From: Robert Hettinga <rah@shipwright.com>
Date: Fri, 6 Nov 1998 12:51:29 +0800
To: Phil Agre <cypherpunks@cyberpass.net
Subject: Re: FYI:  Digicash bankruptcy
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From: "Thomas Junker" <tjunker@phoenix.net>
To: dbs@philodox.com
Date: Thu, 5 Nov 1998 21:32:24 -0600
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Subject: Re: FYI:  Digicash bankruptcy
Reply-to: Thomas Junker <tjunker@phoenix.net>
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On 5 Nov 98, at 14:32, Nahum Goldmann quoted Phil Agre as having writ:

> [With the bankruptcy of Digicash, it is time to assemble the definitive
> list of underperforming Internet technologies.  The received wisdom is
> that the Internet lies at the vortex of a historically unprecedented era
> of intensive and disruptive technological change.  A sober reading of the
> evidence, however, supports something much closer to the opposite thesis,
> viz, the Internet is a modest and useful new tool that, despite itself,
> has given rise to an astonishingly wasteful mania whereby perfectly good
> capital is plowed into one ill-conceived technology after another.

Is Agre a friend of Metcalfe?  One wrings his hands over what other people
choose to risk their money on in Internet technology development and the other
solemnly predicts that the Internet will implode.  If those two guys ever get
together, the ambient lumens will dim for miles around.  NRO will be
repositioning satellites to check out the grey hole of pessimism laying like a
blanket over their meeting place.

> So right now would be an excellent time
> for us to renounce the false idea that we are living in a time of
> unprecedented technical change.

Yeah, right.  Listen to this guy and die.  That's his message.

> ...it is running behind the penetration rates that
> earlier technologies such as the radio and gas cooking achieved once they
> started being adopted on a mass scale...

Had this guy been commenting back then, he would no doubt have been wringing
his hands over all the silly things being done with radio and all the failed
ideas and ventures.  Checking out those future-fantasy clips from the '50's is
instructive... I *still* don't have a kitchen or bathroom as spiffy as what
they were telling everyone they would have a few short years -- I don't have a
constant-temperature shower or cleverly designed foldaway shelves, tables,
trays and ironing boards hidden in every nook and cranny of the kitchen.  In
fact, looking at one of those on video got me in the mood to go back 40 years
so I could look forward to having those neat things.

More importantly, though, as great as the utility of radio has been in many
areas, it has mostly been a one-way incoming pipe for the average person.  Its
greatest utility value in that mode has probably been news delivery, but that
is highly overrated.  If you tune out the news in all forms for two weeks, you
will be a lot less stressed and realize that, by and large, what makes the
news doesn't care a whit about you, and if you con't care a whit about the
news, no pieces of the sky fall in.  If radio hadn't been regulated as badly
and suffocatingly as it was, and if people without propellors on their heads
could have used it to communicate with friends and associates over long
distances instead of waiting for telephone operators to call them back to tell
them a trunk had become available for their annual long distance call to
Mamain Toledo, perhaps radio would have had a hugely greater impact than it
did.  Radio came, radio was monopolized, and it became just another flavor of
newspaper or magazine.

Now gas, there's a revolutionary development!  Convenient, yes.
Revolutionary, no.  Were we able to cook before gas?  Were we able to heat
before gas?  Did gas mean that Father no longer had to trek to an office or
factory to earn his living?  Were we suddenly able to shuttle business
documents back and forth between Passaic, New Jersey and Jakarta at zero
incremental cost? Did gas perhaps enable millions of people to shift their
modes of work and cut the ties with fixed offices?  Maybe gas enabled
multimedia communication, as in Smell-o-Vision?  Geez!  So it was convenient.
So lots of people rushed out and utilized it in a short time.  So?  What did
it change?  It may have made some industrial processes cheaper or more
feasible.  It made some very uninteresting aspects of life less time and
attention consuming.  <yawn>

> Internet protocols that we use today are unchanged in their essentials
> from about 1982.

Isn't that like denigrating all of wheeled transport by pointing out that gee,
the wheels we use today are unchanged in their essentials from about 4000 B.C.
(or whenever)?  And your point is...?

> In fact, once the real history of this era is written, I
> think that 1982 will shape up as the true annus mirabilis, and 1994 will
> simply be seen as the era when the innovations of ten to fifteen years
> earlier finally caught public attention and reached the price point that
> was needed to achieve the network externalities required for its large-
> scale adoption.

Can you spell M-O-S-A-I-C?

> If we get out the rake and drag away all of the detritus
> of the underperforming technologies that I listed above, and compare our
> times on an apples-for-apples basis with other periods of technological
> innovation -- including the Depression era, for heaven's sake -- then I
> think we will have a much healthier perspective going forward.

Yes indeedy, that's what we should all do when we need a lift -- drag out
Dad's or Grandpa's Depression scrapbook and get some *real* perspective!
That'll drive out that pesky optimism and make us thankful for not having to
run down the road chasing the family farm as it blows away in the wind.
Yessirree, those pics of Uncle Dwork selling apples will straighten us right
up and dispel those silly fantasies of interconnecting the world, working from
Tahiti, or making a killing with a killer Internet app.  There oughta be a
law!  It should be illegal to offend good, pessimistic outlooks by running
around in circles showering ideas and developments like sparks.

> As it is,
> people the world over have been propagandized into a state of panic, one
> that encourages them to abandon all of their experience and common sense
> and buy lots of computer equipment so that they will not be scorned by
> their children and left behind by the apocalypse

Where does this guy *get* this stuff?  How many people do we *know* who fit
this description, hmmm?  Even one?  Well, OK, but Aunt Mabel doesn't count --
she invested in bull semen, too, though we all thought she did it with just a
tad too much enthusiasm.

> The sad line-up of underperforming technologies should be
> understood not as serious attempts at innovation but as a kind of ritual,
> an expensive and counterproductive substitute for the chants and dances
> that healthy societies perform when they are placed under stress.  Maybe
> once we get some healthy rituals for contending with technological change
> ourselves, we will be able to snap out of our trance, cast off the
> ridiculous hopes and fears of an artificially induced millennium, and take
> up the serious work of discussing, organizing, and contesting the major
> choices about our institutions that lie ahead.]

Oh, geez, I can hear this now, around 1725 or 1750... people in England and on
the continent, naysaying the wild and wooly schemes and hopes for opportunity
and fortune in the new world.  It must be part of the curse of the human
condition that we have to have gloomy people like this hanging on the
coattails of invention, being dragged kicking and screaming into a future they
cannot avoid no matter *how* loudly they complain.

Regards,

Thomas Junker
tjunker@phoenix.net

http://www.phoenix.net/~tjunker/wang.html
The Unofficial Wang VS Information Center

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-----------------
Robert A. Hettinga <mailto: rah@philodox.com>
Philodox Financial Technology Evangelism <http://www.philodox.com/>
44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA
"... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity,
[predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to
experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'