The apartment building at the one minute mark looks like Deckard’s building when it was new:
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IMHO, that’s a consequence of our perverted little mode of capitalism. Oddly, the power structures of that corrosive structure have actually managed to overcome the natural democratization of technology.
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Funny you mention that, because to my eye I saw the mise-en-scène of the short lived 1999 show Total Recall 2070, and just how much that show was a reflection of the ultimately failed aspirations of companies such as AOL and AT&T.
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Ok, now that’s something I’ll have to watch. There are a few scenes in these commercials that have the look. As someone commented earlier:
Even these commercials have more of a cyberpunk feel than we ended up with. For example, the medical clinic in that commercial:
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Someone made a version of these ads corrected for actual use of the technology:
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the parody was so astute as to realize that the original ads were using a sound-alike of Peter Gabriel’s “Solsbury Hill.”
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I don’t really understand the criticism here. AT&T was putting out a lifestyle advert – “we’re an important part of your life and will be” – and we’re to criticize it for not saying “we’re going to build technology that will upend the basic social cornerstones of your life”? I mean, all ads like this are a little silly (e.g., the touch, the feel of cotton; got milk; etc.) but sorry they didn’t want to telegraph the potential for what middle America would then (and probably still) regard as perversion.
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And now they’ve got Direct TV and are working on Time Warner. History never repeats, my ass.
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What’s a phone booth?
Correction. AT&T isn’t predicting the future of the Internet here, they’re predicting the future of the “Information Super Highway” as they expected it would be.
In the early 1990s the large technology and telecom companies poured millions of dollars into their vision of what the “Information Super Highway” would bring, once faster networks were widely available.
But that was not the Internet, which at the time was seen as too technical and geeky to be of wide use. Their vision was a closed network on which they would control all of the technology.
Meanwhile, kids in midwestern university basements were working to make the Internet more accessible and usable by regular people, with a belief that open standards and protocols were the future, and that led to the World Wide Web as we know it today.
Those kids clobbered those large telecom companies, forced Microsoft to completely change course, and produced the dot-com boom of the late 90s.
That’s why these ads seem so ridiculous.
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I remember liking these ads as an aspiring little cyber-geek. And here we are, in The Future. Feels like the blink of an eye, 25 years went by.
I tend to think things have definitely gotten fairly “cyberpunk.” We have all manner of “the street finds its own use for things” (tech) going on these days.
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Yes, they wanted AOL and Compuserve type business, not true “internet”.
Heck Sears even got into the game with “Prodigy”
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I’m not so sure that’s just a capitalistic thing, though, but more a characteristic of citizen-hostile regimes in general. The Soviet Union’s telecom infrastructure was highly centralized, and underinvestment in public telecom infrastructure was deliberate (as a way to control information flow). Communist Party apparatchiks had access to special phone networks, which, while they might be more reliable than the public network, were likely even more heavily monitored (shades of Orwell’s 1984, where the Outer Party members were more heavily surveilled than the proles). One could judge a person’s overall importance by how many phones were on the desk; apparently key sets weren’t a thing behind the Iron Curtain.
I was very surprised, back in the late 1980s, to see quite a number of USSR-based nodes in the FidoNet nodelist. With the Cold War still going on, though, I don’t think it was possible to directly dial calls between the USSR and USA, in either direction.
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Don’t forget this you will ad, it’s only recently become a thing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AdDC-8179hw
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Hold on a sec. I’m not AT&T fanboi, but think about what made possible many of these scenarios: the iPhone. And who was the exclusive carrier for the first few years? Yep, AT&T. Remember when you didn’t want to have them as the carrier, but, damn, the iPhone was so innovative that you swallowed your pride and ponied up?
So if you squint a bit, AT&T was part of what made this possible, just in a derivative - and ultimately diminished - manner.
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My favorite “future ad” of the era was this. I’m still looking forward to a video game system you snort… 
I was under the impression that Apple chose ATT not the reverse?
And even further to the point, the current AT&T company is a weird grandchild marrying its grandparent company scenario where SBC Communications and BellSouth (itself formerly a part of Ma Bell prior to the lawsuit that broke it up) owned Cingular Wireless, which then acquired AT&T Wireless, and then SBC acquired the original AT&T and then Cingular was subsumed under the incarnation of AT&T and everything was renamed AT&T because of the brand value and visibility. The current AT&T is like a different Doctor (Who) than the one that made these commercials.
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In 2012 they made more of them (Without Tom Selleck)
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It’s so funny to me how fine a line there is between “aspirational and futuristic” versus “kind of freaking ridiculous”. The original commercials were really forward-looking for their day (even if the ideas in them weren’t exactly new) but the 2012 ones are mostly just goofy. No, AT&T, I would not want a badly cosplaying dude to teach my kid history, or be able to record my dreams to share on the internet, or get “nano surgery” while playing violin (?). And their vision of virtual reality is a big salad bowl on your head?
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