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.