The dangers of predicting the future. Or, why the Internet will fail, according to 1995

Trying to predict the future seems to be a natural human tendency. What’s happening now is pretty interesting, sure, but figuring out what it all means requires looking into what will happen tomorrow. And that’s tough.

Even when we pour endless amounts of money into predicting something relatively scientific, like the weather, we fail more often than we succeed (at least, if we’re trying to make useful predictions on specific weather — like, should I go camping on a weekend, two months from now).

Predicting the stock market? A mug’s game.

Predicting elections? Requires polls so big you may as well just call a vote.

But there’s an endless market for people to prognosticate — and you saw tons of it this year, as one decade ended, and a ton of writers were hauled in front of their editors and told: “Why not do a story on what’ll change over the next decade.”

So it’s funny to go back a few years and see what people were predicting then, for now.

Which is exactly what the blog Three Word Chant has done, unearthing a 1995 Newsweek essay about why the Internet will fail:

Consider today’s online world. The Usenet, a worldwide bulletin board, allows anyone to post messages across the nation. Your word gets out, leapfrogging editors and publishers. Every voice can be heard cheaply and instantly. The result? Every voice is heard. The cacophany more closely resembles citizens band radio, complete with handles, harrasment, and anonymous threats. When most everyone shouts, few listen. How about electronic publishing? Try reading a book on disc. At best, it’s an unpleasant chore: the myopic glow of a clunky computer replaces the friendly pages of a book. And you can’t tote that laptop to the beach. Yet Nicholas Negroponte, director of the MIT Media Lab, predicts that we’ll soon buy books and newspapers straight over the Intenet. Uh, sure.

The problems identified by the cranky original author haven’t gone away. The internet is still a wild wilderness of competing voices, with poor navigation, anonymous sniping and zero accountability.

But he made the classic rookie futurist’s mistake: assuming that things will never change. Some sites have risen to the top with a reputation of accountability and accuracy (news websites, for example, if you try to forget about the financials). Other websites have business models based on making sense of the senseless (like Google, and other search engines). Still others seem to have self-assembled order out of chaos (three cheers for Wikipedia).

It’s humourous to read how much the essay got wrong. But it’s sobering when you think about how those criticisms, often, still exist. We’ve just jury-rigged ways around the worst of it.