blastfromthepast

I haven't blogged for some time, and checked out my web statistics to see if there's any real people visitors left, or just robots. Surprise, surprise. Lots of folks keep finding their way here. Welcome!

But the biggest surprise was to the end of the list of operating systems used. 14 Visits in november using Windows 3.1. Windows 3.1! That's like: man! That is ages ago! That even predates the invention of the information superhighway by Al Gore! I'm old enough to remember those days... Trumpet Winsock on a 14 kilobit dial-up.

So, I also check the browser types used. Sure, there they are: Netscape 4.7, Internet Explorer 3.x, Internet Explorer 4.x. Dinosaurs roaming the social net in the 21st century.

Reflect on this for a moment. Windows 3.1 was superseded by Windows 95 in, exactly, 1995. Fourteen long years ago. I don't know what is more amazing: that there's people who are actually interfacing with such prehistoric software? Or that there's machines that still haven't broken down after more than 14 years?

Or that these systems haven't been totally barfed by malware by now? Maybe these systems are so old, that they've become, effectively, immune from malware? In the sense that the malware genome just doesn't fit their vulnerabilities anymore?

back to the future

Anyway, there's some important lessons there. First, the long tail. Even if you run a relatively obscure website, you'll get visited by any browser ever made, running on any computing platform that has ever been internet-enabled. Even if you thought those technologies were long extinct already.

Second, path dependence. The headlong rush of technology progress seems to leave history far behind, as long as you thunder along in the vanguard. But if you take a distance and look carefully (like in the long tails of your server logs), you'll see that each of the steps made along the way keeps having impact on the present. In a creepy way, the past refuses to die and keeps reaching out for us in unexpected ways.

So, dear reader, take care. All those decisions you make, assuming some sensible implicit "use by" date? Some automatic shelf life that in all reasonable circumstances should limit the scope of any (unforeseen) consequences? Wrong assumption. The past is forever with us, and the present will be too. We are not only creating the future. We are also, right now, creating the past of the future. The future past that will remain forever present.

In 2001, Manuel Castells published an instant classic: The Internet Galaxy, Reflections on the Internet, Business, and Society. Re-reading it strikes you full force with the enormity of changes we've seen already, in the few years since 2001.

Here your are, in the age of World of Warcraft and Facebook, reading a text that analyzes role-playing chat environments and The Well as premier instances of social behaviour on the internet. Meet The Flintstones.

However, in other respects, Castells turns out to be a powerful visionary.

Not every project can succeed. Now Mitch Kapor leaves OSAF, the chances for Chandler to fulfill it's vision have become very slim indeed.

Rolling Stone features an interview with William Gibson

My assumption has always been that at some point we would lock on to a literally exponential increase in human knowledge. That was my best guess, somewhere back in the Seventies.

Gibson invented the word cyberspace. As in transcyberia....