It’ll Never Work
Pure genius from NewsWeek in 1995. Enjoy…
After two decades online, I’m perplexed. It’s not that I haven’t had a gas of a good time on the Internet. I’ve met great people and even caught a hacker or two. But today, I’m uneasy about this most trendy and oversold community. Visionaries see a future of telecommuting workers, interactive libraries and multimedia classrooms. They speak of electronic town meetings and virtual communities. Commerce and business will shift from offices and malls to networks and modems. And the freedom of digital networks will make government more democratic.
Baloney. Do our computer pundits lack all common sense? The truth in 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.
Read the whole thing and laugh. This bit is pure genius:
Then there’s cyberbusiness. We’re promised instant catalog shopping—just point and click for great deals. We’ll order airline tickets over the network, make restaurant reservations and negotiate sales contracts. Stores will become obselete. So how come my local mall does more business in an afternoon than the entire Internet handles in a month? Even if there were a trustworthy way to send money over the Internet—which there isn’t—the network is missing a most essential ingredient of capitalism: sales
peoplemen.
Did this guy get a job with McDoom afterwards? It would explain a lot…
The least effective and most horrid part of my 1970’s education was the ‘language lab’, being taught French by a proto computer, yuk. Having said that I am more than happy to book hotels and tickets online and buy DVDS online not only because they are cheaper but I don’t have to engage with ‘the public’ at HMV.
Reminds me of this independent article from 2000 -‘Snowfalls are now just a thing of the past’. The Independent in its helpful way also recently deleted all of the comments that were attached to the article. No prizes for the primary thrust of the comments…
True, the staying away from people thing is one of the big plus points. I’m keen also because when everything goes The Shape Of The Pear you’ve got a better audit trail online for use when shouting at people.
That’s a major selling point of the internet – the amusement factor as all my bookmarked links to Newsweek and Guardian articles stating that the world is about to be taken over by sentient frogs because of global warming/cooling/stuff disappear when they start to get too embarassing.