Right now I’m thinking about the Internet, the all-pervasive medium through which I’ve published my thoughts and work I’ve done in my free time for several years now. Like mostly everyone else, I communicate with others using the Internet, play games through it, read news, and learn about things. (Except, sadly, I am not convinced the general public is interested in learning. ) And we are all familiar with the “dot com mania” and the insane rise in the NASDAQ – and, sadly, the subsequent fall of the NASDAQ. People have been wondering exactly what was behind all of this, and if the Internet – which once seemed so enticing – is now bogus.
What we are entering is a power age, and the importance of the power age lies in its ability, rightly used with the wage motive behind it, to increase and cheapen production so that all of us may have more of this world’s goods. The way to liberty, the way to equality of opportunity, the way from empty phrases to actualities, lies through power” – Henry Ford Here’s something which should not be news: the entire . com insanity was a crock from the start! That’s right – the entire New Economy was founded on delusions and misinformation all along.
But just as people were overzealous then, they are overly pessimistic now (at the time of this writing). The Internet is not intrinsically a crock. But the general public got a taste of what the Internet can do, and warped and distorted it into a magical cure-all for all of life’s problems. The Internet cannot produce material objects; only industry can. The Internet can near-instantaneously transport information from any location to any location, but it cannot transport atoms. And while information is fun and happy, many other things we enjoy (such as books (for now), pizza, and computers! re made of heavy, sluggish atoms.
Throwing up a web site does not automatically mean instant wealth, nor does a name that ends in “. com”. This has always been true, and will continue to be true (for a while… ), but for a short time most everyone deluded themselves into believing the exact opposite. And even technically knowledgeable people (such as myself, and many others who knew what the Internet was before everyone and his uncle came onto the scene) were caught up in the hysteria, because the Internet is indeed really cool, and it seemed it was the time when everyone was becoming aware of that fact too.
We always knew that advertising on the Internet was a crock, but we underestimated the general public’s ability to come to their senses (I know, I know – it’s still just a little unbelievable that they could have figured it out eventually). We live in a power age. The Information Age which we are entering enhances power; it makes production more efficient, communication more efficient and widespread, organization more effective, and a myriad of other things. The Internet lubricates our current system, and makes things easier. It is not magical, though, and we all have to confront reality.
Take, for example, advertising on the Internet. But first, let’s look at a simpler case (assume the cow is spherical): advertising in magazines and television. Now, we all can agree that almost all advertising is evil and useless. In my case, I hate cars – I hate driving cars, hearing about cars, or thinking about cars. Now, a disgusting amount of advertising on television, and in magazines too, is advertisements about cars. I presume this is done because while few people at any one time are looking to buy a car, any individual car purchase makes large profits for the companies, so it is worthwhile to advertise the things.
But such advertisements are worthless when directed at me, because I have no desire to buy the things, nor will they kindle such a need in me. It’s a waste of their time, and my time. So the first lesson: improperly targeted advertising is worthless. In television and magazines, the things advertised happen to be what most of the people reading or watching that medium want to buy, so the advertisers make money, the TV shows and magazines make money, and the general public gets their TV shows for free and their magazines and (especially) newspapers for trivial sums of money.
All is well. Why does it fail so badly and so spectacularly when applied to the Internet? This is, of course, for reasons that I and many others (but not enough of them! ) have seen for quite a while. Internet advertising has been a crock from the start. First of all, it is almost always spectacularly horribly targeted. Let’s focus on banners (the most innocuous form) for a while. If I am visiting, say, any web site, and I see a disgusting animated GIF that blinks a bad imitation of a link, and it tells me “if this link is blinking, you have won a shopping spree!
Click to claim your prize”, I am not just bored, or annoyed – I am offended and disgusted. I will never click that thing, in any way, ever. That is just advertising in poor taste; it is mistargeted at everyone. Same with the scripted “punch the monkey and win a prize” nonsense that is hopefully a quite dated reference by the time you read this – but it was all the rage during the . com mania. At the very least, most ads on TV (even the car ads sporting SUVs driving off-road and kicking up mud) are not so offensive to everyone’s sensibilities.
Say we ignore such cruft and look at somewhat more respectable ads. If I am viewing a site about computers, it’s a fair bet that ads about computers might be a good idea, and ads about other topics not such a good idea. Web sites, increasingly, seem to be realizing this. But an advertisement asking me to buy a wireless camera to do who knows what with is not properly targeted. The web, far more than television or magazines, makes proper targeting of ads possible and easy. Ideally, advertisements should be a form of news.
“Hey, this product is available. ” If I am on, say, www. storagereview. m and I see an advertisement for the Seagate Cheetah X15-36LP (a particularly tasty drive at the time of writing), that’s excellent. I’ll be pleased it’s there. I might even click the danged thing, because I’m interested in buying that drive. But a wrong assumption of the . com mania is that people should click banner advertisements, or that they will, or that tracking clicks is a good method to judge how effective an advertisement is. From the very instant I began to use the Internet and the web, I never clicked banner ads. I have always seen through their guise and their inner bogosity was revealed to me.
Everyone and his uncle, it seems, took a while to realize this. I’ve heard that at times, 10% of people clicked banner advertisements. That was non-believable to me. Right now it’s fallen to percentages I can believe – within epsilon of zero, if I recall correctly. This is just people waking up and figuring out the correct thing to do: people who aren’t green newbies don’t click banner ads. But does this really matter? Say, for instance, we’re given that ads are (finally) targeted properly, to people who will appreciate hearing about a new product.
And even if I am on a site dealing with hard drives, I might not be annoyed by an advertisement for McDonald’s, because – as with TV – that might make me hungry, and cause me to actually crawl out of my room at Caltech and walk to the nearest McDonald’s for a couple of cheeseburgers. But an advertisement for Coca-Cola would not be good; I don’t drink that gunk, preferring the hacking fluid of choice, Mountain Dew. Insidious schemes using cookies and databases to track my web usage are NOT the way to go, they are not a good way to figure out that I hate Coke and cars, but like Dew and cheeseburgers.
I might even go out of my way and enter in a form somewhere my preferences, to decrease the number of boring ads being thrown at me – but again, I won’t want this stuff personally linked to my name. Advertisers have, at the time of this writing, yet to figure this basic stuff out. Lamers. ) Returning from the parenthetical digression, not even television or magazine ads expect us to rush out immediately and learn more about the product, or even go and buy the damned thing. Rather, they create brand recognition and product awareness, so when we’re next at the store we’ll pick up a bag of Pizza Rolls and a bottle of Mountain Dew.
Internet advertising during the . com mania – and even now – expects people to click on the damned banners. Which smart people don’t do. But the banners still can be worthwhile. I am increasingly encouraged by correctly targeted advertisements (like Seagate ads on hard drive sites) and “general interest” ads like ones for McDonald’s that don’t expect us to click on the things when we see them. Alas, we cannot order cheeseburgers over the Internet – yet. Once marketroids realize this, web sites won’t have to struggle to stay alive on ad revenue.
And now, let’s look at pop-up ads, Flash and scripted ads, and even applet ads. These are all bogus. They take the idea of “people should go out and click on and buy this stuff right away right now! ” even further, and blare it in our faces, popping up new windows and annoying us with bells, whistles and gongs. I think most everyone realizes this, so I won’t go on at length about it. Besides, software can block this kind of stuff anyway.
Enough about advertising – what about the companies of the . com mania themselves? Places like “eToys” and “pets. m” and all those other things that failed were bogus from the beginning. A widely recognized brand is all well and good, but it is also worthless if there isn’t something that people want to buy behind it. Amazon. com has somehow not died (though at this moment I’m uncertain as to whether they’ve actually turned a profit yet), but I believe this is because they really don’t suck. I’ve ordered books (many, many books) from amazon. com before, and they arrived quickly, and they have a huge selection too. Which I like. But most of the other . com startups failed, and for good reasons.
They sucked to begin with, and tried to hide their intrinsic bogosity behind marketroid words like “B2B solution” and other catch phrases. (You know what they are – I won’t offend your sensibilities further by repeating such phrases devoid of intelligence. ) This does not mean the Internet is bogus – just that those lame companies were. “The microprocessor has brought electronics into a new era. It is altering the structure of our society” – Robert Noyce and Marcian Hoff, Jr. , “History of Microprocessor Development at Intel”, IEEE Micro On the contrary, the Internet is rather cool.
However, this . com mania happened at the wrong time – which is to say, too early. (It’s been obvious to technically knowledgeable people for quite a long time that the Internet is cool, and we wondered why J. Random Luser hadn’t figured that out yet – but the mania actually happened too soon. ) Even as I write this, most people are connected to the Internet through that lowliest of devices, the modem. Even my own computer has one of these wretched devices, and when I finish this essay I will upload this document through its vile silicon and wiring, because it’s the only connection I have at home.
I don’t plan to put a modem in the next computer I’m building; I don’t want to defile such a glorious box. ) Few people have less bogus – but still sucky – connections like cable and DSL (both of which are also crocked-up solutions to getting Internet access to the general public, like transmitting information over phone lines). The real connections, like Ethernet, Fast Ethernet, Gigabit Ethernet, and optical connections (all of which are the future) remain confined to places like college campuses (hooray) and limited use. You can’t do very many interesting things through a modem.
You can barely download severely compressed music like 128kbps MP3 files – and look how THAT exploded (in a number of senses of the word). You can’t even think about digital video until you have an Ethernet connection. But as more and more people get real connections to the Internet, its applications will become innumerable and highly, highly useful. The whole digital music situation, I hope, will eventually get sorted out – and this will mean the death of publishing companies, free music for everyone, and proper compensation to the artists (publishing companies are middlemen – though in the Old Economy they deserve money, in the (upcoming!
New Economy they are redundant, worthless, and do not deserve money). I have a few ideas how this might be accomplished, but we’ll see. The digital video situation will become widespread, and a solution to it will have to be devised too; I expect television to eventually die, and *real* video on demand to become a reality – by which I mean watching any episode of any TV show or any movie at any time, with the click of a button, on your computer. I don’t expect all of this to happen right now, of course.
Predicting the future is always incredibly hard, of course, but I figure digital video (and its widespread copying) will become newsworthy the way MP3s are now, in (say) 5 years. An eternity, I know. The death of television? That might not happen for two decades (several eternities). It’s just beyond technically feasible now (hard drives are just a little too small to hold massive amounts of video), actually. And the irrational desire of people to only pay a thousand dollars for a computer will likely postpone the death of television. But I believe it will happen, because it’s so obvious.
So, if advertising is rather screwed up right now (which it is), and Internet companies in a precarious and ambiguous situtation (which they are), is the Internet at all useful right NOW? Not in 5 or 20 years from now, but right now? Yeah, it actually is quite useful. Because anyone can publish things on the Internet, and do so with much more ease than starting up a magazine, and additionally publish arbitrary amounts of content, there’s a lot of nifty things out there. For example, I can (and often do) learn everything I can about a new game before its release, thanks to gaming sites.
I can keep up with a game after it’s released, and keep up with the community that grows around it – such as Deus Ex; I follow forums and sites dedicated to it. I can actually learn things, about C programming, the nature of color vision, or prime numbers – this has been true for as long as I’ve used the Internet, and it will continue to be true. “I got fed up dealing with politicians and businessmen who think the Net is some kind of pipe down which stuff can be pumped at kids (who are seen, incidentally, as empty vessels to be ‘filled’).
So I started saying to them “Look, it isn’t a pipe, it’s a beanstalk up which children climb, like Jack in the fairy tale, into other worlds”. It was worth it just to see the look of incomprehension on their faces” – John Naughton And I can learn about things to buy, too! I follow the aforementioned storagereview. com rather closely; from it, I’ve learned massive amounts of things about how hard drives operate and what SCSI is, and I’ve picked out the drives I want to buy from their reviews. I’m psyched for Max Payne and Duke Nukem Forever (both unreleased as I write this) because of the various previews I’ve seen.
It was because of an Internet preview that I bought Deus Ex in the first place, which turned out to be such a good decision that Ion Storm Austin (as it’s called right now) basically already has my money for Deus Ex II. I keep up with nvnews. net, and I’m actually current with video card technology now, whereas before I was totally ignorant of how the things work. (My first 3D accelerator was a TNT2 Ultra; I upgraded to “Ultra” because it sounded cool. ) I bought my current video card because of all the buzz on gaming and hardware sites; I did it through a certain web site noted on nvnews. net.
All these news and reviews sites, I believe, are really the future – not silly “e-tailers” or “portals”. I’ve always known “portals” sucked. The page my web browsers go to on load has always been a search engine – which really aren’t bogus, as the Internet is so huge you really do need search engines, and good ones. First I used Lycos, then HotBot. Once each of those started sucking, I switched to a new search engine. Now, I use Google, which (unbelievably) doesn’t suck, and looks like it will stay that way. These sorts of things have a future. The Internet has a future, and it’s going to be great. The New Economy is still ahead of us.