I'm glad he addresses Stephen Diehl and his anti-crypto screeds. Nearly all of Diehl's criticism is some form of “None of this digital stuff has any real world value.”
But the thing is, this digital stuff does have value to the people that own them. Diehl's opinion that the value is zero does not make it true.
It's very reminiscent of Clifford Stoll's articles. Stoll was a brilliant engineer and writer, but a terrible predictor of the future. "Why the Internet will fail" is probably Stoll's most famous column.
"While the Internet beckons brightly, seductively flashing an icon of knowledge-as-power, this nonplace lures us to surrender our time on earth. A poor substitute it is, this virtual reality where frustration is legion and where–in the holy names of Education and Progress–important aspects of human interactions are relentlessly devalued."
Stoll basically says (in 1995 when he wrote that) none of what we actually got will happen. He's laughably badly off, almost "But my Bible says the world will end in 2012" wrong.
Stoll even mentions other predictions he suggests are ludicrous, but which of course came true - not because those other predictors were extraordinary but because it was already fairly obvious and Stoll doesn't see it.
"Nicholas Negroponte, director of the MIT Media Lab, predicts that we’ll soon buy books and newspapers straight over the Intenet. Uh, sure."
Or here's Stoll explaining that Amazon isn't possible:
"Stores will become obselete. So how come my local mall does more business in an afternoon than the entire Internet handles in a month? Even if there were a trustworthy way to send money over the Internet–which there isn’t–the network is missing a most essential ingredient of capitalism: salespeople."
This follows a pattern Stoll has. He has no imagination, given the ingredients for a cake, and the tools, and a recipe, and an oven, Stoll can't imagine a cake will result. If it could, thinks Stoll, there surely would already be a cake, there isn't, so making a cake is ipso facto impossible. Stoll won't try, and he's astonished that anybody else would.
Here's the fun thing about that last one by the way. Stoll wrote this piece after Netscape shipped SSL. It wasn't yet popular enough that Stoll would definitely have known about it, but far from being an unpredictable future it was an all-too real present. Yes it's SSL 2.0 and SSL 2.0 is insecure, but that's what we know now in the present where TLS 1.3 is used for transactions underpinning a huge fraction of the global economy. When Stoll dismissed this as impossible it's not because he knows SSL 2.0 is insecure, it's because he can't even conceive of its existence, even though Netscape have it working.
I think the average non-pundit can't imagine announcing new predictions after being wrong. But for a pundit this isn't even embarrassing. Metcalfe literally ate the speech where he'd said he would eat his words if he was wrong, then immediately made the exact same false prediction. They don't learn, because they pay no price at all for being wrong. They are, in fact, completely useless for this reason.
When Warren Buffet invests in X, that's going to cost Buffet money if he's wrong. So, he doesn't make a habit of being wrong over and over without learning anything from it. Pundits like Thompson or Stoll don't care if they're wrong, they pay no price whatsoever for never learning from their mistakes, so why would they do so?
Clifford Stoll seems like a nice guy, I bought one of this products years ago, perfectly satisfied, but he is, in fact, lousy at predicting the future.
His criticisms were valid. Society choose to eat the shit cake.
He was optimistic that the web wouldn't destroy local institutions and benefit authoritarian regimes over democratic society. That local journalism and commerce wouldn't be subsumed by a few giant, highly destructive monopolizing web-powered multinationals. That we would still read the "friendly pages of a book" instead of only the "myopic glow" of screens.
But the thing is, this digital stuff does have value to the people that own them. Diehl's opinion that the value is zero does not make it true.
It's very reminiscent of Clifford Stoll's articles. Stoll was a brilliant engineer and writer, but a terrible predictor of the future. "Why the Internet will fail" is probably Stoll's most famous column.