Digerati
Cliff Stoll: The Skeptic
By John Brockman
Author John Brockman, who doubles as a Manhattan-based literary and software agent, identifies 30 of the most
influential thinkers of the digital revolution in his book, published by San Francisco-based HardWired. Digerati
profiles such thinkers as Esther Dyson ("The Pattern Recognizer"), Bill Gates ("The Software Developer"), Jaron
Lanier ("The Prodigy"), Cliff Stoll ("The Skeptic"), Scott McNealy ("The Competitor") and many others. The book
includes their thoughts on the digital revolution, their opinions of each other and Brockman's own take on each of the
digerati.
Cliff Stoll -
lives in Oakland, Calif., is an astrophysicist and the author of Silicon
Snake Oil (1995) and The Cuckoo's Egg (1994), and a regular
commentator on MSNBC.
"W
hen I'm on-line, I'm alone in a room, tapping on a keyboard,
staring at a cathode-ray tube. I'm ignoring anyone else in the room. The
nature of being on-line is that I can't be with someone else. Rather than bringing me closer to
others, the time that I spend on-line isolates me from the most important people in my life, my
family, my friends, my neighborhood, my community."
- Cliff Stoll didn't think this way in 1994. One of a large and varied group of weekend
guests, Cliff was sitting in front of my computer in the study, typing like a man
possessed, on a beautiful, sunny June afternoon.
- "Come outside, Cliff," I said, "and join the party."
- "Can't, John," he said. "Been away from home three days and already I have at least 250
e-mail messages to answer."
- Drastic action was required. "Cliff," I barked, shifting into my U.S. Army command
mode, "you will get off-line, you will turn the computer off, and you will move your ass
outside. Now!"
- With digital communications and the accessibility we all have to one another, you begin
to see how Cliff, since the publication of his best-selling The Cuckoo's Egg, had gone
from Internet God to Digital Martyr.
- "Cliff is often given short shrift because he is acting as a very spontaneous critic of the
Net hype," says Mike Godwin, counsel for the Electronic Frontier Foundation of San
Francisco and Cliff's close friend. "What a lot of people don't realize is that, first, Cliff is
coming to this position from a base of knowledge about all the positive things the Net
can be. The second is that he is not nearly so negative as he is commonly presented as
being. What he wants us to do is ask critical questions. In Cliff, you see one of the first
people who had to grapple with a wide range of ethical and security issues on the Net.
Unlike virtually every other critic of on-line communications, Cliff knows what he's
talking about. He's used the medium."
- Cliff walked outside with me, away from the sea of digital information in which he was
drowning. I don't know if it was the beauty of the day, the attention he received from
the bright teenagers who had read his first book, or just the walk alone with a dog and
his thoughts through the pine forests and cornfields, but Cliff never went back into the
study. He didn't answer his e-mail. When he left for the airport two days later, he
handed me drafts of the first two chapters of a new book, which quickly evolved into
Silicon Snake Oil.
- Two years have passed, during which Cliff has become a father -- twice. He's the one
who stays home and takes care of the babies. The digital agenda has faded into the
background. "I love computers, and I use them all the time," he says. "I've got a
half-dozen computers in my house. But this cult of computing gives me the
heebie-jeebies, the sense that if you don't have an electronic-mail address, if you don't
have your own customized home page on the World Wide Web, then you're being left
behind, that progress is going on without you. Human kindness, warmth, interaction,
friendship and family are far more important than anything that can come across my
cathode-ray tube. While I admire the insights of many of the people in the world of
computing, I get this cold feeling that I speak a different language."
Cliff Stoll, In His Own Words
- The Internet brings me terrific stuff, but it also brings me loads of drivel and dross and
mediocrity. My computer doesn't know how to separate the two, so I have to work hard
to figure out what's good stuff and what's lousy stuff. Rather than saving me time by
providing fast communications, the Internet is wasting my time by forcing me to edit out
lots of valueless dreck from a constant stream of messages. At the same time, the
immediacy of the Internet detracts from the time I leave to reflect on my work. It makes
me react to what's happening inside my computer and across the network rather than
think about what's happening in the universe at large and on the planets I'm studying.
- The Internet is said to be growing from its present infancy into a wonderland where
there will be commerce and lots of information. I don't believe it. The Internet provides
lots of data, but data is just words and bits and bytes and numbers. Unlike information,
data has no content, it has no context, it has little utility, it lacks accuracy, it lacks
pedigree, and it lacks timeliness. Most of all, it lacks usefulness.
- This information highway, which delivers damned little information, is said to be the
roadway to power in progress. After all, information is power. I don't believe it!
Powerful people are seldom informed. Presidents. Prime ministers. Generals of armies.
They don't sit behind a computer reading stuff off the Internet! Hey, who has the most
information? Librarians do! It's hard to imagine a group of people with less power than
librarians.
- Nor is there a connection between information and knowledge. Knowledge, dare I say
wisdom, which we ought to be seeking, is, for the most part, not information, but a
sense of understanding, a sense of judgment, a sense of when to ignore information.
Moreover, what turns the cranks in my head is not information, but ideas, hypotheses,
creative solutions that I might not have come across before. I can't get those from a
computer. I can get those only by thinking.
- The Internet is perhaps the most oversold, overpromoted communications system ever
created. It is little more than an uppity telephone system. In fact, it's somewhat less than
that. At least on a telephone system, I can call anyone I want to, worldwide. I can't do
that on-line! I can't call my mom on the Internet. She doesn't use a computer. The
telephone system reaches 98 percent of the people in North America. How many are on
the Internet -- 10 million, 30 million? That's only 10 percent of the population.
- An essential aspect to studying, to thinking is context. It's not enough to look at just a
sentence in a book or even a paragraph in a book. I want to read the whole book, to get
the ebb and flow of the storyteller, to understand where the story is leading. The nature
of the Web and hypertext destroys context. We literally surf, from one place to another,
without going to any depth. If television is the vast wasteland, then the Web is a
phenomenally surface-shallow hole of mediocrity. The home pages that I find are
monuments to narcissism. Like the Internet, the Web is a terrific solution to a
nonexistent problem. Someday we will find problems that the Web will solve.
- It follows from a sense of economic principles that publishing on-line is cheap. The cost
of paper is skyrocketing. A curious phenomenon is that every year, publishing on-line
gets cheaper and publishing on paper gets more expensive. An obvious result of this is
being ignored by almost everyone -- namely, that people who have valuable things to
say that others are willing to pay money to hear will publish in print. Those who have
things to say that have the least commercial value will publish free on-line! It's
Gresham's Law: Bad money drives out the good. The Internet is the land of the cheap,
the home of the free.
- I suspect that rather than ending publishing, the Web and the Internet will take the
lousier manuscripts out of the bookstores and put them on-line. Good authors will
continue to publish real books. Why would somebody publish terrific ideas on-line?
Somebody else will swipe them and publish them. It happens in science all the time. A
book is one fantastic device that has been honed and evolved over the centuries into a
potent tool for information. It's user-friendly, portable and cheap. We have a terrific
distribution system for it. It's available to every person who's literate. What more can
you ask for? Books are terrific, and I don't think they'll disappear in the near future or in
the far future either. Hypertext is not an adequate substitute for a book. Books have
their own hypertext: an index, contents, a footnote, a cross-reference.
- It will be a long while before there is a lot of on-line commerce. One thing the Internet
is missing is salespeople. In doing business on-line, how do I know a company is going
to exist tomorrow, next week or next year? In dealing face-to-face, there's a sense of
trust, of camaraderie, a realization that the salesperson works for the customer as well
as the business. It's an idea as old as commerce. Yet somehow, in computing we think
we can avoid salespeople by selling on-line. I expect that in the next five or six years,
we'll realize that the great predictions of on-line malls and Internet commercial bonanzas
evaporated into thin air.
- I am more at home with plumbers and carpenters than with the gurus of the digital
culture. I have the feeling that the world of tomorrow will not be that of the information
age. Most of the jobs that we see around us -- bartender, waiter, senator, movie actor,
salesperson -- do not require computers, probably don't even require faxes and often
don't require telephones. I suspect that 20, 40, 100 years from now, those jobs will still
exist, and we'll need competent, capable people to handle them.
Comments and suggestions are welcome via e-mail to: feedback@upside.com
Copyright ©1996 Upside Publishing Company. All rights reserved.
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(I think I still have the tape of his address to the California Club last year. E-mail CApps if you'd like to see it)
Does Purchasing a System Scare You?
Time and time again successful retailers contact us regarding the purchase of our system. They
receive our literature, review our reports, speak with our references and receive a proposal.
However, more often than not, the purchase is stalled by the phrase, "Let me think it over." Why
is this? We think we know.
Generally speaking, people are afraid of buying the wrong solution, paying too much or falling
victim to a disaster with no support there to help. All of this stems from two obstacles. The first
obstacle is fear, the other is ignorance. The fear, ironically, is a result of the ignorance.
This is not to say that people purchasing systems are an ignorant lot. Rather, it is that people who
do not understand something fully cannot evaluate it effectively. This uncertainty results in their
fear about making the decision. A considerable amount of failure and frustration is based on the
misunderstood and the uncertain.
Virtually everyone in Retailing has heard a POS horror story, but you should not let that
intimidate you out of the crucial process of implementing automation. This is especially true,
when you identify a solution that comes highly recommended by your peers.
MerchanTechnologies has maintained 100% of its customer base of 1500+ stores over the past 8
years. Few other companies can claim no attrition over nearly a decade of business.
Can a company that fails to provide high quality products and superior follow-up services achieve
that level of success? Of course not.
We are confident. If we cannot provide a solution for you, we are the first to say so. Why?
Quite simply, we don't want to set a level of expectation that we cannot meet. That would only
result in a dissatisfied customer and blemish our spotless record.
©1996 - MerchanT New$ - Newsletter of MerchanTechnologies
Some Point of Sale Wisdom, that also can apply to any new system purchase, from the people of
MerchanTechnologies, publishers of the Prism POS. 800-395-8324. By the way CApps has almost a
100% record with our clients too.
Tell MerchanTechnologies that Roy Lamberton at CApps Sent you.....
(Back to CApps Home Page) (The CApps Concept) (What We Do)
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