Happy 25th anniversary to this Daily Mail article from the year 2000, proclaiming that internet "may be just a passing fad as millions give up on it".
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@stefan Wonder where James Chapman is now, curious what his thoughts are looking back
@stefan@stefanbohacek.online @BalooUriza@social.tulsa.ok.us
He's a PR executive now, after bouncing around politics most of the 2010s.
@stefan that reminds me, I gotta renew my newspaper subscriptions. better write a check
@stefan A right-wing rag getting it massively wrong? This is my shocked face 😐
As it said, it was linked to the cost of it and its limitations.
I remember having to do my work in a shop or at the library and yes it was limited... and costly too.
I wonder what it will become in 30 years
@stefan I remember well my laughing at this time (after using the internet for years). But exactly 5 years before, I worked for a not so small German newspaper where our publisher said, the mechanical writing machines of the 1950s were quite good enough for another 10 yrs. When I took my electrical machine from home, my colleagues nearly killed me. At home, I produced zines on the computer. It was a time of disruption for late-comers.
In fairness: The thing that I thought about the Internet that year, that it would usher in a golden age of shared knowledge and respectful communication, is similarly laughable in retrospect. I wasn't alone in this belief either.
I'd've much rather lived in the universe where integrated circuits didn't work.
@stefan it would be better if millions currently on it had given up on it
@stefan We had a chance to kill it when it was an infant. But we didn’t.
It's not called the Daily Fail for nothin' 😂
@stefan Remember that time when the US built all those data centers for AI and then realized that LLMs didn’t work after all?
@stefan thats an ai image ,i can tell its not the real daily mail because it didn't mention dianne or house prices being affected
@stefan Soon with KI Shit.
@stefan Any day now!
@stefan oh wow. That's a bold article for Y2K ~~ maybe a few years earlier, sure, in the dial-up era prob a fair take.
@stefan This part sure aged like a fine wine though
@stefan
Just because I'm still here doesn't mean I didn't give up on it.
@stefan I bet my flatmate read this, and that's why we're not allowed to connect the internet.
Oh, what a tangled wwweb we weave, when first we practice to selfie.
@stefan « science correspondent » 💀😂
@stefan Sure some people have given up on it, but we're gonna need a lot more people to give up on it before things improve.
@stefan
See, they had clickbait headlines even on analog paper! 😉
@stefan I wonder how often James Chapman, Science Correspondent, gets his face rubbed into THAT one.
@stefan Now I'm almost wishing they had. Who could have predicted the way corporations would enshittify it so badly that you're afraid even to visit actual major sites because they're tracking private stuff about you to sell. At least back then you knew not to visit the bad sites and you'd be generally fine. Now I trust the bad sites more than the "good" ones...
@stefan Those millions are the only ones living in peace today.
@stefan i remember that. it was just as ridiculous-sounding then as it is now.
@stefan LOL. Flop of the millennium!
By 2000 it was pretty clear to anyone with any tech inclinations to realize that it wasn't just a fad.
Possibly dodgy newspapers with no one on staff to explain how it worked might have felt that way.
@stefan My feelings are a complicated mixture of remembering a better time when the young internet expanded my worldview in every dimension and made me the person I am today, and the recognition that those days are long gone and never coming back and we'd be far better off right now without the past decade and a half (ish) of shinternet that replaced them.
Lots of snark and negativity (understandably!), but I am for one thankful for the internet/the web, and all of you being here with me.
We can still turn things around, together!
@stefan The question is how.
We won't do it while everybody else is still trapped in shit places.
We won't do it either bringing so many people over, with all their bad habits, that this (or whatever other good place we may come up with along the way) becomes yet another shit place.
It's a bit of a catch-22.
@stefan Maybe we should have done exactly that...?
@stefan It might have been better if they had.
@stefan @purplepadma I see that the Daily Fail’s reliability was just as good as today back at the turn of the millennium
@stefan pfff, I dismissed it in a fad in 1997 already
@stefan I’m imagining 2 million Britons still happily disconnected
@stefan Would be better if Daily Mail would have been a fad and gone. Vile publication.
@stefan I still have nightmares of modems endlessly trying to set up a link on a noisy line...
How dare you.
»James Chapman has unrivalled experience at the top of both journalism and government.«
@stefan
I recall an interview with an AT&T exec who claimed the Internet was a fad
@stefan Does anyone have page, section, and edition for this? (The image gives author, title, date, and column).
@dedicto @stefan no but it looks like research being quoted is here: "they came, they surfed, they went back to the beach"
https://academic.oup.com/book/52617/chapter-abstract/421806907?redirectedFrom=fulltext&login=false
and here is the entire ESRC "virtual society?" project book
https://books.google.co.uk/books/about/Virtual_Society.html?id=OEgVDAAAQBAJ&redir_esc=y
@stefan the article was good, the timing was wrong, we're getting there now :P
Even then, vested interests were funding malign influence campaigns because they always fear the new.
Even then, the rich feared the disruption of unfettered access to information.
@stefan If only this had been true...
@stefan December 2000 seems to be a bit late for that. About three years late, since I would put the tipping point at about 1997.
@stefan Wow, that's about a year and a half *after* Homer Simpson said "The Internet? Is that thing still around?" in a joke indicating he was clueless and out-of-touch.
Don't look so frightened
This is just a passing phase
One of my bad days
@stefan "The Internet is just a hype" - supposedly Bill Gates
@stefan Interesting this quote: "e-mail [...] is adding to an overload of information".
So nothing has changed, really, we're just continually adjusting to overload.
@stefan I'm seeing the same article these days about electric cars and bikes. And the opposite articles about AI, "millions falling behind by not using AI"
@stefan Happy Dead Internet Day!!!
@stefan too bad it wasn’t right lol
@stefan I feel like this is an artifact from right as the timelines diverged. One from the good future.
@stefan it’s me! i’m millions!
@stefan Sometimes I wish they'd been right...
I'm also convinced someone at BT genuinely believed this was the case, as they seemed to be very slow to get into the ISP game back in the days people were first getting online. Like they were waiting to be certain it wasn't going to be a flash in the pan.