The future still isn't what it used to be: Tog

In 1994, so 30 years ago, UX designer Bruce "Tog" Tognazzini's Tog on Software Design was published with this introduction. I wrote a post about it a mere 15 years later with a take on which predictions had and hadn't panned out. Another 15 years having passed, this seems as good a time as ever to take another look.

My first post included several direct quotes, which had the advantage of showing Tognazzini's actual words, but the disadvantage of leaving out some of them. This time around, I'm going to try summarizing the main point of each paragraph, with a few direct quotes for statements that seem particularly notable. Please have a look at the Tog's original page, as well. Unlike many old links on this blog, it still works, and kudos for that.

Tog's main points, as I see them, in the order originally written were:

• Phones, fiber and computers are [in 1994] about to converge. The whole world will be wired and national boundaries will no longer matter. Governments are trying to control this, but it's not going to work.
• In particular, the Clipper Chip is a fool's errand because people can do their own encryption on top of it. Individuals will have access to strong encryption while banks and other institutions will be forced to use weak, government-approved encryption.
• For example, the government of Singapore banned Wired magazine for an unfavorable article, but an online version was available immediately. "Traffic on the Internet cannot be selectively stopped without stopping the Internet itself"
• Intellectual property laws can't keep up with new forms that build on putting together bits of existing content. There will be increasing repression as corporate lawyers try to stop this.
• But this will end as corporations find ways to monetize content by having lots of people pay a little instead of a few people paying a lot [licensing fees at the time could run into the thousands of dollars] "As the revolution continues, our society will enjoy a blossoming of creative expression the likes of which the world has never seen."
• While everyone's attention is focused on script kiddies, corporations will sneak around "America's boardrooms and bedrooms", destroying any illusion of privacy.
• Security is also an illusion, but "The trend will be reversed as the network is finally made safe, both for business and for individuals, but it will be accomplished by new technology, new social custom, and new approaches to law."
• The previous computer revolution, in the 1980s, resulted in a completely unexpected result: self-published paper zines. However [in 1994] it's hard to get distribution. Cyberspace [sic] will fix that, and creators will no longer need publishers in order to be heard. "[R]eaders will be faced with a bewildering array of unrefereed, often inaccurate (to put it mildly), works"
• Tablets with high-resolution, paper-white displays will put an end to physical bookstores.
• Retail will see increasing pressure from "mail-order, as people shop comfortably and safely in the privacy of their own homes from electronic, interactive catalogs"
• "More and more corporations are embracing telecommuting, freeing their workers from the drudgery of the morning commute"
• Schools will come to accept "that their job is to help students learn how to research, how to organize, how to cooperate, create, and think" and textbooks "will be swept away by the tide of rough, raw, real knowledge pouring forth from the Cyberspace spigot"
• The term "information superhighway" is obsolete, because it doesn't do justice to Cyberspace, which will be "just as sensory, just as real, just as compelling as the physical universe"
• A new economy will arise, based on barter and anonymous currencies that no government will be able to touch [this was written over a decade before the Bitcoin paper came out].
• There will be digital haves and have-nots, but this will dissipate quickly as hardware becomes cheaper. The real problem is that the internet of the 1990s was built by mostly male hackers for their own use. There needs to be an "an easier, softer way" to access it, and only then will it see widespread adoption.
• It's crucial to supplant the obsolete operating systems of the 1990s -- UNIX, Windows and Mac -- with object-oriented technology. Even 15 years after bitmapped displays were widely available (i.e., the first Macintosh came out in 1984), computers are barely shedding their old teletype-based look. We can't afford to wait another 15 years for OO to become widespread.
• If all this is going to work, we need coordinated long-term strategies instead of each major player doing their own thing and hoping it all works out.

Honestly, I don't think my take on this has changed greatly in the past 15 years, because I think Tog's take is just as true as it was 15 years ago, or when it was written, even. That is, some parts are true and some parts are way off base, and which parts those are hasn't changed much. And, of course, it's likely that my opinions haven't changed greatly in the past 15 years.

Instead of comparing this post to the previous one, I'd like to look at the same themes from (I hope) a somewhat different angle. Last time around, I opined that the predictions that missed were mainly the result of assuming that a new development that's on the upswing will continue that way until it replaces everything that came before. I still think that's true, but what stands out to me more this time around is the apparent motivation behind the predictions.

Tog seems mostly to be grappling with the idea that computing technology of the 90s was poised to fundamentally overhaul our social structures. It should be clear to even the occasional reader of this blog (I'm pretty sure there are at least some) that I'm on the skeptical side of this one, but what really comes through in Tog's writing is a strong desire for this to be true, and in particular ways:

National boundaries will be obsolete. Government attempts to rein in technology will fail. Publishers will be irrelevant as entirely new forms of creativity emerge. Schools will change their entire mission. We will escape our physical bonds by working and living in a Cyberspace that's only distinguishable from the real world by its being more vibrant and vivid. OO will change the whole way software is developed and open up whole new possibilities. Corporations and other major players will have to learn to work together in whole new ways.

No boundaries. No gatekeepers. No government interference. No physical bounds at all. New possibilities. New forms of expression. New ways of working. If you zoom out to that level, I don't think it would be much trouble to find a similar set of predictions from the 1960s, or the 1860s, or as far back as you want to go.

Or the 2020s, for that matter.

But national boundaries are still here. Reserve currencies are still around. Banking regulations still matter, even in the crypto world. Publishers, studios and record labels are still gatekeepers. To the extent schooling has changed, technology hasn't been a primary force (and remote schooling certainly did not replace students physically going to class). Telecommuting and remote work exist, but they don't dominate, they only work for some professions and they don't mean jacking into a Snow Crash or Neuromancer virtual world, even though one of the largest corporations in the world has rebranded itself around exactly that vision.

Within this, a few particulars seem worth particular notice.

Tog wasn't the only one musing about new forms based on quoting existing material. Ted Nelson's Xanadu project was all about that, and audio sampling had found its way from 1970s hip hop into the mainstream, eventually giving rise to whole new genres.

But this was neither a new idea nor anything revolutionary (see these old posts for more detail). Quotations and allusions have been around forever. It's more a matter of how they're used. Sample-based sound fonts are widely-used, but the whole point of most of them is to imitate live instruments as closely and unobtrusively as possible. In practice, sampling is quite often done in support of existing forms.

On the other hand, answer songs, which have been around forever, are all about the reference to a known song. It's common for an answer song to use the original tune or quote the original lyric, but it doesn't have to. The point is the reference to an existing work, regardless of how that reference is made.

A sample of the Amen break might be a deliberate reference that the audience is meant to recognize -- even if they most likely recognize it from other samples of the break -- or it might be reshaped or reprocessed beyond all recognition, or maybe some of both.

In short, there mere act of sampling or quoting is neither necessary nor sufficient for the creation of a new form. To the extent that there's even such a thing as a truly new form, people create them because that's what creative people do. Some new forms may make use of new technology.

I think "new form" is somewhat of a red herring anyway. I can think of several examples of encountering something wildly new, only to later understand its deep and direct connections to what came before. An album that sounded like it was from another planet suddenly made a new kind of sense after I'd heard a different album from decades before. And then it turns out that the songwriter behind that one had studied poetry in college and cut their teeth in Tin Pan Alley (I'm deliberately being a bit coy about which particular albums these might be, because this is just one example and my claim here is that the particulars don't really matter).

The newness was real -- nothing quite like either album had been produced before -- but so were the connections. A lot of the newness was newness to me. As exciting as that may be, it can't go on forever, but fortunately it doesn't have to. The connections are just as interesting.

The point being that it's easy to get excited about something new and to want the world to look like the new thing. I think this is particularly easy for technologists, since our whole gig is to try to make new and (ideally) better things.

Tog in particular played a key role in developing Apple's early UIs (the term user experience (UX) was just coming into usage when Tog published Tog on Software Design). Apple products were, by and large, much easier to use than MS-DOS PCs. It's not hard to understand someone who'd helped make that happen wanting to sweep away obsolete rules and systems. Given that Windows was announced in 1985, the year after the famous 1984 Macintosh ad, it's not hard to understand the feeling that this was actually happening in real time. The ad itself does a great job of conveying the desire to change the world.

The world, for its part, has its own opinions.

Before I go, I wanted to touch on the predictions that did pan out.

The Clipper Chip did, in fact, fall into oblivion, not long after Tog was writing about it. Tog was hardly a Cassandra here, though. If anything, the Clipper Chip was a great example of how a group of people really, really wanting something to happen doesn't necessarily make it happen. The idea that you can use end-to-end encryption to get around an insecure transport layer, whether that insecurity is accidental or a deliberate back door, is old. Arguably, it's ancient, but in any case PGP, for all its flaws, had been around for a few years by 1994. Even government agencies seem to have thrown in the towel on this one in recent years.

Overall, there is a pattern of yes ... but.

• Corporations did, of course, figure out how to make money by charging a bit at a time, mostly by running ads or by charging for subscriptions ... but neither of these is a new business model (in-app purchases are an interesting case, though).
• New case law and social conventions have developed around digital property ... but these look a lot like adaptations of existing law and conventions rather than something wholly new
• Corporations have collected huge amounts of personal data about people, some of it, like genetic data, very personal indeed ... but it's hard to argue that "the internet has finally been made safe" from this as predicted. In fact ...
• Security on the internet did indeed become a nightmare ... and it's still a nightmare
• Zines morphed into blogs ... but even during the heyday of blogs, most of them went unread, and the same is true for podcasts, social media channels and so on ("zines morphed into blogs" seems like one of those test sentences linguists use to show that we can understand a certain portion of language even if the words are totally made up)
• Tablets did happen ... but they'd been a staple of science fiction for decades, and Apple itself had been working on the idea for a while by 1994 (the Newton came out in 1993), so this was more a matter of Tog asserting that eventually some kind of tablet would take off. Again, an assertion like that doesn't necessarily mean it will happen on a large scale, but it wasn't exactly a shot in the dark ... and, of course, bookstores are still around.
• Online retail has had a huge impact ... but as I said the first time around, the term "mail order" is a big hint that this was more a shift in the mix of how goods are delivered (the original post snarkily mentioned WebVan, eToys and Pets.com, all of which were long gone by that time)
• Telecommuting is a thing ... but it's also not a thing
• "Information superhighway" stopped being a cool thing to say, if it ever was ... but (as I snarked the first time around) "cyberspace" also stopped being a cool thing to say, if it ever was
• Cryptocurrencies happened, which seems striking since the Bitcoin paper was over a decade in the future ... but as to a "new economy [...] based on barter and anonymous currencies that no government will be able to touch" ... I've beaten this one pretty much into the ground here, so you be the judge
• Object-oriented platforms have become mainstream ... but ... I'm not going to wade into the discussion of why software is the way it is, at least not here, but it's safe to say there are ills that the advent of OO platforms has not cured.

And then there are a few points where Tog's original post contains contradictory ideas because, I think, the underlying reality contains them as well:

• The operating systems that Tog complained about (UNIX, Windows and Mac)  are still around, but  in a Ship of Theseus sort of way (see this followup post from the time -- just to muddy the waters, today's MacOS is a mashup of the original and UNIX by way of BSD and NeXTSTEP). So take your pick: Tog was wrong since they're still around, Tog was right since they've all been completely restructured over time, or some of each
• In some sense, the internet knows no boundaries, but the Great Firewall shows no sign of going away and other regimes have found ways to severely restrict access. One way to look at it is that by default the internet knows no boundaries, but it can in practice if the local regime works to make that happen. This doesn't seem that much different from the earlier mass media, particularly TV, radio and print
• The contrast between "often inaccurate (to put it mildly)" web publishers and "raw real knowledge" was jarring the first time around, and it's still jarring. The actual web/internet has been a mixture of both from the outset.
• Similarly, the tension between an internet built for geeks by geeks and an internet built for the whole world has been around from early days, and it's still around. Likewise for the underlying social issues around who gets access to technology and who pays the costs. Underneath this, particularly now that so many people are online, is the question of how much technology reflects society and how much it shapes society.

As I said above, I don't think my take on all this has changed much. I think I've mellowed on how I feel about it, from "this is just horribly wrongheaded" to more like "this is a particularly clear example of something we all do", but what I think hasn't changed is the feeling that, however much I may disagree with many of the points, Tog is worth engaging with, by virtue of putting forth a strong and clear vision of the world, backed up by examples.