From hungary-online-owner Fri May 19 21:39:15 1995 Received: from localhost (daemon@localhost) (fnord) by nando.yak.net (8.6.5/8.6.5) id VAA00435 for hungary-online-out31415; Fri, 19 May 1995 21:39:15 -0700 Received: from localhost (daemon@localhost) (fnord) by nando.yak.net (8.6.5/8.6.5) id VAA00418; Fri, 19 May 1995 21:38:55 -0700 Received: from tbeke@math.mit.edu () via =-=-=-=-=-= for hungary-online@hungary.yak.net (415) Received: from math.mit.edu ([18.87.0.8]) (fnord) by nando (8.6.5/8.6.5) with ESMTP id SAA27269 for ; Fri, 19 May 1995 18:38:49 -0700 Received: from markov.mit.edu (MARKOV.MIT.EDU [18.87.0.40]) by math.mit.edu (8.6.12/8.6.9) with ESMTP id VAA11558 for ; Fri, 19 May 1995 21:38:44 -0400 Received: (from tbeke@localhost) by markov.mit.edu (8.6.12/8.6.9) id VAA13108 for Hungary-Online@hungary.yak.net; Fri, 19 May 1995 21:38:44 -0400 From: Tibor Beke Message-Id: <199505200138.VAA13108@markov.mit.edu> Subject: (HOL) To Rick 'bout pessimism To: Hungary-Online@hungary.yak.net Date: Fri, 19 May 1995 21:38:44 -0400 (EDT) In-Reply-To: from "Rick Bruner" at May 19, 95 10:31:10 pm X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.4 PL23] Content-Type: text Content-Length: 9913 Sender: owner-Hungary-Online@hungary.yak.net Precedence: bulk Reply-To: Hungary-Online@hungary.yak.net > It's actually part of a worldwide subway station calculation device -- what > a fabulously useless application of the power of the Interet: tracking > metro stops in Kiev while sitting in Cleveland, Ohio! you ain't seen nothin' yet; check out http://turnpike.net/metro/mirsky/Worst.html (Mirsky's Worst of the Web -- btw, this site was quoted Best of the Web by several observers ;-) > Not I didn't. I said that the US Information Service web page sucked. It > does. Actually, the CIA has a pretty cool web page: > > http://ciac.llnl.gov > > And it does have email addresses noted. So there :-P shoot! i did goof. i realized it the moment i sent in my original post, but there's no way to cancel one, of course ;->. not that it matters much, but the site you mentioned above is the US Dep't of Energy Computer Incident Advisory Capability, which (i quote) "provides computer security services to employees and contractors of the Department of Energy". it does have something in common with C,I,A. as for the US Information Agency, allow me to quote from their web page: > The Smith-Mundt Act of 1948, which created USIA, prohibits us from > making our overseas programming materials available to citizens of the > United States. We cannot therefore do more than offer general > descriptions of most of our products and services (non-U.S. citizens > should contact the local U.S. Information Service office for the address > of our Web and Gopher servers where this material can be found). > Please visit the sections listed below for information on topics which we > can freely make available to all visitors. to me, this provided sufficient excuse for a web page that, as you plainly put it, "sucks". also, as for the limited use email gets when it comes to communicating w/ governmental agencies, i think the point i raised remains valid. > You've alluded to similar ideas a few times in other recent posts. What do > you mean by "wins"? Are you suggesting that Microsoft Network will actually i see the internet as a three-layered paradigm: there's a government- subsidized infrastructure (historically responsible for the emergence of the net, originally conceived as a pilot project in connectivity and education); there's a grassroots, low-key, comfortable, pseudo-nerdish and rather muddleheaded, futuristic(?) postmodern(?) cyber-anarchism (which is historically responsible for much of the content, tone and feel of the net); and finally, the media. since the net is just becoming a new medium, the existing ones break arms and legs to establish their presence. yes, all of advertising, newspapers, commerce is a VERY new phenomenon. also, very unformed, very inchoate; they often directly borrow ideas and devices from other media, which is ridiculous (but probably unavoidable when things are just starting out). now you might say i'm overstating the point in calling this a 'war' and saying one side will 'win'. nothing excludes the possibility that they coexist, after all. still, there're caveats. for one thing, as you pointed out, we're observing the retreat of academia (and money given specifically to _them_) from the field. for another, low-key subculture still can't do much more than provide _content_ for an infrastructure controlled by big, profit-oriented players. > Somehow, I think that intellegence and mass culture may be converging once > again in human history, here on the Net. It already exists. The Internet > today is cool, fun and yet requires a certainly amount of intellegence to Lemme count the fallacies in just these few sentences ;->. What does it mean, "converge once again"? i can recall no time in the last 5,000 years when intelligence was not the privilege of the few (those few who are (a) born intelligent (b) their intelligence was one way or another kept alive, nurtured and matured. i know of no biological, sociological or psychological theory that was able to upset this, no doubt very succinctly put, view of mine). anyway, that's a long call from 'mass culture'. secondly, i absolutely do not see that the internet would contribute to the 'intelligence' of the 'masses'. it requires a certain amount of computer savvy to use, no denying, and the trend of the industry is to minimize the amount of brain cells (or savvy, let's say) involved. a fine and dandy objective (if ONLY the industry were doing it well!), but another long call from 'convergence'. i sometimes wish more distinction were made between 'information superhypeway' and 'entertainment superhypeway'. don't you dare say edutainment ;-). > use. But 30 million users, and fast growing, is no small market. (How many > of them are using the Web would be an interesting piece of info, if anyone > has a figure.) just curious: do any of you know the name of the inventor of the World Wide Web? if no: how funny. he was a sysad at CERN, now at the (non-profit) WWW Consortium at MIT. do any of you know the name of the person who invented SLIP? yup, that thing, Rick, that lets you use the 'net from home. if not: how funny. he's now some CEO at AlterNet. y'all know the name of Bill, who contributed nothing, absolutely nothing conceptually new to computing. so much for whether intelligence or money/media/hype is visible on the Net. but i digress. the WWW is claiming some 20-30% of all Internet traffic these days, i believe. that's an absolutely _staggering_ amount. (of course, it's also very resource-hungry.) its rate of expansion is way above the rate of expansion of the Internet (which is itself exponential). > I personally see the '90s as the decade of the ascendence of alternative > culture. Revenge of the nerds. Seriously, who would have thought it > possible that to wear thick glasses, get excited about math and computers, > to be labelled a "geek" -- your typical Wired reader -- would one day be > considered "cool"? Okay, maybe they always did so in Hungary, but you guys > are ahead of your time. :) i don't want to be overlong, but i think you're mixing threads here -- -- let's distinguish 'ascendence' from 'visibility' (some period between 1950 and 1970 was the ascendence of the newest incarnation of 'alternative' since Descartes; i'm very much of the view that, say, mind-controlling substances or homosexuality played a constant and definite role throughout human history, but it's only very recently that this starts to be pronounced; or that, say, 'High Times' is a monthly with superb quality printing and computer graphics) -- the typical Wired reader is not a geek; the typical Wired reader is a curious-minded science flunkie, college resident or would-be yuppie observant of the trends of counterculture, with enough time and money to fool with computers, a bit ten-thumbed but trying; or some cozy quasi-underground angst-er, art school grouppie, dreamy-eyed multi- media visionary of vacuum. it's a very fine crowd, i like hanging around with them till they start boring me; i've tried to get several of them excited about math, but never succeeded. ;-> -- nerds exist, the MIT campus's full of them, they read Wired, and they laugh their ass off. they, unfortunately, _do_ what those (out of necessity) sensationalist journalists write _about_. You write several excellent paragraphs here 'bout the Net merging and bringing together subculture with subculture, and offering them, on a plate as it were, to the Citizen, who gets a big dose of it anyway from other media, and doesn't shrink from 'em, unless he's a member of the religious right or such. I truly agree with everything you say. > You seem to have a vision of doom regarding the Net, Tibor. Other than > standard Hungarian pessimism, I don't see why. What exactly is threatening > its future? Legislation? How could it ever be regulated? Who's > jurisdiction? The UN's? The Net is not particularly different from the phone system (which is also global WOW! regulated in each country WOW!), save that one uses computers instead of phone sets, there are emerging standards for digitized video and audio, and there are (static) content providers. The economic and political forces affecting the Net will be like those affecting the phone system. That's a fairly good first approximation. In the second run, one would have to count in the fact that the Net is a medium, and compare with paper journalism, radio and TV. You would certainly not argue that those media are unregulated. To bring up a very blunt example, data encryption is illegal in so many countries on Earth. The major economic issue behind the Net, btw -- this is wholly overlooked if you're a mere 'surfer' amazed (justly amazed!) by its richness -- is saturation. There've been some fine papers written about it by economists; I can give you references. (The issue of 'how will businesses survive on the Net?' is wholly secondary, and besides, few have managed to say s'g about it that also has a grain of intelligence.) In short, if each of the 30 million Internet users will have to wait fifteen minutes and a half to get to a page of HotWired (try this: http://www.penthousemag.com), then the editors at HotWired may as well quit and start a TV station instead. Broadcast Internet from satellites, you say? There're major, major technological issues to be solved; proposed and incompatible standards exist from rival companies of rivalling countries that no one has dared to put on the market yet and, at the final irony of all, the present software ad hardware standards of the Internet hail from times when billing and saturation were not an issue ('cos of gov't subsidies). This works against a market solution; and the irony is, this same fact allows cozy low-key punksters like Rick Bruner and Tibor Beke to communicate. But it's my turn now to apologize for length. Tibor ############# # This message to Hungary-Online@hungary.yak.net # was from Tibor Beke # # To unsubscribe, # send "unsubscribe" to # An announcement-only subscription (less volume) is available # at # Send mail to for more information, # or to if you need human assistance. #############