Tag Archives: internet

Brief history of the future by John Naughton

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The full title of the book is A brief history of the future: From radio days to Internet years in a lifetime. This was written around 1998-1999, and it was published in 2000. That was so long ago, Google existed, but it was not even mentioned in the book. The author talked about how he used Alta Vista as a search engine. There was no blogging, no YouTube, no Facebook, no social media of any kind. I wanted to see if he had any inkling about what the Internet might look like in the future.

The closest he came was on page 265 when he said that “it’s clear that the forces which seek to make money on the Net have become noticeably stronger and more threatening in the years since the Web took off.” Yes, that indeed is the case. in 1997, I mentioned Amazon as a good place to buy books. I did not picture that it would grow to become the behemoth that it is today. I also maybe knew about eBay in the year 2000, but I thought it was a stupid name, and I did not think it would be as big as it is today.

Two pages late on page 267, he brings up Lawrence Lessig, and his 1999 book, Code and other laws of cyberspace. I have yet to read this book, but it sounds interesting. In it, he seems to argue that we had a lot of liberty in using the Internet in the late 1990s, but that liberty is not guaranteed to remain. “Freedoms that were foundational will slowly disappear.” (That is a direct quote from the Lessig book.)

Some other things of note:

  • He is a British author, and he had some strange turns of phrases. For example, on page 75 he wrote “Some of them, indeed, were potty about it.” Potty=happy or giddy? Also, “the folks at MIT had long ago twigged this.” From the context twigged=figured this out, but really, twigged?
  • Much of the language assumes that a dude is using a computer. The remote user sits at a terminal…. For much of the time he… Then he hits perhaps…. another burst of characters which appear on his screen. Only once near the end of the book does he consider that perhaps a woman might be using a computer and/or the Internet.
  • Page 176, he uses the word pukka. What the hell is pukka. I Googled that word to find that it is British slang — that something is genuine, authentic, excellent, or cool.
  • He also seemed a little racist. On page 185, he mentioned how outsiders who wished to have access to ARPANET or Usenet might have been like how “poor kids in black neighbourhoods might peer over the wall at rich kids enjoying the facilities of an expensive tennis training complex.” Really?
  • There was not really much about the fear that publishers had concerning the Internet. Commercial publishers did not get excited by the ability to publish content on the web. None of this angst was mentioned.
  • The website for the book is now dead, but most of it can be found at the Archive. However, his last reference/citation/footnote is saying that he put a picture of his father at http://www.briefhistory.com/da, but that link was never saved. I am curious what that image is.

Overall, it was an interesting read. I learned some stuff about some of the people who were involved in the early development of the communications system. I knew all about Vint Cerf and a little bit about Marc Andreesen, but there is more about them in the book than I have read elsewhere.

The book – Imaginary futures: From thinking machines to the global village

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This is another book that was recommended by Alison Macrina of the https://libraryfreedom.org/ project. It was listed in the further reading section of one of her talks.

I thought it would cover artificial intelligence and cybernetics a lot more than it did, but it was more of a book on the politics of the US and Russia, and on the cold war race to develop faster and better computing that supported military applications. I hoped that the final chapter would be a better conclusion to tie things together, but lo, it did not.

Sooooo much of the book covers political theory, especially capitalistic systems vs socialism and communism in particular. One should be familiar with Marshall McCluhan and the book Understanding Media, but I had not read that.

The final chapter gushes over Wired Magazine, as if that presents the final word concerning society and the internet. There were a ton of reference to Wired Magazine, but not many (any?) other periodicals that cover the internet as a social tool. It was like he was cherry picking quotes from Wired Magazine to show a point, and he did not explore other sources that might challenge that point.

The author did talk about the academic gift economy (p. 277 for example) and the way academics share information more freely, but the concepts of open access, and the problems with academic information hidden behind paywalls was not mentioned at all.

It is noteworthy that the book came out in 2007, and it got some things right. It mentioned that YouTube was a growing source of media viewing (p. 285), and it was pretty new in 2006/2007. It only mentioned the word blog once, and it is not in the index. Social media was not really covered or predicted.

Here are some specific things that jumped out at me.

Very soon, when the Net was ubiquitous, everyone would be equal within cyberspace. The rule of the few over the many was only a temporary condition. (p. 275.)

Ummm. What? The internet is not going to make the world an egalitarian place.

Of course, Napster was mentioned.

Anyone who distributed unauthorized copies of copyrighted material over the Net must be punished. Anyone who invented software potentially useful for on-line piracy should be criminalized. The courts and police had to stop consenting adults from sharing information with each other without permission. (p. 281)

Academics have been getting around this problem and issue for decades and decades. There are ways to get copyrighted material (journal articles and other bits of research) from others through email. This was not discussed at all. Napster made it easier for people to share songs with each other, and the music industry did not like that.

Overall, the book was a hard slog, since I was not expecting a book about communism vs the capitalist system. This review in Goodreads hit the nail on the head. “The book provides a lot of historical insight, really interesting, though it’s written in a such boring manner it’s really hard to go through it.”

I do agree with this statement from a different review of the book.

Barbrook has an amusing take on our distorted – if not delusional – relationship with technology, but his underlying point is serious: future visions of technology are used to distract us and also control us, and if we forget these imaginary futures, we are likely to repeat them.