THE CYBER WASTELAND: A TALK WITH CLIFFORD STOLL

Three years ago this month, Clifford Stoll published one of the first screeds against the Internet: Silicon Snake Oil: Second Thoughts on the Information Highway. Stoll's book was considered important because it was an attack from inside the technocracy -- the astronomer had been an Internet user since 1972 and had also carved out a career as a computer-security expert. This wasn't a technophobe bookbinder at the podium, but someone who had lived and breathed the Net, only to find it wanting.

At the time Stoll wrote his book, however, that vast Internet domain -- the World Wide Web -- was still in its infancy. In fact, Silicon Snake Oil makes only passing reference to the Web, with no appearance of such now-familiar names as Yahoo!, Netscape, and Amazon.

How might Stoll react to the myriad changes still hitting cyberspace? What would he make of the thousands of new users coming online each day, the businesses rewiring their sales force for electronic commerce, or the schools racing to add Net connections?

Business Week Online's Dennis Berman caught up with Stoll on Apr. 20, ironically, just as the author was trying to repair the damage from a recent hard-disk failure. This is an edited transcript of their conversation.

BW: How well do you think the your book holds up today?
Stoll: My book doesn't talk about the Web, which is a serious problem, considering I wrote it in 1993, 1994, and 1995, and it came out in early 1995. Since then, the price of computers has at once become cheaper and more expensive. The cost has gone down, but they've gotten more expensive in that the amount of time they take from us has gone up. Information has become much, much cheaper, and necessarily of much less value. When I wrote the book, one of the things I said is that I've never met anyone going around saying "Help, I need more information!" Today, I don't know of any business saying, 'We don't have enough information, we've got to get more."

One of the big lies of the Internet, of course, is that we are driven by the need for more information. That is imply not true. In that sense, I like what I wrote before [in 1994 and 1995]. On the other hand, I wrote a chapter on the difficulties of computers. Much of that has been obviated by the Web. No one knows what FTP [file transfer protocol] is on the Web, and no one needs to know what Archie and Veronica are [two text-based search tools that predated the Web].

BW: What do you make of the recent survey that found search engines actually track only one-third of total Web pages?
Stoll: The impoversishment of search engines is deeper than the 30 or so percent of Web pages covered. The problem with them is they work in one direction, on the assumption that information searches are keyword-driven. That's a neat idea that you can have a keyword-driven information search. Unfortunately, most information is not keyword-driven. You're calling me and asking what's my opinion on the Internet. Almost all the interesting questions you have asked begin with "why" -- those are way tougher to deal with.

BW: Are you astounded by how the Web has changed over the past three years?
Stoll: The Web has made it much easier for anyone to use the Internet. It has made the network much more accessible. With that, many more places have gone online in the past five years. The Net has gone from having a tiny bit of commercial interest to almost exclusvely commerical interests. That's good and bad... Once something is put on the Web, it becomes public information. As public information, it has very little, if any, value. It seems to me information has value if it's secret, and you don't get any secrets on the Internet.

BW: One of the things that have changed is message boards -- most of them are now dead.
Stoll: My feeling is that the idea of a virtual community online is a falsehood. It doesn't exist. Nobody uses them now. Why is that? Because we don't get any nice, good feelings sitting around posting messages to strangers. Message boards seemed to be so wonderful 5 or 10 years ago because the technology was neat. Once the technology wears off, you're left with discussing something with someone you don't know.

BW: Listservers made up of people who know their stuff seem to work.
Stoll: They do, if you know the right ones, and if the people do know their stuff. But I've found that people who know their stuff don't give that stuff away for free. If you publish online and put your best work online, you are a freebie freelancer, and any author worth his salt won't work for free.

BW: How much has Internet hype been accepted by the press?
Stoll: I continue to be astonished at how few skeptics stand up and say this is grossly overpromoted. Not just a little bit, grossly. And I am astonished how often reporters and journalists say very privately that there's a lot of hyperbole. What they won't do is actually say so in print. I'm further surprised at how gently reporters have treated those who have made simply false claims.

They treat very lightly those who make grandiose predictions. Look at what comes out of the [Massachusetts Institute of Technology] Media Lab, which predicted books would be here. That didn't happen. No one says the Media Lab is a fraud. And people say computers will revolutionize the classroom. But in the classroom, kids continue to turn out worse and worse test scores.

BW: Do you think today's students are becoming too dependent on computers for doing research?
Stoll: Kids don't learn how to do research -- they don't learn to deal with books. If we have an ideal way of getting our students to avoid reading and to not touch books, I can't think of a better way to do it then give them all Web access. If our purpose is to teach them how to get an answer from the Web, then we're doing a good job. But if the purpose of higher education is to get students to read, to think, to reflect, and to be skeptical of technology, we're doing a lousy job.

BW: Electronic commerce seems to be gathering steam. Why will it or won't it work as advertised?
Stoll: The people I know go online so as not to spend money. The dirty little secret is that Internet users are stingy. And if I've got a million stingy people together, it's going to be hard to make money off of them.

They'll take the free stuff, but they don't like paying for things. As soon as you charge a nickel an icon click, the dominant method for paying for things inevitably becomes advertising. And what are they advertising? Other Web pages. Can you imagine a TV station making money advertising other TV stations? It's an electronic Ponzi scheme.

BW: Knowing what has happened since your last book, what might an updated volume include?
Stoll: I'd write about the fraudulent nature of computers in schools, the way our libraries are being devastated by computers, the overpromotion of computers in society at large. I'd write about the love affair between high-tech politicians and the Internet, and also write about the tough days ahead for those who trust them.

Why have we not learned that there is a cost to every new technology, whether it's radio, automobiles, television, computers. Why, in the past 100 years, do we keep latching on to these wonderful ideas, like nuclear energy, that will solve our problems. When it doesn't solve our problems, we don't hold anyone responsible. When the highway system doesn't solve the problem of our cities, but makes them worse, we wring our hands. Rather than saying "Reduce our dependence on cars," we say "Let's keep our cars and get another technology -- computers -- to solve the previous problem." I'd love to write about how we keep looking for that magic bullet of social problems being solved electronically.

By Dennis Berman, Business Week Online