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Bruce Sterling: Internet (1993)

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Re: Bruce Sterling: Internet (1993)

#41

Post by mseebach »

thisiswrong wrote: post #31
sneak wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did anyone ever really think it would be any different? At least we're still allowed to rent servers without a license, and make our own webpages.

>Did anyone ever really think it would be any different? Er, Yes! I'd say no one back then would have ever wanted the internet to be as privatized, militarized, and censored as it is now. We need to take the internet back into the hands of the people by adopting mesh networks. This is how the internet needs to become... and fast : http://nakedsecurity.sophos.com/2012/02/24/activists-creatin... With the rise of crypto…

> Er, Yes! I'd say no one back then would have ever wanted the internet to be as privatized, militarized, and censored as it is now.

Erm. The Internet is an explicitly military invention and without it's (controversial) privatisation, you'd be unlikely to have heard of it. It's not meaningfully censored outside of jurisdictions that already censors all other media extensively (DNS-poisoning consumer lines is bad and broken but really very low on the censorship-scale).

Re: Bruce Sterling: Internet (1993)

#42

Post by eterm »

crusso wrote: post #40
eterm wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh, that $40 is the service cost. Even in '97 I remember paying £20/mo for the ISP, phone bills were then on top of that £20. Then "freeserve" came out[1] and (gasp!) was free apart from the phone call. This was a major shift. There were downsides (only 1 pop3 email account, no newsgroups, no webspace), but it was free! [1] http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/177467.stm

Almost all residential POTS lines in the US were flat-rate, so there were no charges here to make a local phone call. Granted, if you had to dial long-distance to connect to the ISP, then you paid toll rates for that.

Oh, thanks for the correction and local knowledge.

Re: Bruce Sterling: Internet (1993)

#43

Post by mseebach »

coldtea wrote: post #35
jstalin wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow, what's with all the frowns and sad faces? The Internet is perhaps the most incredible invention of humanity ever. Billions of people are connected to each other like never before, any information is at our fingertips, anyone who wants to create a web site is free to do so and post whatever they want (except maybe in China), commerce is available to the individual on a global basis, etc etc. Whining about the "go…

> Wow, what's with all the frowns and sad faces? The Internet is perhaps the most incredible invention of humanity ever. Billions of people are connected to each other like never before And why is that a good thing in itself? Easy access to anybody else? Ever stopped to think what kind of other side-effects that ability could have?

I can come up with a number of reasons it would be bad, but none that doesn't make me sound like a rabid totalitarian.

Re: Bruce Sterling: Internet (1993)

#44

Post by crusso »

eksith wrote: post #4
eterm wrote: post #2

It hurts to read this. How did we lose the freedom, the idea that everyone is an equal peer? Was it just the realities of money, that an end user would rather pay a tiny fraction of the real cost of being truly on line and pay instead with their freedom? We used to laugh at AOLers because they weren't experiencing the real internet, because they sold themselves out to an online service. Are today's ISPs with their fi…

> How did we lose the freedom Money came into the picture. And I'd say we're in worse shape now since even in the AOL days, you would still know that this isn't the real "internet". Now, we've been lulled in the false sense that we're getting unfiltered (un-throttled) access, when in fact, it's just a carefully crafted image. I look forward to the day "Internet Service Provider" has been completely replaced with "Ubi…

Money came into the picture.

You have it completely backwards.

I "discovered" the Internet in 1988 when I got a job in the IT department of the University I attended. I LOVED it. I transferred files, participated a lot in news groups, played MUDs, made friends in Europe... it was wonderful.

When I graduated a few years later, I had to kiss the Internet goodbye. Without attending a major University that poured tons of money into maintaining a connection to the Internet, I had no hope of staying on it. I remember telling my parents about this amazing network of computers and saying something to the effect of, "It's fantastic, but I don't see how most people will ever get to use it because it's so expensive." Afterall, the Internet had been in existence for decades but was completely unavailable to home users.

Then they opened the Internet up for commercial use and the web came along. MONEY CAME INTO THE PICTURE. Tons of it. A few years later, every business felt like it had to be on the Internet in some way. With all that money flowing into web sites and interconnects, access from home became dirt cheap.

Commercialization is what made the Internet available for the masses. It amazes me that here we are not even twenty years later and people are rewriting history, demonizing the very framework that made the Internet successful.

Re: Bruce Sterling: Internet (1993)

#45

Post by jstrate »

crusso wrote: post #39
jstrate wrote: post #37

I'm surprised articles like this are still posted on HN/reddit. Like most of the tech you use on your iWidgets it has deep roots in the US defense budget. Networks, GPS, digital maps, etc. Surprising this is posted here as it doesn't fit with most of the evil military industrial complex narrative that comes with linked articles.

Like the rest of the US government, just because good things occasionally come from the largest financial expenditures on the planet doesn't mean that the balance of those expenditures are a good idea or that the taking of money for those expenditures is morally justifiable.

>good things occaisionally come

Understatement of the century.

Re: Bruce Sterling: Internet (1993)

#46

Post by crusso »

romaniv wrote: post #26
VMG wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What are you talking about? The internet has been a great success for the masses: Wikipedia, Google, Youtube, Facebook all bring an immeasurable benefit to it's users. Of course not everything is perfect, but I much rather have today's internet than the internet of 1993

I would postulate that if Wikipedia, Youtube and Facebook went permanently offline tomorrow, absolutely nothing of significance would change either online or in the society. People would still find ways to do the same things, maybe even better ways. The Internet of the 90s wasn't as widespread, but it had a much greater impact on areas of life and people it touched. If anything, your list shows how centralized the In…

The Internet of the 90s wasn't as widespread, but it had a much greater impact on areas of life and people it touched

Having grown up before the age of the Web/Internet, I couldn't disagree more.

I use Youtube on a regular basis to learn about things. Of the top of my head: gardening methods, worm composting, repairing a cracked ipad screen, fixing a macbook with soda spilled on it, learning about new programming environments.

Facebook and other social media have been given much deserved credit for allowing democratic organization of an unprecedented level in the Middle East.

Wikipedia is astoundingly useful for learning things quickly about math, history, science, culture, etc.

Skype keeps my parents in touch with their grandchildren even better than I kept in touch with my own grandparents when I lived an hour away from them growing up.

You could go on all day describing companies and Internet industries that have completely changed the way people live: Ebay, Salesforce.com, CNN.com, Blizzard, etc.

After all, you didn't name technologies, you named brands/services.

The brands are the ones that dominate the services being covered, just like in the old days Xerox was a verb that stood in for the service of making photocopies.

Re: Bruce Sterling: Internet (1993)

#47

Post by crusso »

antocv wrote: post #3
eterm wrote: post #2

It hurts to read this. How did we lose the freedom, the idea that everyone is an equal peer? Was it just the realities of money, that an end user would rather pay a tiny fraction of the real cost of being truly on line and pay instead with their freedom? We used to laugh at AOLers because they weren't experiencing the real internet, because they sold themselves out to an online service. Are today's ISPs with their fi…

The masses. We lost because of the great masses, the eternal october but on a much major scale. The same people that still watch TV and who become numb from their everyday medium to low-wage work, all those who are fighting against each other to climb the ladder just a tiny amount up. See the original internet users were scientists, officers, business people, those early adopters who have the resources and curiosity…

How sadly and extraordinarily elitist.

Re: Bruce Sterling: Internet (1993)

#48

Post by eksith »

crusso wrote: post #44
eksith wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> How did we lose the freedom Money came into the picture. And I'd say we're in worse shape now since even in the AOL days, you would still know that this isn't the real "internet". Now, we've been lulled in the false sense that we're getting unfiltered (un-throttled) access, when in fact, it's just a carefully crafted image. I look forward to the day "Internet Service Provider" has been completely replaced with "Ubi…

Money came into the picture. You have it completely backwards. I "discovered" the Internet in 1988 when I got a job in the IT department of the University I attended. I LOVED it. I transferred files, participated a lot in news groups, played MUDs, made friends in Europe... it was wonderful. When I graduated a few years later, I had to kiss the Internet goodbye. Without attending a major University that poured tons of…

Perhaps I should clarify.

When money came into the picture, small-time ISPs and countless dial-up providers (many who offered some short time free) were popping up everywhere. They were quickly gobbled up or mismanaged to the ground as time went on and what remained was far from the competition (the more equal peers concept) as now only handful of companies control access to the world.

Your university was likely connected via early backbone which would have been sold to a company or is being maintained outside it's jurisdiction and is likely being manipulated purely for exploitation.

Commercialization isn't killing the internet. Monopolization is.

Re: Bruce Sterling: Internet (1993)

#49

Post by adventured »

shubhamjain wrote: post #28

> The standard fee is about $40 a month -- about the same as TV cable service. I mean WOW! Americans were able to get internet at 40$ / month in '93? I recall, in 2003, my folks had to pay huge telephone bills even when my internet usage didn't exceed more than 2 hrs a day (dial-up times).

It was around $15 to $20 for my family using dial-up in the mid 1990s ('94/95) for unlimited use (equivalent to maybe $7 to $10 today). 4kb / sec baby! The phone line was another $20, and you'd dial a local # for the ISP to avoid long distance fees. Never could talk my parents into getting a separate phone line just for the modem.

Re: Bruce Sterling: Internet (1993)

#50

Post by adventured »

anoncow wrote: post #33
joering2 wrote: post #21

Ain't that amazing that most human inventions were created to either satisfy military or a porn industry.

can you give examples for the latter?

Arguably the largest demand for consumer bandwidth over the first decade of the Web's existence was porn. From about 1996 forward (Quake), gaming has also helped move the needle.

These days sites like Xvideos, Pornhub etc are monsters when it comes to bandwidth consumption, and there are dozens of major streaming porn sites.

That constant bandwidth demand has been a great catalyst in terms of encouraging ever faster speeds.

How much content is on sites like YouTube or Dailymotion related to sex appeal?

Facebook had intentionally built-in sex appeal aspects to it. It was for college students after all.

Snapchat? Chat roulette? MyFreeCams & Live Jasmin (both of which generate tens of millions in sales)? There are many porn related sites in the top 1,000 global sites. Titillation moves things forward and always will. Humans are sexual beings.

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