textfiles/politics/SPUNK/sp000317.txt

The following is taken from the electronic magazine
Voices From the Net (number 1.3), which came out on Wed Oct 27, 1993.

=========================================================================

FEATURE:                _Harley Hahn: Author_

Harley Hahn found us, very soon after we started Voices. One day we
received a surprisingly enthusiastic note in our mailbox, suggesting that
we might want to be listed in a soon-to-be-published Internet guide, and
that, while we were at it, we might also want to interview the author.
Harley assured us that he had many interesting and controversial things to
say. He hasn't let us down.

It might have been a simple "you scratch my back and i'll scratch
yours" sort of exchange, a publicity swap (and a little publicity never
hurt a new publication), but we hope you'll agree that what we got was
a lot more than just self-promotion. What follows is the result of a
telephone interview that lasted well over an hour, and it covers a lot
of ground. But so, apparently, does Harley Hahn.

He's a "internationally recognized author, analyst and consultant,
specializing in Unix and other operating systems." He's written a number
of books, including _Peter Norton's Guide to Unix_,
_A Student's Guide to Unix_, and the newly published _The Internet Complete
Reference_ (with Rick Stout). He has a degree in mathematics and computer
science from the University of Waterloo in Canada, and a graduate degree
in computer science from the University of California at San Diego. And
Scott Yanoff said nice things about his Internet guide...

So now let's hear what Harley has to say:


<Voices> We were looking over the introductions to your two books
[Student's Guide to Unix, Internet Complete Reference] and it seems to
us that maybe you have something like a cosmology of the Internet-Unix
linkup here, a sort of big picture which is driving a lot of what you
are doing. Some of the other people we've talked to have quibbled over
the question about "What is the Net?" Do you want to start by tackling
that question?

<Harley Hahn> Well you know, there are lots of questions in life that sound 
simple but they don't really have satisfying answers and I think that 
that's one of them because there's no real good definition of it. If you 
maybe take a simpler question and ask "What is Unix?"

v: yes

h: People can say it's an operating system, but it's a lot more than 
that. People can say it's a family of operating systems, but other people 
say it's a collection of tools for solving problems for smart people or 
other people say it's really an approach to solving problems, and other 
business oriented people say it's a computer system which runs a certain 
type of software with certain interfaces.

And you come down to the fact that there's lots of questions in life
and in the world of computers that sound like a question because
they're a sentence and they have a question mark at the end and if it
sounds like a question then it should have an answer, but it really
doesn't have a good answer. So the real answer is that, depending on
who you are, the question has different answers, and even then the
answer may change over time.

I guess I can give you three answers to the question "What is the Net?" 
The first one is: You can say that the Net is just the short form for 
Internet, and the Internet is this large collection of other networks 
and it's a physical thing that actually exists with phone lines and 
computers and data being stored all over the place and so on. That's 
what the Internet is and "the Net" just stands for the Internet.

The second answer is: A lot of people when they say "the Net" mean
Usenet.  They mean where the discussions go on. So you could say that
Usenet is a system of discussion groups all over the world and then
"Net" is just an abbreviation for Usenet. I find that in practice
people kind of switch back an forth between the two definitions,
sometimes when they say "the Net" like someone says "I need a recipe"
and someone says "Why don't you ask on the Net" then they're clearly
talking about Usenet. Sometimes when somebody says "I'd like to send
you email are you on the Net?" they're talking about the Internet
because Usenet doesn't have electronic mail.

So "the Net" can mean Internet, "the Net" can mean Usenet, but that's
not what the most interesting meaning to me. The most interesting
meaning is that it's sort of a global gathering place. It certainly
doesn't involve everyone in the world, not even most people in the
world, not even most people in the United States and Europe and Japan
and the developed countries, but it's the largest gathering of human
beings that has ever existed in the history of mankind and it's getting
larger and larger and it looks like it's going to be the ancestor of
something that eventually everybody will be able to gather whenever
they want.

So that's what I think of "the Net". I don't think of it as
meaning only the Internet or meaning only Usenet. I think of it as
meaning a network of people that right now depends on the Internet and
right now the discussion groups depend on Usenet, but you could take
away the Internet and put in a different infrastructure, and you could
take away Usenet and put in a different way to have discussion groups,
but we would still have "the Net." We would still have that gathering.

v: For an unanswerable question you handled that quite nicely.

h: Can I point out why I think that is significant?

v: sure

h: I'll try to say it in a few sentences. If somebody says "hey try this 
new word processing program", there are word processing programs that 
already exist so it's not really new it's just a new variation. And if 
you've only typed on a typewriter and someone says "try this new word 
processing program" it's a lot more new to you because you've never seen 
anything like it, but still you've typed on a typewriter, and even before 
then you've written stuff down on paper.

The thing about "the Net" is that it is something that has never
existed ever before in the history of human beings. It's not like in
the way that a word processing program is just more automatic or
computerized than typing which might be more mechanical than writing on
paper. "The Net" is not just something that we already have to a larger
scope because if you connect everybody with email it's not the same as
a large email network. The character and the quality of it change.

There's a size, I don't think it's an exact size, but once you get over
a certain size it becomes more than just a large version of something
you already have. So the significance of "the Net" is not that it's
just a large gathering, because certainly there have been gatherings of
human beings since there have been human beings. I call it a large
gathering but that's because I don't have a better word.  It's
something that never existed before in the history and culture of human
beings and that's why it's significant. Its sheer size ties the world
together, or it's beginning to, in a way that nobody even imagined was
possible.

v: Something like an actual collective consciousness?

h: Well, I think that's the first thing that you might start thinking 
about because you talk about something that's greater than the sum of its 
parts, but I think that say in fifty years when you look back and when 
it's pretty well understood what this "Net" thing is, it may be called 
something different by then. People will say the idea that it is a 
collective consciousness was maybe a good way to start thinking about it 
but it was kind of a rudimentary, naive way. It's really a lot more than 
that. It's a lot more than a collective consciousness, and I don't even 
know that it's a collective consciousness really.

I know that ever since the beginning of time it seems whenever human 
beings have had a chance to communicate, they do. They get together. 
Whenever there's a chance to send messages they do, and the "Net" that 
we're building, it seems like we don't know why we're building it, and 
we're almost unconscious that we're building it, but collectively we are 
trying to connect up to one another as much as possible.

But I think that's it's more than a group consciousness, it's very much
individual consciousness that's doing things. For example, yesterday I
connected to IRC (ed. Internet Relay Chat) and I could talk with anyone
who happened to be on there, and that's not a collective consciousness
at all because it's just me talking to individuals, and yet
qualitatively  I think that's different than say talking to you on the
phone right now.

v: You have mentioned (in previous conversations) some of the new social 
organizations that are happening on the Net...

h: There's new social organizations, yes, and that's probably a better 
word, although it's longer, than gathering. I think when you say social 
organizations, you're saying people are organizing themselves in new 
ways, and we don't have a word to describe it yet so we'll call it social 
organization and then later we'll get some more familiar terms. What I'm 
saying is we need a vocabulary.

In order to discuss things you have to have words to represent the
ideas, and we don't have enough words yet to represent all the new
ideas of the things we're creating or the things that are happening out
of our creations. So we call it "the Net", but that's not a good word.
What we need are new words that don't have any connotations and the
only meanings they have are representations of all these new things
that are happening, but those new words have not yet arisen so we can
talk about social organization but then we have to be vague.

v: There is of course that whole Net language, to use the form in which 
it rears its ugly head all the time, that's developed that seems to work 
on the model of attaching prefixes and suffixes and all of that...

h: We have to make a distinction between two types of things. There are 
words that are used on the Net but then there are words that are used to 
talk about the Net. Some words are in both. There are abbreviations and 
slang that people on the Net use, but that's the same everywhere.

You go to a part of a city that has it's own culture or a part of the
country or a different country, they all have their own slang and their
own words that nobody else understands. At a level beyond that, what we
need are words to talk ABOUT the Net and how it's important, and what
it's like to use it, and what it means to us as human beings.

Maybe a good example is the word newsgroup. You use the word newsgroup
on the net, and it's slang, and it means something, but newsgroup we
can call a meta-word, a word to talk about ideas and other words.
Newsgroup is a concept now that we're beginning to understand, and now
we can sort of understand what that means so we can talk about
newsgroups. We need a whole lot of new words like newsgroup to talk
about the ideas. We can talk about a  and we can talk about
newsgroups and there's probably some other things.  What we're missing
are all the words to talk about what the whole thing means on a larger
scale.

v: Yes, you've done some work which is very much related to this business 
of establishing ways of talking about the net both in the work you've 
done in trying to make Unix accessible and now the new book on making the 
Internet accessible. Do you see part of your role there as at least 
working towards that meta-language?

h: Yes, but I don't think about that primarily. In one sense I do. I'm 
very careful how I use words, and of course most of my books, almost 
every word, is written in regular English, but when you come to the terms 
that aren't regular English I think carefully about how I want to use them.
For example, when I write UNIX I'll write it with a "U" but then a
"nix" because to me Unix is not just a brand name and people are
starting to realize that now.

That's a simple one. Because so many people read my books, and because
they are about what I call important subjects, I'm very careful how I
use the new words because one of the criteria we use for how we should
use and spell a word is what we see in print. So I know if I put it in
a book and tens or hundreds of thousands of people read it, that in a
sense becomes a tiny bit of authority.

I try to use the words in a way that I want people to use them. I spell
Unix the way I think people ought to spell Unix, and I talk about it
that way. The same way as I talk about a newsgroup. I use the word
newsgroup in the new modern meaning of a Usenet discussion group. I
don't call it Netnews for instance. Some people do. I call it Usenet
because I want people to call it Usenet. I want to codify that word.

I think one of the most interesting words that you can see that is becoming 
part of the vocabulary is "rtfm". To me rtfm is a great word because it's 
becoming a word in its own, and I want to help it become a word in its 
own, and it doesn't have any vowels so I think that's pretty neat.

To me the idea of RTFM grew out of the original meaning which was an
acronym which meant Read The Fucking Manual, and it meant nothing more
than that.  It just meant read the manual before you ask somebody a
question, but now RTFM means a much broader idea. It means that you
should try to help yourself before you ask for help. It also implies
the other side of that coin that if somebody who has tried to help
themselves and they ask you for help than you have an obligation to
help them.

RTFM is very important because the Net is so large that it is literally
impossible for everybody to be taught what they need to know to use it,
so it needs a culture of teaching yourself. RTFM is a new Net word and
I try to codify in my books by explaining it and using it as a word in
this new language. We do have a few new words to talk about this new
Net idea that exists, so in some small sense to answer your question,
yes, I see one of my jobs as defining and codifying and exemplifying
this new vocabulary so people around the world can use it.

v: That's an interesting way of transforming that acronym from a 
snide retort to something between an ethics and an etiquette...

h: Well, if you take any word in the dictionary and look it up in one of 
these large dictionaries that shows the history of the word you always 
see it started out somewhere, in English it's usually Greek or Latin, but 
it could have started of with an English word that meant something and 
then got turned into this and that, all our words came from somewhere.

I noticed that RTFM was originally an acronym, and then people started
using it like a verb, like "I rtfm'ed but I couldn't find the answer".
And they started using it like a noun sometimes and so on, and people
just do this because new words are formed all the time. When new ideas
exist there's a vacuum until a new word comes along to express that
idea.  So the vacuums usually get filled fairly quickly, and one of my
jobs is to notice these new words and to point them out to people and
teach them the vocabulary. Not all the technical terms necessarily, but
the vocabulary of ideas because they can't understand or think or talk
about the Net until they have the words that express the ideas that are
part of the Net. So it's much more important to learn these things than
it is, say, some technical option for anonymous FTP or something like
that.

v: So you see part of your role as helping to establish a basic literacy?

h: I think that's a good way of putting it, but I want to be very clear 
that I'm not making new stuff up and saying that anyone should be 
literate by repeating how I think it should be done. I'm more of an 
observer. I observe what the literate people on the Net do, how they 
talk, how they think, how they express themselves, what words they use, 
and then I write in that same language so when you read what I write you 
are really reading the language of the literate people on the Net.

I guess if you read some books in English that are written to express
the vocabulary and ideas of, say, the most educated people in our
society, then by reading those books you can learn new words and you
can learn ideas and you can learn how educated people think. In this
sense, if you can read an Internet book that discusses things in the
way that the most literate Net people do then you can start to become
part of that culture, part of that society, and you want to aspire to
learn how to think like the best people in your culture not like the
mainstream more popular people in the culture.

v: You talk quite a bit in your books about the global nature of the Net, 
and the fact that it is the largest gathering, and you say that people 
won't be excluded on the Net due to race or wealth or religion and all of 
those sorts of things. Are there ultimately going to be technical 
hierarchies that are set up in terms of how well you can use the tools at 
hand?

h: Can I turn that question around and change it a little bit?

v: Certainly, feel free.

h: Are there or will there be exclusions on the Net based on other 
criteria? The answer is definitely yes. You see, every group in society, 
even a large social organization...

Let me backtrack and say I don't think this is a huge global 
organization, I think it's a collection of small, ever-changing,
coming-into-being and then disappearing, smaller social organizations.
Anyway...

Any social organization does exclude people, but on the Net they don't 
exclude people on the basis of what you look like. The exclusions are 
based on intelligence and ability so on the Net we don't discriminate 
against people of the wrong color. We discriminate against stupid people.

And we don't discriminate against people who don't have enough money; we 
discriminate against people who are lazy. We don't discriminate against 
people who are the wrong religion; we discriminate against people who 
aren't willing to learn something so they can use a new tool. We don't 
discriminate against people who wear the wrong clothes; we discriminate 
against people who in a discussion don't have anything important to say 
or act like idiots.

In a very crude way the Net discriminates/excludes stupid people. It's
not supposed to be fair, but there's too much in life where you can be
accepted even if you're sub-standard, and on the Net that doesn't work
because you don't see anybody and you can have completely free choice
in who you want to talk to.

When you read Usenet articles you choose which ones you want to respond
to or pay attention to. If you want to say something bad about what
someone said you can just go ahead and do it, and you also have
enormous freedom to say and do whatever you want because you know you
can't really hurt someone. If you send them a mean spirited reply to
something they've posted in a newsgroup you know it doesn't hurt them
really, not like if you discriminate against them and don't hire them
for a job because you don't like their color or you hit them and take
away their money or something.

We have enormous freedom, and it's really a meeting of the minds. It's
certainly not a meeting of the bodies or of the mouths or the ears or
anything like that.  I wouldn't say so much of a hierarchy, but as we
organize ourselves into transient social units that there definitely is
a premium put on people whose minds work better than other people's.

For example, if you're talking on IRC, if there's five people in a
conversation and one person has intelligent, interesting things to say,
and the other person is kind of a dullard, doesn't have much to say,
then the attention gravitates towards the person who has something more
interesting to say, and so there's a discrimination there, a
discrimination of ideas, and a discrimination of what really is
worthwhile about human beings.

Some people might feel it's worthwhile to be big and large and be a
football player, but when you come right down to it what serves us most
as human beings are people who are smart and have ideas and can be
convincing and compelling. People who can teach other people,
contributing ways where a mind can meet another mind.

I think there's one thing that's very appealing to smart people about
the Net is that you can go ahead and no matter what you're like in the
other part of your life you can just go and let whatever brilliance you
have shine forth and people will appreciate it. I think this is one of
the things that's scary to other people.

I don't mean people get scared at the beginning because it's a new
society and they're not used to the nuances. Everybody feels that, but
people who aren't very smart, people who are lazy, people who don't
want to work hard, people who don't want to teach themselves something,
they don't like it so much because for the first time they're actually
being judged on what they're worth, and they can't get an incomplete
and they can't do extra work to turn a C into a B and they can't show
they're good because they earn more money or something like that. The
only thing that makes them worthwhile is what they say and what they
think and what comes out in words, it's not what they look like and I
think that's scary to a lot of people.  Other people just lap it up and
they love it.

v: I guess we hesitate to use IRC as the only example because there are 
people who are more shy who do very well on the asynchronous environments 
like Usenet.

h: That's a very good point. Everybody has different ways of expressing 
themselves and communicating. What's great about the Net is we've used 
this physical Internet and created all these types of communication that, 
if you like talking in real time you can talk in real time and if you 
like being thoughtful and thinking about what you're doing and writing it 
down and changing it you can talk in Usenet discussion groups where you 
have all the time you want, and different people who shine in different 
ways can find somewhere to shine on the Net.

I guess the way I would put it is that the great thing about the Net is
no matter what you're good at there's a place for you, there's nobody
who doesn't have a place on the Net because the Net is made up of
millions of people and although you may not get along with your
neighbor, in a set of millions of people, there are going to be people
there for you.

v: That's a good way to talk about that.

h: But there is an obligation, you see, we don't pay for the Net. You 
might pay twenty, thirty, fifty bucks a month to get access, you might 
have it for free because of where you work or where you go to school, but 
we don't really pay for it because there's this hugely enormous 
infrastructure and nobody pays for that. It's paid for by organizations 
and governments and so on, out of taxes or tuition or whatever.

We do have an obligation, but our obligation is not a monetary one. Our
obligation is to educate ourselves and train ourselves to use the
tools, to learn some etiquette, to learn how to get along with other
people, and to not back away from learning things that you can't just
learn in ten seconds. We have an obligation to start using our brains
here, and stop being lazy, and maybe stop watching so much television.
I say that in a sense that whatever part of your brain is engaged when
you watch television is the exact opposite of what's engaged when
you're using the Net. The more you watch television, the harder it is
to use the Net. The more you use the Net, the less satisfying
television will be.

v: Let's go back to the access question. It's a wealth issue, you have to 
have the money to afford a computer or afford an account, and then 
there's a lot of talk about commercialization/privatization issues, where 
do you think this is all going to work in as far as public access goes?

h: One of the things we have to do on the Net is to stop being parochial. 
We have to learn that we're talking about more than just the United States 
here. Every country is organized differently, and there's vast changes, 
and vast differences in size. In the United States, the Net I believe is 
going to become more and more commercial because the government is going 
to want to stop paying for it. In other countries, they're much smaller 
and I don't know if it could be supported by direct market competition, 
so the government will probably still support the Net. 

But within the United States, if I can answer your question, the Net will 
become more commercial, and I think what we will start to see is that 
access to the Net will be a lot more like access to the telephone system 
and access to the postal system in that there will be providers, at least 
in the short term. It won't be exactly like this, but it will be like 
cable TV, telephone, buying electricity, buying gas, putting stamps on a
package to send something. I don't know what exact form it will take,
but I think that the government is going to get more and more out of
the Net business and let private enterprise get more and more into the
Net business.

We may see the days when many people have free access to the Net start
to disappear. We may have to start paying for it, but I think that the
prices will be reasonable and it will be worth it. I think that it is
going to become such an important part of many people's lives that we
can't do without it. After all, no matter what it costs, within reason,
you have to have a telephone and you have to have access to the postal
system and you pretty much have to be able to buy electricity and maybe
gas if you need gas where you live, and the Net is going to be like
that.

There's a company in the northeast United States that is going to start
selling Net access through cable.  You can buy access to the Net by
plugging your computer into a coaxial cable. You won't have to get a
regular modem and dial up a host computer. The advantage of this is
that the direct hook-up will be closer to the speeds of an ethernet
network as opposed to the speeds of a regular modem.

All these experiments that will start to happen in the United States
over the next few years and we'll see what happens, which ones work out
and which ones don't. There's going to be enormous change in the Net.
There's something that just happened in the last year and it's hard to
characterize, except we'll look back and we'll figure out what it was,
that some great fundamental change happened in the Net and people are
starting to perceive that it's a necessity of life, and now all of our
culture, advertising, business, laws, government agencies, newspapers,
public opinion is all going to start to be part of the Net like it is
part of our newspapers, telephone, postal system and so on.  We're
going to embrace this part of our culture and things are going to
change a lot.

Could I talk about why I think the Net is important?

v: Yes! Great!

h: Of course we have email which we can't do without now, and we have 
Gopher and Usenet and all these other things, but I think the Net is more 
important in another way. When you write books, it's a lot of work, and 
you have to sit home and you're all alone and you do all this work and 
you never get to meet the people who read the book and if they like them 
you never really get much praise from them because a book writer never 
really meets his audience.

So you have to have an inner drive that keeps you going. One of them is
certainly money because that's how I earn my living, and people who
write books, if they don't write, they don't make money. But I have a
much larger drive here, at least in writing about the Internet and
Unix, in that I think it has an importance that transcends the obvious
things like email and Gopher and so on. I think that it's the most
important vehicle for world peace that we've ever had the chance to use
yet.

I trace back the events of the last twenty-five years that we really
notice in the last five years: the change in the Soviet Union, the
changes in China which are happening, the Berlin Wall falling, the
Arabs and Israelis talking together, many many changes I believe.

Why is this happening now, why not before? Because information flows
freely now from place to place. I have a belief that people are
inherently good, not everybody all the time, but as a race we are good
people, whatever "good" means.

If we are allowed free and unfettered communication, free and adequate
communication between ourselves, we will want to be peaceful, we will
want to help each other, we will want to get along. Over the last two
generations, as information began to be global with CNN news and
satellites and all these things all over the place, that's when the
world started to wake up and start working together and get along
better.

I think that the potential for the Net for people to
communicate is much larger than the newspapers and radio and
television. I see the Net as being our best hope, in fact, our
inevitable hope and it definitely will happen, for the world finally
starting to become a global community and everybody just getting along
with everyone else.

Now I don't mean this on a personal level.  You'll still be fighting
with the person next door.  I mean that countries will start to get
along. I mean that the economies of all the different countries and all
the divisions within a country because of the Net and global trade and
less tariffs and television, will become so dependent on one another
that no one will be able to afford to make war anymore or to fight on a
large scale and it will become unthinkable.

For example, it's absolutely unthinkable for the United States to go to
war with Japan now.  Even though there is a history of animosity, the
two economies are so tied together it would be like you going to war
with your foot. You couldn't shoot yourself in the foot because it
would end up killing you.

The Net is tying together the world in such a way that the best of
human nature comes out, and it's what is making the world more and more
peaceful and more and more wonderful. It's the most important gift we
have to leave the generations that come after us, and that's why it's
so important for me to make the Net, and to make Unix accessible to
people. Until people learn what they need to use these social
organizations, none of this can happen.

The more people that learn how to use the Net, the more people
participate in these transient social organizations, and the faster we
evolve into a wonderful human culture that is really our birthright. I
think we're just starting to see the potential of human beings, and the
Net is starting to do that for us.  In a very narrow sense -- and I'm
being ignorant here -- all of human culture and history and effort so
far has been sort of concentrating just so we can all get connected up
together, and finally we are all getting connected up together and now
we're going to see what happens.

This is really the beginning of human culture right now starting in the
early 1990's, and what we're seeing is far more wonderful and exciting
and interesting than anything that anybody ever dreamed of before. I
really think that there is a watershed here, starting with computers in
the 50's and the Net in the 80's and 90's, that you'll look back and
everything before that will be called primitive times.

v: So how do you start when you're trying to write the COMPLETE reference 
to the Internet? I know you say early on in the book that knowing even 
any big part of the Net is probably beyond any of us. How do you take on 
a project like that?

h: Well, the way I did this is I said to myself "I imagine a person who 
is extremely literate in the sense that he knows how to use just about 
every important thing that's out there on the Net to at least a basic 
level." That's saying a lot. So I answered the question "What does a 
literate person need to know right now about how to use the Net?" So for 
example, if you read the chapter about Gopher, Veronica, and Jughead, you 
will learn what a literate person needs to know about Gopher, Veronica, 
and Jughead. That's how I went about doing it. The Internet Complete 
Reference is almost a misnomer, maybe a better title would be "What a 
Literate, Informed, Intelligent Person Should Know About Every Aspect of 
the Internet".

v: Be tough to put all of that on the cover though! We have previously 
talked about interfaces and how the Net is going to be made accessible to 
new users. You'd expressed something close to disdain in the book about 
the wide use of graphic interfaces as a solution to Unix as what is 
perceived to be an unfriendly system. Do you want to talk a little about 
where you think the interface trail is leading?

h: OK. You used the word "solution" and I really don't think that there
is a problem here, or if there is a problem it's not what some people
think the problem is. The problem is not that the Net is hard to use,
the problem with Unix is not that Unix is hard to use.

Let's take a look at something simple like a newspaper. Almost everybody
in the country over the age of whatever who learns to read can read a
newspaper. Look how much work is involved in learning how to read a
newspaper. I mean, you have to learn how to read, and that's difficult,
it takes years. You have to learn the layout of the newspaper, you have
to learn the conventions.

Reading the newspaper is actually a very difficult thing to learn how
to do. If you took somebody who was raised away from culture, somebody
raised by wolves on a desert island, and they might be the same age as
you now and they might be able to speak English, but if you tried to
teach them how to read a newspaper it might take years.

If you say a newspaper is difficult to learn how to read, the solution
is not to make the newspaper easier, it's not to publish newspapers
where everything is made in simple pictures because you lose too much.
You gain so much by being able to express yourself in the newspaper in
words and complex ideas and sentence structure, using grammar and
layout and columns and continuations and pictures and so on, that you
would lose too much if you said all newspapers have to be made up of
simple pictures that people who don't know how to read can understand
because that way they'll be accessible to everybody.

No, we don't do that. What we say is "If you want to be part of our
culture, you have to learn how to read." If you want to use the Net and
you want to use Unix and you want to use a program it's a mistake to
say "Let's make it so easy that somebody on their first day or their
first week will feel familiar with it and will feel at home and will
find it easy." That would be just as much a mistake as saying "we can't
have any written newspapers we can only have simple pictures that are
delivered to your door every day."

The problem with people accessing is the same problem that somebody has
in accessing the newspaper who can't read. So, the solution is not to
say the newspaper has to be all simple pictures, but that the person
has got to learn how to read.  There's not a problem that the Net is
too hard, there's only people who haven't learned how to use it yet.

You lose too much of the complexity by trying to make it too simple.
You can't make it simple to learn because it's not a simple thing. You
can't make a newspaper simple to read because it's not a simple thing.
What you can do is build a tool that -- once a person learns it -- will
be easy to use.

When we talk about making these easy to use, we have to distinguish
between somebody that has experience, and somebody that doesn't. What
we have to do is make things easier to use by people with experience.
If we try to make everything easy to use for the people that don't have
experience, then we end up watering everything down, and we end up
losing the ability to express complex ideas and do complex things.
Imposing an easy-to-use graphical user interface on many of the things
on the Net isn't going to work.

What's necessary is to say not that the system is hard to use, in fact
I'll explain in a minute the Internet is extremely easy to use for what
it does. The problem is that it takes a while to learn it.  So what we
have to do is we have to help people learn how to access it, and we
have to encourage them to keep trying because at the beginning it's not
going to seem easy. We have to help people so that they will keep
trying until it becomes second nature.  Some people perceive that it's
difficult, we have to change that perception.

One of the things is that a lot of people come to Net when
they are already adults. I think what you will find is that the kids
who are using the Net will learn how to use the stuff without any
problem at all and they'll feel right at home and when they're 25 they
won't understand why a 25 year-old would think that anonymous FTP is a
difficult thing to learn how to use anymore than, at your age, you think
how anybody could think that driving is difficult to use.

We really need to look at things in a different way.  We have to let
people know that what they are embarking on is worthwhile and is lot of
fun and profitable and interesting, but it's going to be frustrating at
the beginning. We have to resist the temptation to make it easy for
newcomers. We want to make it easy for the population that's already in
there not the new people coming in, and we want to make it easy for the
new people coming in, in the sense that we encourage them and give them
good instruction.

The Net works very well right now, it works very well with email and
Usenet and Gopher and all these things that you can't pick up the first
day, but once you learn how to use them the system works great. The
idea behind RTFM is to recognize that there are always people who are
learning, and that everybody is always learning something. So we have
to have a tradition and a mechanism where you try to learn and teach
yourself, and then once you try anyone is obligated to help you.

We could turn it around and make it more personal. Once you learn how
to use a tool then you are obligated to teach anybody else as long as
they've tried first.  That's the tradition we're building up, and we
need a tradition of better books for people to buy and better online
documentation and so on. That's the solution, and that's what the real
problem is. The Net isn't hard, it's just strange at the beginning.

Resist the temptation to try to make it look like what you already
know.  It's something different and you don't understand it. Try to
just think of it as a culture and appreciate it over a period of months
rather than thinking that you have to change it right away to make it
easy. You have to change yourself, the Net isn't going to change. You
have to mold into the society. Nobody asks you to give up your
individuality, but you have to learn the rules and how they work, and
that's what has to happen on the Net.

v: If there's a problem, it's that the Net is scary to begin with, and 
certainly we have to get folks from the point where they don't know how 
to do enough to the point where they are literate and can start helping 
other people. The GUI solution could very easily trim down the power of 
the system itself. I guess the other solution is to provide a friendly, 
frequently funny, easy-to-use book like the things you are writing.

h: The problem is not a computer problem, it's a person problem, so the 
solution won't be a computer solution like an interface. The solution is 
going to be the solution to what do you do with people who want to learn 
how to do something but they are scared of it.

If you can remember back to your first day of school, kindergarten or
something, it was very scary and yet you did it anyway. A lot of things
in our life we take on participation in new parts of our society. It's
fearful in the sense that we don't know what to expect and we're not
accepted yet and everybody knows more than we do, but we have to do it
anyway because it's part of the rites of passage of being a human being
in our culture.

The big difference between that and the Net is that if you feel this
anxiety when you start to use it then nobody will drag you into it. I
guess it's important for some books -- and I try to do it in my books
-- to realize that, unlike going to school, people don't have to use the
Net, and if they get scared at the beginning they might stop using it
or they might stay away from the parts of it that they're anxious about
and just stay in nice safe places.

I want them to explore and use everything. I make an effort to show
people that it's really a social thing, and what you are really doing
is communicating with other people and using the tools that other
people have built. 

We have to be very careful to walk the line between encouraging people
to use this new global set of transient social organization and making
them feel comfortable, and pandering to them.  When people enter this
new social organization there's a lot of new rules and new culture and
nuances and their own language. They're confronting not the difficulty
of initiation, they're confronting the demons that lie inside
themselves.s

The real problems are what lies inside everybody when they try
something new, and the solution is not always to pander to that, but to
tell people "I will help you, but you have to help yourself. I will
help teach you things, but you have to want to bring out the best in
yourself. You can feel a little fearful some of the time if it's new as
a human being. But it's not scary. It's a wonderful, nurturing,
comfortable place to be."

If you look at any social organization we've ever had, from living with
one other person, to countries to communities, to businesses to
non-profit organizations, this large global network that we call the
Net works better than any organization we've ever had.

There's less fighting there's less bickering. It's a democratic
anarchy. There's nobody in charge. There's no police, there's no rules,
there's only etiquette and guidelines.

Wouldn't you love to live in a world where everything is run by
etiquette rather than rules and law?  And people enforce things because
they want to be nice people and they voluntarily act nice rather than
having police or parents or teachers telling you what to do.

That's what the Net is like. Most people are much nicer on the Net than
they are in real life. The Net brings out the best in people. Any
effort you put in to learn how to access and talk to the other people
on the Net is going to pay you back much more than the effort that you
put in.

I just want everybody to start using the Net and fulfilling themselves
as a human being.

======================================================================