"Everyone complains about brownouts every day.
"Maybe the Internet has already collapsed," Metcalfe says to me later that day, in a lecture that lasts the dinner hour. Soon the fish will find itself reeled in, and we will witness the pathetic spectacle of the once mighty Internet, the darling of our economy and the object of our millennial dreams, flopping aimlessly like snagged red snapper on a boat deck. In thinking, the Net is a fish already hooked those routine brownouts are but the first few twinges at its mouth. He wisely offers no predictions on how that will work out. Now that Metcalfe has a Turing, he can gulp down some champagne instead of his own words, and get back to his so-called sixth career: using computational engineering to improve geothermal energy production. And so at a 1997 Web conference, after checking that the ink wouldn’t be toxic, he put the newsprint in a blender with some unidentified liquid and drank it all, before a delighted audience. He recounted that he’d been so confident of a crash that he had promised to eat the column if he was wrong.
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If the chatbot had truly understood Metcalfe, it would have known that he’d greet the subject with a laugh. Speaking of the internet, I defied ChatGPT’s advice and reminded Metcalfe of the 1996 collapse he predicted that never happened. Even advertising was viewed as a pathology for a while-until it funded the entire internet.” (We didn’t pause to debate the fact that porn is still an issue and that some people think online ads ruined civilization.) “But now we don't argue about porn anymore, that's been handled.
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But I am confident that we're going to figure out how to handle truth, so that, you know, fake news doesn't kill us.” After all, he notes, at one point people thought porn was going to ruin the internet. “That's why there are these pathologies emanating. “We don't quite know how to handle all the connectivity,” he says. Metcalfe acknowledges that the power of networks isn’t always to the good. “She invited in a Stanford PhD who she thought might know something about Metcalfe's law. “Mark stood me up and Sheryl didn't know what Metcalfe's law was,” he says. His daughter, an early Facebook employee, had arranged a meeting with CEO Mark Zuckerberg and his right-hand woman Sheryl Sandberg, so that the executives could connect with the man whose achievements made their company possible. So you would think that the day Bob Metcalfe actually visited Facebook, he would have been treated like a hero. You can argue that the idea was behind the explosion of not just social networks, but the entire philosophy of “get big fast” that characterized the first two decades of tech in this century. When people talk of network effects, they’re unwittingly channeling that sales pitch. The remedy, of course, was buying more of our networks.”
Our salesforce took this 35-millimeter slide and told people the reason they weren’t useful is that they weren’t big enough. So I ginned up a slide on an Alto that showed that the cost of a network goes up linearly with the number of nodes, but the number of possible connections goes up as the square. “People were building small networks and not finding them useful. Metcalfe says his motivation was not science but commerce. It’s probably the most celebrated equation of its kind since Gordon Moore’s observation about computer chips. In 1985, the economist George Gilder named the idea Metcalfe’s law.
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