These ads depicted people doing stuff that was fundamentally normal,
but made exotic because they were doing it over a 128k bonded ISDN pair
provided by AT&T: tucking in their kids, attending meetings,
getting medical advice, using self-serve kiosks at the DMV, etc.
The ads are infamous in their own way, first because they were
beautifully executed, and second because AT&T managed to predict a
bunch of technologies without making any significant inroads in
supplying those technologies (part of the reason AT&T is so anxious
to kill Net Neutrality is that it failed to out-compete the companies
that provided services over its wires, and so now it wants to exact a
tax from them instead of trying to make things that people want).
That’s right, as far as it goes, but there is another way in which these
so-right ads were so, so wrong: they predicted that the major impact of
technology would be to make us more normal, not weirder: that
teleconferencing would allow nuclear families to remain in touch even
when separated by distance, but not that networks would allow
polyamorous people to discretely meet one another and form amorphous,
blended families. That we’d have videoconference board-meetings, but not
that we’d galvanize political opposition by livestreaming police
brutality. That we’d have smart-watches but not that we’d have hardware
hackers creating free/open laptops from the bootloader up to root out
monopolism and surveillance.
I dropped out of four undergraduate programs, and the last university I
didn’t graduate from was the University of Waterloo, where I had
submitted a thesis proposal for the Interdisciplinary Studies program
that was grounded in this idea: that the predictions everyone made about
the internet were about how much normal we were going to get, but that
all the early evidence was that we were about to get way, way weirder,
for better and for worse. It was 1993, and these ads were the impetus
for the proposal. The university turned down my proposal, I took a job
programming multimedia CD ROMs for Voyager, and never looked back.
