I’ve been going through my old emails lately, trying to see if I’ve ever written anything of importance. The jury is still out on that, but I did find something interesting: an email I sent to one of my friends about my predictions for this new-fangled Internet thing. I sent it on 14 September 1999, a bit more than ten years ago. Tomorrow I’ll talk about how my thoughts have held up over time and whether I can get a job as a professional prognosticator. Here it is below the fold:
I’m sure you could find many an article on how the Internet is affecting out culture, but most articles of that kind are pretty much worthless in my opinion. As far as I see it, the Internet is just now moving into the area where it is a help rather than an expensive, flashy toy. The biggest reason for this change is the amount of shopping that can be done through the web now. You can get anything now, literally. The last bastion of non-Internet sales has always been food, but there are finally a few start-up companies that are selling groceries over the web (if I remember correctly, Austin has such a company). There is not much left. You don’t need to leave your computer now to survive.
As a positive, this can lead to more free time available for people. We are not far from refrigerators scanning their contents to see what you are running low on, and then using the Internet to order more food. We already have electronic bills and money-transfers, so you don’t need to bother writing out checks every month for your phone, electricity, and what have you. Obviously, these are time savers, but what are people doing with the extra time? Just look at how many adult web sites there are out there.
One problem with the internet is the dearth of usable information. Sure, everything is on there somewhere, but how do you find it? It’s not easy, though that problem is just about solved as well. For years, companies have been working on "robots" that scan the Internet for things that you want. They are almost here, and in some cases some rudimentary alerts exist: every time some McGovern thing goes up on EBay, for example, I am notified. Soon, you will be able to type in plain English something like "Find the top 10 stocks for the period from 11/6/98 to 4/2099" and you will have the information a short while later. If you tried to do that search yourself, you probably wouldn’t know where to start.
Socially, there are already changes. You have these people who have relationships only over the web. There are psychological effects of the Internet, like the finding that people who spend hours a day suffer more from depression. At least in the foreseeable future I doubt that the Internet will abolish all human contact, but it is dehumanizing in a way. It is a bit easier to avoid people and still get things accomplished with the Internet, and when identities are no more than what you type in a chat room, it is not a normal thing. Many people now have identities on the web, such as web pages and chat names and all that jazz. Lord knows I do. But still, it is not making a huge difference, for who visits my web page? Do I ever visit the pages of others? Maybe in the future this will become a bigger deal.
I think the Internet as a weapon of war is the most interesting. The CIA just said that by 2015 Iraq and North Korea will have long-distance missiles capable of hitting the U.S., and China will have them before then. Which is all good and scary, but I think that the guerilla wars of the future will be fought electronically. When so much commerce and business is conducted online, it is easy for a hacker to screw things up in a big way. An enemy may not bomb the U.S.; they may just drain our bank accounts. I think we will see the potential for such warfare next year with the Y2K bug. If things can get pretty screwed up by that, then it proves anybody can screw things up badly.
I don’t know what to say about media control. It will always be determined by supply and demand, and I think that the Internet will do a lot to reverse the conglomeration process. For example, in the music industry, no longer do you have to have a record label to sell your music. Just record it, put it in MP3 format and slap it on the web. More cable TV channels means more small channels with limited programming appeal can reach a large audience and become profitable, if not sensible. We may be close to free long-distance. Sure, the big networks are doing weird things, but who cares anymore? Their share has decreased from like 90% thirty years ago to a lot less today.
Hey, I like technology. My work pager, this 2.5 cubic inch piece of plastic, gives me national and world headlines every hour, sports scores, weather forecasts, and text messages that anybody can send me from my web page or our security monitor web page. Sounds fun to me.