Silicon Snake Oil (Paperback)

by Cliff Stoll (Author) "It's some caving trip: Far below you is an active volcano from which great gouts of molten lava come surging out, cascading back down into..." (more)
Key Phrases: online fees, computer jocks, local bulletin boards, New York, Library of Congress, Jon Gradie (more...)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly
Computer expert Stoll presents a backlash account of the Internet, questioning whether its potential influence is as far-reaching and positive as supporters claim.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Paperback edition.

From Library Journal
Stoll, a Berkeley astronomer who chronicled how he broke a computer spy ring in The Cuckoo's Egg (LJ 9/15/89) and who has been netsurfing for 15 years, does an apparent about-face here, warning that the technophiles are trying to sell us a bill of goods on the promise of the Internet?one on which it can't deliver and that, ultimately, both ignores the cost of forsaking human interaction and actual financial costs. His is a lone voice countering the mass of media hype that has been touting the national information superhighway and the rush of individuals and businesses to get connected. In chapters dealing with everything from education to E-mail (Stoll reports he lost less mail via the U.S. Postal Service) to the "virtual" library, he details the limitations of the networks. Though he is occasionally not quite up to the minute on some library implementations, his message nevertheless should be read as a caution to every librarian rushing down the information highway. [For an interview with Stoll and an excerpt from his book, see p. 100.]?Francine Fialkoff, "Library Journal.
-?Francine Fialkoff, "Library Journal"
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 247 pages
• Publisher: Pan Books (April 12, 1996)
• ISBN-10: 0330344420
• ISBN-13: 978-0330344425
• Product Dimensions: 7.6 x 5.1 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 4.2 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.5 out of 5 stars See all reviews (73 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #2,081,433 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

14 of 16 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Dissapointing, December 27, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: Silicon Snake Oil: Second Thoughts on the Information Highway (Paperback)

As an Internet junkie, let me say that I'm glad I read this book, and I encourage all computer and net-obsessed people to read this book.

He does bring up some very good arguements -- like his theory that networked systems are ruining public libraries -- but many of them are unsubstantiated and full of holes. He has complaints about everything computer-related, from how slow they are to how they look to the lack of noises they make. (He complains that his computer, unlike his trusty typewriter, doesn't make noises when he types some characters or advances to a new line... but I couldn't help thinking that if the computer *did* make these noises, he'd just complain about how loud it was.)

The most irritating thing about this book is that he paints himself (perhaps unknowingly) as a hypocrite. For example, he writes how the usenet is basically a waste of time and how you hardly ever find anything useful there, yet he keeps bringing up things he learned while reading the usenet and talking about how much time he spent there. He seems to love the Postal Service, yet when he wants to see newly discovered pictures of Saturn, he logs in online to get them, then complains about how he has to wait, rather than perhaps mailing away for them, as a snail-mail supporter would do. And I found it especially disturbing that for a man who uses computers every day for his job and pleasure, who owns five different machines, and who has obviously been a computer user since before many of us knew what computer were, he offers exactly ZERO suggestions on how to improve them. I realized this about 100 pages in and wanted to stop reading the book right then and there, but the only thing that kept me reading was my interest in seeing if he ever presented any suggestions for improvement. (He didn't.)

Since this was written about 5 years ago, I would be interested to hear if any of his feelings have changed. Most of his arguements center around gopher, FTP, usenet, BBS systems, etc., and most Internet users never use these. He only mentions Mosaic offhand a few times, but what it has evolved into (IE/Netscape and the WWW) is the most important part of the Internet today. My guess is he would find problems with it as well, and he would have similarly-flawed arguements to back them up.

16 of 19 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Important reading for the computer literate and illiterate, November 10, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: Silicon Snake Oil: Second Thoughts on the Information Highway (Paperback)

Unfortunately, the ones who should read it the most are precisely the ones who would pan it (and did, see some reviews below).

Mr. Stoll has written an excellent book that contains enough humor and personality to keep it interesting. This book can be easily read by anyone whether they understand computers or not because it is not a discussion of how computers work, but what the cost is when we give them too much credit.

I've been programming computers for 18 years, before there even were PCs. Heck, when I learned, I had to punch my own cards (how many of you remember those?). I find that computers are an excellent tool for problem solving and for storing and printing information, but I've always been trained that computers are, basically, just a tool. They depend on the programmer or the user to turn their output into something useful. How ridiculous it would seem if we glorified hammers because they build houses for us! But we do the same thing for computers when the only thing they really do is help us to work faster.

This is the premise of Silicon Snake-Oil. We should spend less time teaching people where to click and more time teaching people WHY to click there! Just because someone can download a fancy picture of the devastation of the rainforest doesn't mean they have the slightest clue about what it means.

What Clifford Stoll is trying to do here is to remind us that it's not the hammer but the person who uses it that builds the house. The fact that schools routinely fire teachers and librarians to make room for computers shows how far we've gone down the wrong path.

Read Silicon Snake-Oil, but don't read it with a chip on your shoulder trying to defend computers, read it with the intention of learning the difference between the tool and the builder.

27 of 35 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Dated Beyond Belief, July 24, 2005

By	Douglas Moran (Austin, TX) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

This review is from: Silicon Snake Oil: Second Thoughts on the Information Highway (Paperback)

Clifford Stoll wrote the highly-entertaining and engaging "Cuckoo's Egg," about his successful efforts to track down the person (or persons) who have hacked in to his computer network.

Unfortunately this book, which can be termed a cautionary tale about the internet and the world wide web (called back then the "information highway" or "information superhighway") has become outpaced by subsequent events to an almost absurd degree. While Stoll's writing is still engaging, and his contrarian views interesting, so many things he discusses are (in his own words about the Internet) "stale, incomplete, misleading...or simply wrong." The most prominent example is his assertion that " The Internet is a poor place for commerce." There are other assertions in the book that are equally dated. (Stoll, it might be noted, after calling the possibility of e-commerce "baloney," now sells Klein bottles on the Web. So much for his predictive abilities.)

While it is certainly no crime to have gotten predictions about the growth and use of the Web wrong--after all, almost everyone did--this book, with its almost-Luddite overtones regarding the internet, is really not worth the time except as a nostalgia item.