The mainstream media is full of confident-sounding predictions about the future of technology that turn out to be completely and utterly wrong.
For every correct prediction — like that 3D TVs will fail to catch on — there’s a million others suggesting everything from personal computers, to the internet, mobile phones and tablets are just a fad.
Pundits predicting the end of crypto as some type of tulip bubble mania crawl out of the woodwork every time the price dips, and Bitcoin has been declared dead, dying, or useless more than 386 times since 2010.
The New York Times just did it again in a recent opinion piece from Ryan Cummings, a staff economist for Joe Biden’s Council of Economic Advisers, which called crypto “useless” outside of crimes and scams.
In case you’re so down on your portfolio you are starting to believe the naysayers, here are five times the mainstream media — mostly the New York Times — was hopelessly wrong about technology.
The Internet? Bah! — Newsweek, 1995
In the mid-90s, when tech CEOs started to gush about how the internet could change the world, one American scientist and astronomer got his prediction of it very, very wrong.
“The Internet? Bah!” was the headline on a 700-word essay essentially poking fun at proponents of the internet, calling them “hucksters” and describing them as a “trendy and oversold community.”
It was published on Feb. 27, 1995 by Newsweek by an actual computer expert. Stoll had been a system administrator at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, and helped capture famed German hacker Markus Hess who was selling secrets to Russia’s KGB.
“Baloney,” wrote Stoll. “Do our computer pundits lack all common sense? The truth in no online database will replace your daily newspaper, no CD-ROM can take the place of a competent teacher and no computer network will change the way government works.”
Ironically, in Stoll’s attempt to mock the internet, he actually painted a pretty accurate picture of what it looks like today.
“There’s cyberbusiness. We’re promised instant catalog shopping—just point and click for great deals. We’ll order airline tickets over the network, make restaurant reservations and negotiate sales contracts. Stores will become obsolete,” wrote Stoll, not realizing he had just predicted the future.
“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.”
The global e-commerce market was valued at $25.4 trillion in 2024 and is expected to reach $73.5 trillion by 2030, according to Research and Markets. That’s more than twice the US gross domestic product last year.
The publication poked fun at its own article about 22 years later, calling it a “laughably inaccurate internet essay.”
“I’m sorry this mean scientist man picked on you when you were just a baby,” wrote Newsweek’s digital strategy editor, Joanna Brenner. “Too bad you didn’t invent Netflix just a little bit sooner; we probably could have avoided this whole thing.”
Another famous internet skeptic was Bitcoin-hating Nobel Prize winning Economist and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman who said in 1998:
“The growth of the Internet will slow drastically, as the flaw in ‘Metcalfe’s law’ becomes apparent: most people have nothing to say to each other! By 2005, it will become clear that the Internet’s impact on the economy has been no greater than the fax machine’s.”
Hilariously, the article was in a magazine called Red Herring and titled “Why most economists’ predictions are wrong.”
The internet will collapse next year — InfoWorld, 1995
Don’t be too hard on Krugman as the inventor of Metcalfe’s Law, Robert Metcalfe, famously predicted the Internet would go “spectacularly supernova and in 1996 catastrophically collapse.”
The column was published on InfoWorld on Dec. 1, 1995, theorizing that there wasn’t going to be enough infrastructure to support the Internet. It’s similar to anxieties about AI data centers and power generation today.
Netscape just went public months before, and Microsoft CEO Bill Gates in May of that year threw his whole company into the “Internet Tidal Wave.” It was also the year that Amazon and eBay launched, and it is regarded as the first year of the “Dot.com bubble.”
Metcalfe gave several reasons for the predicted collapse: massive traffic overloads, security vulnerabilities, inadequate…
cointelegraph-magazine.com