Read the whole thing. Maybe there are undigested kernels of truth and foresight amongst the excrement, but on the whole, it's easily one of the worst, most unimaginative, and most dogmatically narrow-minded futurist thinkpieces to have ever been written:

> Yet Nicholas Negroponte, director of the MIT Media Lab, predicts that we'll soon buy books and newspapers straight over the Intenet. Uh, sure.

He wrote those words in 1995, a year after Amazon was founded, and just two years before its IPO.

We still (by and large) don't buy newspapers online! They're ad-funded, and the whole media industry has gone away from pay to read.

What does everyone do when we find a paywalled article? Use a site that bypasses it. We don't buy news in 2024.

We do buy books. I grant that :) I don't want to be seen as agreeing with the article wholly, but I think that predicting the future is a hard game. I'm inclined to be sympathetic towards it.

I have read it fully now - I agree he had some rough blindspots (like requiring in person salesmen for capitalism).

But my opinion is the opposite: maybe there are some rotten pieces in the otherwise delicious meal. On the whole it's a wise piece; if perhaps too optimistic that people would evaluate fairly the (negative) value that the internet brings in some areas and stick to the better offline options. But that might be a transient state, the future is long (or so I hope).