I am attaching a copy of an article by James Gleick, the
          author of the book about Chaos which was so popular a while
          back, and the owner and instigator of a new Internet access
          service called Pipeline. After reading about this service in
          PC magazines and the Times, I subscribed, and it's been a
          real revelation so far. Anyway, I thought this article might
          interest people here.
 
          Eric Siegel
          [log in to unmask]
 
The Information Future
Out of Control
(And it's a good thing, too.)
 
By James Gleick
 
        Here I am, early one winter evening, on the telephone with an
elderly man in his home somewhere in Manhattan. I don't know
his name; he doesn't know mine. I am frantically begging him to
leave his handset off the hook. My Chinese is even worse than
his English--it's hopeless.
        I have opened a new outpost in the electronic landscape, a
company called the Pipeline, offering everyday access to the
Internet, the blooming network of computer networks--a.k.a.,
Information Superhighway. Our customers are arriving home from
work, switching off the news, turning their backs on spouses,
turning on their home computers and dialing--trying to
dial--into our gateway.
        Like America Online, Prodigy and a host of other services
large and small, we have banks of telephone lines feeding into
a network of computers. Our network in turn is attached to the
global Internet by a series of high-speed digital circuits. Our
telephone lines are arranged in standard fashion, so that as
each becomes busy, a new caller is automatically bounced to the
next free line.
        For reasons that will never be completely explained, however, a
line at the very beginning of our sequence has suddenly begun bouncing to
a random residential number elsewhere. The rest of our telephone bank has
effectively been cut off. Our victim, meanwhile, has been answering his
phone resolutely, minute after minute, greeted each time by a sound that
human ears were never meant to hear, the squeal of a modem. If he would at
least leave his phone off the hook, our Pipeline customers would be
bounced back into our sequence. But why should he? He, too, has paid for
his telephone service. The Nynex repair number, 611, is, as always, a
black hole.
        I have seen the future, and it's still in the future.
 
        Spinning Wheels, and Their Skidmarks
 
        The computer, television and telephone empires have seen the
future, too, of course. Never in the annals of business have so
many great enterprises raced their engines so violently in the
cause of so seductive a vision.... Videos beamed over telephone
wires.... Telephone calls digitized and packetized over
television cable.... Data and interactivity everywhere. If you
want to study the third baseman while other viewers are
watching the batter, you can--at least in the laboratories.
Want to read the newspaper seconds after it's transmitted to
your pocket computer? Or surf 500 channels? Replay that sex
scene? Talk back to Connie Chung? Easy. Come and get it!  At
least that's the idea.
        Information providers and information-provider wannabes are
equally frenzied. If you're a major newspaper or news service,
or if you've a giant entertainment conglomerate, you are
pouring money into pilot projects and on-line trials. In the
confusion, everyone is an information provider. It seems that
every author, game developer, cartoonist, porn star and
greeting-card designer in America has already been signed up
for the thing called multimedia.  That's usually a fancy
synonym for CD-ROM, laser disks that can enliven your computer
with the multiple media of words, sounds, pictures, and
snippets of video.
        Of course, the vast majority of computer owners don't even
have CD-ROM drives. If they don't act quickly, they will miss
out on the Too Many Typefaces CD-ROM, the Fractal Ecstasy
CD-ROM, the CIA World Tour , the San Diego Zoo's Animals
CD-ROM, the Learn to Play Guitar.... Meanwhile, the word in
financial circles is that a business card containing the word
interactive will pass the bearer through any door in corporate
America.
        At the center of this froth is a conviction that there is
nothing less is at stake than the entire future of the world's
information, communication and entertainment infrastructure. If
one could find just the right strategic alliance, just the
right corporate merger, just the right software vendor to help
that video-music-text-art combination soar through
the...airwaves? Phone lines? Television cable?
        Unfortunately, the present has a way of staying with us, and
these great companies are already littering the business
landscape with the debris of their shifting strategies. The
merger of two of the largest, Tele-Communications Inc. and the
Bell Atlantic Corporation ---reported, analyzed and financed on
the scale of a new Sino-Soviet alliance--materialized and
dematerialized in a blizzard of press clippings. Time Warner
Cable has announced that its field trial of interactive
entertainment and home shopping, meant to begin this spring in
4,000 Florida homes, will be put off till the end of the year,
at best. A regulatory change here, a software-development
problem there--and the future recedes once again.
 
        If Only the Infobahn Had Salt Spreaders
 
        The Information Superhighway has reached buzz-word status so
fast that no one has time to utter all eight syllables any
more. The latest coinages are Infobahn and, most succinct,
I-way.  "It's showtime on the Infobahn," people keep reminding
us. The I-way has on-ramps, potholes, traffic jams. "There are
speed limits on the Information Superhighway" is a cliche
pronounced almost as often, and as assuredly, as its opposite,
"There are no speed limits on the Information Superhighway."
        In fact, there are speed limits. If your computer uses a
14,400-baud modem, you are among the elite, but you will still
find yourself drumming on the table as you wait for today's
satellite photo, and on-line video is out of the question: too
much data to squeeze
through too narrow a channel. No one has done more to give
American business the official I-way go-ahead than Vice
President Gore, who understands the cultural and economic power
 
 
of universal connectivity. But there was no video, no audio, no
multimedia in his celebrated electronic town meeting. There was
only Gore, happy technologist and, luckily, touch typist,
rattling words out of his computer keyboard to an audience of
hundreds. The speed limit was measured in words per minute.
        For large institutions like universities and data-processing
companies, with huge quantities of information to send back and
forth daily, the notion of anInformation Superhighway isn't a
terrible metaphor. There is an infrastructure that needs to be
expanded and maintained: high-capacity electronic paths across
the country and around the globe. There are routing problems
and traffic problems. There really are tolls and bridges,
on-ramps (sort of) and potholes (unquestionably).
        For most of us, however, the metaphor is misleading. We don't have
continent-sized data tie-ups awaiting for the construction of a giant
cross-country conduit. We have ancient copper telephone lines that we wish
could support our fax machines, modems and voice conversations. The choke
point is in the few blocks between our homes or offices and the telephone
company's switch. The miracle is that so many people and small businesses
are managing to find their own ways into the electronic world, "that
electronic world which more and more supplants the dull world of heavy
elements and three dimensions," as John Updike put it recently.
        It grows not by design but by accretion. It resembles not a
broad, linear highway but a protoplasmic organism, or colony of
organisms. New bits are constantly floating along and joining
up withthe mass. When my company adds a customer--especially
one who stays on line for hours at a time, sending out E-mail
and commentary, or placing information on line for others to
stumble upon--the Internet has grown by another degree.
 
        The Internet (Un)Defined
 
        Somewhere out there, people are taking the trouble to put the
professional sports schedules on line, free, to be consulted by
any surfer of cyberspace who suddenly feels the urge to know
where the Indians are playing on May 4.
        A pair of architecture buffs have started assembling a
"multimedia" resource dedicated to the "dissemination of
architectural knowledge": drawings by Palladio, Kandinsky
paintings, musings on "lunar architectural"--and of course
links into everyone else's equally new, experimental and
personal sources of architectural information.
        Debbie (the Leaper) Brown, working for a computer company in
Rochester, took the trouble to post a complete episode guide
for one of her all-time favorite television shows, "Miami
Vice."
        Bill Sherman, at the National Center for Supercomputing
Applications, who is evidently more of a Muppets fan, put on
line a compilation called a "Mupp-ography."
        Students at Carnegie-Mellon University have wired in an M&M
dispenser and soda machine, so that a hungry or thirsty
Internaut in Paris or Taiwan can get get a real-time display in
a typically raw style:
 
        M&M validity: 9         Coke validity: 9
            M & M                      Buttons
           /-----\           C: CCCCCC..................
           |     |        C: CCCCCCCC....   D: CCCCCC......
           |**** |        C: C...........   D: CCCCCCCCC...
           |*****|        C: CCCCCCCCC...   D: CC..........
           |*****|                          C: CCCCCCCCC...
           \-----/                          S: CCC.........
              |        Key:
              |          0 = warm;  9 = 90% cold;  C = cold
              |          Leftmost soda/pop will be dispensed next
           ---^---
 
 
        This is the Storehouse of Human Knowledge, Department of Grass
Roots. Nothing is too trivial to find a permanent place:  certainly not
this week's Nielsen Ratings, and certainly not the Twin Peaks Allusions
(16 contributors from the United States, Britain and Sweden), the Twin
Peaks Pilot--"every second of it," Twin Peaks Symbolism, or Twin Peaks
Timelines.
        It's surely in the same spirit that the Government of the
United States has become tossing on-line its own miscellany of
useful information. The new Internet site of the Senate
itemizes Available Documents Distributed by Member; forget that
so far it's an on-line Senate of four (Patrick J. Leahy, Edward
M. Kennedy, Charles S. Robb and Ted Stevens). The White House
posts every public document.  Of course, history is a
continuum, and the Federalist Papers are available next door
(cyberspatially speaking).
        The hardest fact to grasp about the Internet and the I-way is
this: It isn't a thing; it isn't an entity; it isn't an
organization. No one owns it; no one runs it. It is simply
Everyone's Computers, Connected. It is the network of all
networks--the combination of all the large and small
university, government and corporate networks. It extends to
individual P.C.'s at the end of the line, like shacks at the
ends of dirt roads not far from the turnoff to U. S. Route 1.
        The Internet has taken shape with startlingly little planning.
It received only the most accidental assistance from top
Government policy makers ("Information Superhighway" was no
more a Bush Administration watchword than was "Supermarket
Checkout Scanner"). Nor did the telecommunications companies
help much; the fiber that carries the megabits of data may be
theirs, but they themselves remain conspicuously absent from
the business of getting companies and individuals onto the
Internet. The most universal and indispensible network on the
planet somehow burgeoned without so much as a board of
directors, never mind a mergers-and-acquisitions department.
        There is a paradoxical lesson here for strategists. In
economic terms, the great corporations are acting like
socialist planners, while old-fashioned free-market capitalism
blooms at their feet. We live in an era when giant
communications empires own the cables and airwaves, and giant
information empires own everything else.  It's a time when
Simon & Schuster and Warner and Paramount and CBS Records and
Time magazine and Sony and hundreds of magazines, cable-TV
stations and rap-music companies are, if not yet one big
company, then roughly three.
        Yet here's the Internet, a world controlled by no one, like a
vast television station without programmers or a newspaper
without editors--or rather, with millions of programmers and
editors. It's a frontier, befitting its origins: unruly,
impolite and anarchic. But also democratic.
        My own obsession with the Internet began with sheer wonder at
the junkyard plenitude of information, tempered by horror at
the difficulty of finding anything. Most people who have found
a way to dial into the Internet have been confronted by one of
the world's strangest linguistic phenomena, the operating
system known as Unix. They have also had to know the computer
addresses for each item on this giant library shelf. Want an
hourly status report on the activity of the aurora borealis?
Just enter the command: finger [log in to unmask]
        This seems unnecessary. The point of companies like the
Pipeline has been to create an environment using simple
graphical software that organizes at least some of the
wilderness. We try to cut paths into the jungle, even if the
underbrush does have a way of
growing back. Certainly graphical interfaces are the future,
and they are bringing a new population into the electronic
world. Is that a good thing? The original inhabitants don't
always think so. Part of the Internet's culture, and not the
most attractive part, has been a form of elitism that has
encouraged the obscurity. It has been like a town that leaves
its streets unmarked on the principle that people who don't
already know don't belong.
 
        Hello? Anybody Home?
 
        I have visited the advanced telecommunications research
laboratories and seen what technology can bring--ISDN, for
example, Integrated Services Digital Network, which promises to
turn ordinary phone lines into high-bandwidth carriers of
pictures and videos. Lately, though, on behalf of the Pipeline,
I've also visited the local telephone company and seen what
technology can't bring. I've tried to order this very service.
I have a 14-page, four-color brochure! "Nynex ISDN Primary
Service ... for More Efficient Voice, Data, Image, and
Video...." The Pipeline's ISDN order has been floating about
for months. Our sales representative says he wrote it up three
times, and each time the system bounced it back. I have a phone
number for an ISDN specialist inside Nynex, but he doesn't seem
to have voice mail.
        Luckily, our customers understand the environment we're
working with. "Sorry, my response to Dave's post on Indian
beach food got eaten up by a second-level demon somewhere in
the Giant Tunnel of the Fourth Moon of Nynex," writes a New
York financier in one of our on-line forums. We make do.
        At the Pipeline, we've discussed plausible advanced-technology
scenarios for bringing our necessary volume of telephone
circuits into our office: Nynex has plenty of fiber and packet
networks, Enterprise Service, Infopath, and Advanced Customer
Networks. We don't want hundreds of separate telephone numbers
(a scarce commodity) and we don't want dial tone (our customers
call us). But we get them whether we want them or not. Somehow,
when we file out of conference rooms, the solution is always
the same: a wall-full of individual, old-fashioned telephone
lines.
        The Pipeline is not alone. The large, private on-line
services, too, rely on more or less the same graying telephone
technology. Those services may have a limited future anyway.
Either they will open their gates to the Internet and become
subsumed by it, or they will remain lakes isolated from the
ocean. Meanwhile, despite ourselves, we have become revenue
producers for the telephone companies. One customer calling
from Cape Cod racked up a $544 phone bill in her first month,
while paying the Pipeline a total of $35.
        Maybe this is the era of small mammals scurrying about at the
feet of the dinosaurs. Our own reason for being, our graphical
software package, was the half-year's work of a lone,
overstressed programmer. The established software companies,
from Microsoft down, leak monthly rumors of their own on-line
software in progress, but have not yet produced any. We haven't
tried to propel our users headlong into the 21st century. They
can't receive video on demand. But they can order flowers from
a cyber-florist, and they can have their E-mail forwarded to
their pagers. They can't surf the famous 500 channels, but they
are trying out a Parisian's interactive guide to his city's
metro, or browsing last week's SEC filings through a free
experimental project, or joining the arguments in the
alt.tv.melrose-place discussion group, or logging into the
Library of Congress, or trying to download this morning's
infrared satellite map--and discovering that the weather
archives are overloaded.
        There are billions of dollars in search of the future, but
it's the present that ordinary users have to cope with. We're
amateurs, avowedly; and here on the I-way, it is Amateur Hour.