTERFACE The customary computer interface will go away. That is, the standard face of computers — the PARC User Interface, or P.U.I. — will fall apart. First created at Xerox for easy use by secretaries, the P.U.I. became the Macintosh, Windows and then the face of the World Wide Web. Actually it is a fig leaf hiding the structures beneath, in their hierarchical complexity.
In the old days — through the 1970s — all computer users dealt directly with internal hierarchy, typing notes to mechanisms that actually ran the computer. This all changed in the ’80s. The first P.U.I. to reach the public was the Macintosh, built by Steve Jobs to look easy — but taking away the right to program and instead creating cattle pens called “applications.”
The last two decades have been largely an arms race between Apple’s interface (the Macintosh) and Microsoft’s (called Windows).
The interface also gave shape to the World Wide Web. In the 1990s, two university students, Eric Bina and Marc Andreessen, put a PARC User Interface around Tim Berners-Lee’s page format (HTML). This frame, now called the browser, made the Web take off, giving a puppet theater to programmers with many different obsessions.
Now major players are deconstructing the P.U.I. For instance, Facebook gives you something like a Web site with no need to build one. Instead of the Web’s interface frame, Facebook pours out rivers of user-supplied content.
Just as significant, Mr. Jobs — who originally brought the P.U.I. to the public — threw it away when he brought us the iPhone and iPad. There’s no more visible hierarchy, and the right to program has come back. Now all of us can create our own cattle pens!
MORE OF THE SAME That is usually the safest prediction about anything. So for tomorrow’s computer world, I confidently predict more of the same, but much more so — louder and more intrusive, with more interruptions, more security threats, more monopolies and, of course, worse interfaces.
The Web will get even more chaotic, with new forms of annoyance, temptation and danger. There will be more and more software settings nobody can get right, and the phone support people in India who talk you through the menus will be taught new slang to make your hours with them seem more comfortable.
WILDER SPECULATIONS There will be a secret porn channel for the Department of Homeland Security’s body scans.
Facebook will team up with the Library of Congress to bring real-time history streams to the user. Be a friend of Benjamin Franklin! But it will somehow lack suspense.
A new copyright law will forbid the typing of any sentence that is not in the public domain. The National Security Agency will be told to enforce this, but without additional financing.
Other new laws will forbid posting anything that is of possible use to terrorists, including music, history and recipes. Some will think the paper publishing industry is behind this.
UNIFIED DOCUMENTS, VISIBLE CONNECTIONS But seriously, the one bright hope I see is the generalization of documents. Since 1974, computer documents have imitated paper, with no inkling of the powers interactive documents might provide — in particular, allowing documents to be connected side by side.
So far there’s been no way to connect documents in detail. We may expect this at last to be fixed, allowing different document formats to be visibly linked, with visible connections among side-by-side documents. Stripes and arrows across the screen — among words, sentences and paragraphs — will at last help us clarify the structure of thought.
That’s my glass, darkly. Is the glass half empty or half full? Or perhaps even both?