Michael Wolff Has Been Trash-Talking the Internet Since 1998–See the Video!
by Kara Swisher
Posted on December 2, 2008 at 2:39 AM PT
Ah, Michael Wolff! Always throwing stink bombs and making deliciously wackadoo declarations about the Internet.
This time, it’s in a dinner interview the author had with BusinessWeek’s media columnist Jon Fine recently.
Wolff (pictured here) slaps around the News Corp. (NWS) social-networking site MySpace with a series of his trash-buckling phrases, some of which are true and some a bit more of a stretch.
But he sure is entertaining!
One of Wolff’s more controversial moments:
“If you’re on MySpace now, you’re a [expletive] cretin. And you’re not only a [expletive] cretin, but you’re poor. Nobody who has beyond an 8th grade level of education is on MySpace. It is for backwards people.”
This is vintage Wolff, to make a big hissy-fit fuss at an opportune time.
Surprise! His latest book, a bio of media mogul Rupert Murdoch (who owns this site), titled “The Man Who Owns The News,” is coming out right about now.
And speaking of vintage, Wolff can be seen in the video below whacking away at the early Internet just over a decade ago, with me and Feed’s Steven Johnson in an appearance on the “Charlie Rose” television show.
It was the era of AOL’s dominance, with Yahoo (YHOO) as the comer and Web 1.0 in its fully overvalued glory.
“It’s craziness, it’s loco, it makes no sense,” said Wolff about the Internet, circa July 27, 1998.
His caustically funny book “Burn Rate” on his naughty early Internet adventures, wherein he was the only person not to get rich in Web 1.0, had just come out.
(And I had just come out with my book on the rise of AOL–the fall of AOL sequel came out in 2003.)
Later in the interview, Wolff could not help himself and makes a truly bad prediction: “I think the myth of the Internet is that it is going to come into everybody’s home.”
Oops, the Web is pretty much ubiquitous only 10 years later.
But Wolff does go on to make a lot of the same salient points he makes today about MySpace and the Web’s hot-today-gone-tomorrow ethos.
The video of our segment starts at the 30-minute mark.
Michael has not aged a day, but please, please excuse my shoulder pads and deeply unfortunate haircut (how did I ever get a date?):
Comments
The analogy you made comparing the boom to California real estate speculation was an interesting one. It has been realized in many cases – Amazon, eBay, Yahoo!, AOL, etc. – and was mere speculation in many others, of course. An astute analogy, one I’d never heard…
Posted by Daniel Bernstein at December 2nd, 2008 at 6:57 amDaniel beat me to it. I obviously need to get up earlier.
Lots of hit and lots of misses in that segment, but a transcript of that with specific company names obscured would still be fairly valid today.
Be careful what you wish for don’t they say? I love having a “brick and mortar” bookstore a mere 30 miles away that I can browse through lots of books I never knew existed, but I do most of my purchasing these days from Amazon by doing string searches for things I know are out there somewhere (but would probably never find in one of those physical stores). I fear for the future of these physical stores though, and as they become more “specialty” in nature their situated gets even more precarious.
Names have changed, but there are still clustering points (Yahoo and AOL diminished, Google, Facebook and others ascending). I know feed readers are very popular and very useful to many Internet users, but among people I know personally (as an ex-techie in rural America) nobody knows what a feed reader is, must less how to use one.
The Internet (and I have no idea what the accepted percentage of homes having a permanent Internet connection is) has added a whole new list of complexities to an already complex lifestyle that we moderns lead, and net-enabled cell phones and netbooks promise to make matters worse (or better depending on your point of view).
We certainly live in interesting times.
Posted by Mac Beach at December 2nd, 2008 at 10:24 amAh, the past…I loved looking back. What stuck out was the often repeated history of convergence.
Is it because as a leader in a space I have this product and with this new idea tagged on to it, my leadership is unthreatened. — Do I feel I’m the leader without ever having to say that my leadership maybe fading, or in jeopardy over time.
Then of course, the fools who follow them.
The Conversion fallacy maybe the biggest lesson to learn in looking back.
Diverge to the future. The quiet and not often written about success principle of all times recorded. Except maybe the clock radio.
Posted by Mike Mohan at December 2nd, 2008 at 10:43 amMichael is provocative (I agree with the cretin comments) and funny but is not much of a futurist. I loved his comment “the biggest myth of the Internet is that it will be in everyone’s homes” ~50:00 into the segment.
Posted by Tom McGovern at December 2nd, 2008 at 12:49 pmwolff is nothing but a writer who observed the net and didn’t ‘get it’
Posted by Sam Harrison at December 2nd, 2008 at 6:59 pm