{"id":2153,"date":"2026-04-04T17:01:52","date_gmt":"2026-04-04T17:01:52","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/alexandrakitty.com\/?p=2153"},"modified":"2026-04-04T17:07:35","modified_gmt":"2026-04-04T17:07:35","slug":"the-futures-that-didnt-happen-preface-when-journalism-guesses","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/alexandrakitty.com\/index.php\/2026\/04\/04\/the-futures-that-didnt-happen-preface-when-journalism-guesses\/","title":{"rendered":"The Futures That Didn\u2019t Happen, Preface: When Journalism Guesses"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Journalism likes to pretend it is allergic to prediction. Reporters will tell you they deal in facts, not crystal balls. Then you look at pieces like Newsweek\u2019s \u201cThe Internet? Bah!\u201d or that solemn tabloid declaring the Internet a passing fad, and you realize how often the press has tried to tell the future with the same tone it uses to tell the weather.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

In 1995, Clifford Stoll wrote a now\u2011infamous Newsweek column insisting that the digital evangelists around him were over\u2011selling cyberspace. Visionaries talked about telecommuting workers, interactive libraries, multimedia classrooms, online town meetings, virtual communities, and commerce moving from malls to networks. Stoll\u2019s response was one word: \u201cBaloney.\u201d \u201cNo online database will replace your daily newspaper,\u201d he declared. \u201cNo CD\u2011ROM can take the place of a competent teacher and no computer network will change the way government works.\u201d If you read those lines today on a phone, working remotely, with your news paywalled and your government conducting hearings on Zoom, it feels like a dispatch from another planet.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

He wasn\u2019t alone. A British paper ran a straight\u2011faced headline from their science correspondent<\/em> explaining that the Internet \u201cmay be just a passing fad as millions give up on it,\u201d treating a dip in early adoption as proof the whole medium was doomed. Other commentators predicted that the Internet would \u201ccatastrophically collapse\u201d because its traffic would outstrip capacity, or that email was too riddled with spam and fraud to become a mainstream tool. These weren\u2019t cranks shouting from the sidelines. They were columnists, science correspondents, and experts whose words came wrapped in the authority of print.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What ties these misfires together isn\u2019t just that they were wrong. It\u2019s that they were confidently<\/strong> wrong. They mistook their personal discomfort, or the limitations of Version 1.0, for the definitive verdict on an entire technology. The internet they could see in 1995, slow, clunky, niche, was the only internet they allowed themselves to imagine.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

W. Joseph Campbell has described this as a kind of \u201cinnovation blindness\u201d: news outlets in the mid\u201190s were among the institutions least inclined to see the Internet as a serious, disruptive force. Many journalists were deeply invested in the existing order: paper subscriptions, broadcast appointments, gate\u2011kept expertise, and it showed. Their coverage of digital tech swung between two bad poles: the sneering dismissal (\u201cthis will never matter\u201d) and the breathless salvation story (\u201cthis will save us\u201d). The middle ground, \u201cthis is interesting, messy, and we don\u2019t know where it\u2019s going yet\u201d, rarely made the front page.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

That pattern never really went away. It just changed costumes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Once it became impossible to deny the Internet\u2019s impact, journalism didn\u2019t suddenly become wiser about technology. It simply flipped from underestimating digital to overestimating specific business models. Paywalls were going to save newspapers. iPads and glossy \u201ctablet editions\u201d were going to save magazines. Social media was going to save engagement, then destroy democracy, sometimes in the same news cycle. Each new solution was heralded as the<\/em> future, until the numbers or the public moved on and the bold declarations quietly fell down the memory hole.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Researchers who study \u201ctechnological hype in journalism\u201d have started to map how this works. Hype isn\u2019t just about overwrought headlines; it organises newsroom priorities, investor expectations, and public emotions. When news coverage frames a tool as inevitable and transformative, it nudges politicians, executives, and ordinary readers toward treating that tool as destiny. The same is true of doom: when coverage centres apocalyptic worst\u2011case scenarios, it turns speculative fiction into assumed fact.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Which brings us to AI.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

AI is clearly transformative. Something big is happening. But how<\/strong> it will transform our lives, economies, and politics is still in play. The only honest answer, at this juncture, is that we don\u2019t know yet. That uncertainty doesn\u2019t make for a snappy headline or a confident TV segment, so journalism has fallen back on its old habits: the miracle and the catastrophe.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

On one side, you have the AI solutionists promising that algorithms will rescue journalism from misinformation, automate drudgery, and unlock whole new business models. On the other, you have AI Doomers announcing, with eerie certainty, that these systems will end work, end art, or end humanity. They are wrong in the same way Clifford Stoll was wrong about the Internet. They confuse wishful and magical fantasy with prescience: the fantasy just flipped polarity. The 1995 fantasy was \u201cnothing will change\u201d; the 2026 fantasy is \u201ceverything will end.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In both cases, journalism amplifies the most dramatic stories about technology and mistakes them for reporting. It hands its megaphone to whoever can make the boldest claim about \u201cthe future,\u201d and then rarely circles back to measure those claims against what actually happened. Buying your own hype is expensive. For news organisations, it has cost money, credibility, and readers who remember the last time they were told this gadget, this app, this business model was The Answer.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Ironically, many of today\u2019s AI Doomers were teens or adults when the Internet Doomers were confidently wrong in print. They watched worst\u2011case Internet prophecies fizzle, then grew up to make the same move, just swapping \u201cemail\u201d for \u201cAI\u201d and dialing the apocalypse up to eleven.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

We are so not doing that here.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In the coming pieces, I\u2019ll take you back through some of journalism\u2019s favourite tech proclamations, about the Internet, blogs, social media, virtual worlds like Gaia and Meez, paywalls, and AI itself, and match the confident headline to the world we actually got. Not to dunk on being wrong; everyone is wrong about the future. What matters is whether you admit it, learn from it, and stop dressing your hunches up as inevitabilities.<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

If Clifford Stoll could be that certain, and that wrong, about the Internet, maybe we should be a little less impressed when today\u2019s columnists tell us, with the same tone of authority, what AI will or will not do.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This series is my attempt to keep the receipts.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Journalism likes to pretend it is allergic to prediction. Reporters will tell you they deal in facts, not crystal balls. Then you look at pieces like Newsweek\u2019s \u201cThe Internet? Bah!\u201d or that solemn tabloid declaring the Internet a passing fad, and you realize how often the press has tried to tell the future with the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[185,186,426,312,427,166,425],"class_list":["post-2153","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-alexandra-kitty","tag-ai","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-clifford-stoll","tag-daily-mail","tag-james-chapman","tag-journalism","tag-newsweek"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/alexandrakitty.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2153","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/alexandrakitty.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/alexandrakitty.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alexandrakitty.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alexandrakitty.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2153"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/alexandrakitty.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2153\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2158,"href":"https:\/\/alexandrakitty.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2153\/revisions\/2158"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/alexandrakitty.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2153"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alexandrakitty.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2153"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alexandrakitty.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2153"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}