Vint Cerf sees his invention reflected on Black Mirror
How did all three of these people end up being interviewed for this, and why would so little of what they actually say and think make it in here?<p>The story about the artist and the scientist, the wise visionary and the foolish tinkerer, is a tired and unrealistic trope being forced onto events that have nothing to do with those themes.<p>The internet was not &quot;designed without unique identifying numbers&quot;, and no lack of such facility is what has led to or what would lead to &quot;all this dark stuff&quot; -- everything about that construction is wrong. It&#x27;s nonsense. It&#x27;s most upsetting to hear that wrongness presented as fact via a nearly-all-context-cut discussion clip with Vint goshdarned Cerf, because if you said it this way right to him he&#x27;d be like, &quot;well, whoa, wait hold on&quot;.<p>It&#x27;s also absurd to imply that the internet was designed in a vacuum, or without thought to its implications, or by just one or a few people, in any short span of time. Beyond that, the things the design of the internet may have been hopelessly naive about are far more complex than and different from &quot;it could allow Bad People to operate anonymously&quot;. Some may be directly the opposite!<p>Gibson did have a remarkable vision in Neuromancer, but that absolutely did not have to do with imagining Russia vs the US at its time of release in _1984_. Warring meganational companies had been featured in many earlier dystopian novels: Bester did it in Tiger, Tiger! (aka The Stars My Destination) in _1956_, Brunner did it repeatedly in Stand on Zanzibar and The Sheep Look Up from the start of the 70s. These were not the new ideas! In Neuromancer the world was different, the space, the mood, the means, the words. These were cool and unique and new -- the combination of all of this in a pretty package is what made it predictive and powerful and popular.<p>Why is Black Mirror even involved here? Because it&#x27;s dark? I love the show, but it has come to have very little to do with taking our nature 10 minutes into the future and a lot more to do with &quot;spooky SciFi&quot;, and it&#x27;s never been a far-out predictive powerhouse. Maybe Gibson&#x27;s name just wasn&#x27;t enough for the editor? Black Mirror does add that click juice. Maybe it&#x27;s thematic. Is the piece going to challenge us to think through consequences of decisions deeply and have higher standards for ourselves and society, the way the show once did?<p>No, instead, we get a whole 7 minute audio narrative that will play as a timefiller between segments, with the trite payoff that &quot;only artists know human nature never really changes, even with some new toys.&quot; mixed in with just a sprinkle of &quot;it takes all stripes&quot;.<p>Did it actually take talking to all of Vint Cerf and William Gibson and Charlie Brooker to get there? Did presumably several minutes (I hope not hours) of their much more interesting words and thoughts get cut so we could hear the journalist&#x27;s baseless or cliché ideas instead? Just for more woo-woo pessimism? It&#x27;s like asking Elon Musk to comment on a local science fair rocket and concluding that the next generation holds promise.<p>Imagine the possibilities we _had_ here: hearing Vint Cerf and William Gibson actually reflect meaningfully on what Black Mirror means to people today in the context of their works, and what it suggests for the futures of literature and technology. Imagine if all three people interviewed had a real discussion together! That could be a real and lasting contribution to the human canon. But we got this instead.<p>Maybe these guys had nothing better to be doing. Maybe this tech writer and their editors just don&#x27;t know about IP addresses, or at least think that no one listening does or should, that it&#x27;s too complicated for regular people and correspondence with reality doesn&#x27;t even matter. Maybe no one is even listening.<p>But people <i>are</i> listening. Someone who isn&#x27;t steeped in the technical world may hear this piece and from its total lack of depth or nuance assume it is obviously-true. They may take away that &quot;the internet&#x27;s creator didn&#x27;t even think about its consequences! Tech people are so clueless. Just shows you that Black Mirror is true. The future sounds bad.&quot;<p>Something this banal and stupid presented by NPR, and making direct use of the time of these amazing people for it, is a sign (among so many others) that we&#x27;re setting the bar far too low on intellectual curiosity, on journalistic character, on technical literacy, on societal introspection, and hell, on basic imagination.