The Top 25 Brief But Biting
Internet Quotes of 1990-1995
These brief quotes offer a small and simple selection of just a few of the big ideas found among the 4,200 statements included in the Early 1990s Internet Predictions Database. If you want to read these quotes in full context and get more details about each, simply click on the predictor’s name at the end of each predictive sentence on this page. We suggest that you access all of the details about this project and check into the thousands of more extremely compelling quotes in the database by going to the 1990s Internet Predictions Database homepage: https://www.elon.edu/u/imagining/time-capsule/early-90s/.
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In the world of the future, people will use low-cost Radio Shack equipment to spy on themselves to find out who they are. – Eric Hughes, 1992
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Cyberspace without carefully laid channels of choice may become a waste of space. – Michael Heim, 1992
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Computers will no longer be a place to hide from girls or zits or lack of social skills, as it was for many of us. – David Liddle, 1993
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The role of capital as an editor is being removed. – R.U. Sirius (real name, Ken Goffman), 1993
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We should have learning centers, neighborhood electronic cottages … [but] it would be easier to get the Pope to become a Buddhist than to get the schools to change. – Ed Lyell, 1993
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Video conferencing bears a terrifying promise: Distance will no longer be an excuse for not attending meetings. – Steve Steinberg, 1994
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The Internet will be to women in the ’90s what the vibrator was to women in the ’70s. It’s going to have that power. – Lisa Palac, 1994
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The value of information about information can be greater than the value of the information itself. – Nicholas Negroponte, 1994
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Faith in law will not be an effective strategy for high-tech companies. – John Perry Barlow, 1994
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There’s a big cinder block stuck on the technology accelerator pedal, and we’re only gonna go faster and faster, never stopping. – Douglas Coupland, 1994
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Telemolesters will lurk. Telethugs will reach out and punch someone. – William Mitchell, 1994
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From now on, the struggle will not be over mechanical control of the means of information, but over spin-control of the zeitgeist. – Bruce Sterling, 1994
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Much care has to be taken with design and education in order for the change to be positive. We don’t have natural defenses against fat, sugar, salt, alcohol, alkaloids – or media. – Alan Kay, 1994
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The computer will increasingly replace the commuter. – Gerald Celente, 1994
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I’m looking forward to the day when my daughter finds a rolled-up 1,000-pixel-by-1,000-pixel color screen in her cereal packet, with a magnetic back so it sticks to the fridge. – Tim Berners-Lee, 1995
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The Internet, with its open, distributed structure, was designed to withstand a nuclear attack. If it can do that, it can withstand corporate America. – Barry Shell, 1995
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Most things that succeed don’t require retraining 250 million people. – Waring Partridge, 1995
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We have to resist media imperialism – the tendency to colonize, to define new technologies in terms of the old … Redefine, don’t repackage. – Barry Diller, 1995
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Hackers are going to help us find ways to have a more humanized system of commerce. – Steven Levy, 1995
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We never will get 100 percent accuracy – [intelligent] agents will always make mistakes. – Pattie Maes, 1995
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There is nothing to be afraid of. It’s not going to be HAL, but “Remains of the Day.” – An Internet enthusiast (quoted by researcher Sherry Turkle) using fictional servants from popular films to explain the ideal intelligent agents, 1995
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The Internet is more like a social space than a thing so that its effects are more like those of Germany than those of hammers. – Mark Poster, 1995
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Tim Berners-Lee forgot to make an expiry date compulsory … any information can just be left and forgotten. It could stay on the network until it is five years out of date. – Brian Carpenter, 1995
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[Encryption] just has to cost more to break than it would cost the bad guys to bribe your cleaning lady. – Stewart Baker, 1995
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We techies should be more honest about what computers can do and what they cannot do, or else we are setting ourselves up for a big pie in the face. – Clifford Stoll, 1995