Andy Mitchell

It’s no secret that recently I’ve felt a general sense of fatigue at the Web. I don’t know if it’s the Web’s fault, we’re both getting older and, well, people change. I’m just not sure my old friend knows what it’s changing in to. Don’t get me wrong, we’ve not fallen out, indeed deep down I have high hopes we can work things out, but I can no longer keep my feelings in the dark.

I’m not the first, in fact this post was inspired by the ever-enlightening Paul Robinson; and it follows a few days of similar posts (like Jeff Nolan). Oh and I lied about the “10 reasons”… you shouldn’t feel cheated, this is apparently the language of the Web (take solace in the fact this post iz not written by mai kitten for ur cheezburger).

As a foreword, when I talk about my friend the Web I really mean the opportunity it represents. The new types of business, new ways of connecting wtih people, new ways of viewing and understanding the world, new kinds of leisure pursuits… heck, even interesting advances in technology itself. All the things that appear to be moving closer, but feel like they’re moving further away.

So where did it begin?
My initial disallusionment began sometime in Q3 2007, and is an underlying reason I dropped out of Meecard, my startup dedicated - ostensibly enough - to helping freelancers, but which was rapidly failing to address the hard problems and instead started to fall into the trivial. I think Meecard was a tiny - but clear - representative of the bigger changes that are happening around us.

The Lull

There is a sense we’ve peaked on the growth curve that grew out of the last dot bomb crash. As a utility, Flickr was the first great hope, and Flickr is now mature. As a trend, blogging was the biggest, and blogging is now mature (worse, it’s consolidating into big money media). The excitement was justified - we’ve achieved great things with communication - but it has now gone.

What new ideas do we have to look forward to? RWW - among others - look toward the ’semantic web’ and ‘mobile’. Sound familiar? It’s the same story we’ve heard for the last few years, and the time still isn’t right (although bless you iPhone, you’ve just about made mobile realistic).

Web 2.0’s great success is in the reduction of cost, which means many more people can get involved. So competition is up, but you can’t solve the big problems on a shoe string, so purpose is down. Inspired by TechCrunch and Google, we’ve created a world where people are intensely competing to produce frothy fluff. Who’s winning? No one.

So the excitement has been drained, there’s nothing on the horizon, and our once passionate community is broken by greed and competitiveness. It turns out the problems don’t stop there, as we are realising the things we thought were important - and I’m looking at you AJAX - are in hindsight actually a huge step backward. In the race to move to cloud based services (a ‘good thing’), we’ve caused ourselves and our consumers immense pain trying to replicate the desktop experience with broken technology. I.e. all that effort and we have user interfaces that move us back over a decade.

The devil is in the details. The feeling that progress is somehow slowing is increased by simply ‘making stuff’. On paper, it’s easy to say “the Web will change the world”, but the more you try, the less clear the picture gets. Hope and belief wanes as realistic cynicsm sets in. This isn’t helped by us being at the point of the timeline where the big experiments of ‘05 and ‘06 are now having to prove themselves, and many are failing.

We’ve made identifying the ‘next big thing’ even harder by never truly defining what ‘this thing’ is. We call our time “Web 2.0″, but no two people can agree on exactly what that is. For me, it’s the transformation of the Web into a two-way communication medium (cloud services, AJAX, RSS, social networks, etc. etc. are all just technical manifestations of this). Without a collective understanding of where we are; we cannot attain the closure we need to move on.

The Loss of Purpose

The Web we have created is chaotic. That in itself is a beautiful thing, because it’s a mechanical manifestation of us. But it’s also hard. We either solve easy problems (reducing friendships to button clicks, turning desktop apps into distinctly shitter web apps, aggregating aggregators) or the hard problems (making sense of all this chaotic data, transforming how we interact with it). For the millions of startups on shoestring budgets, that’s not actually a choice.

Worse, there is no actual demand for the hard stuff. Joe Bloggs has been conditioned to using a single white text box to use t’internet. Anything more complex and the fear of the unknown outweighs the promise of any benefit (Twine, bless you, you tried - you really did).

Small budgets, loss of direction and a lack of demand is reducing us to incremental evolution. We are creating cheap, easy solutions that solve simplistic consumer problems; and somehow justifying them as the Second Coming. I’m looking at you Slide, with your $500 million valuation; and don’t even try & hide Facebook, we all know you think you’re worth more than Ford (that little company that actually makes some stuff).

Ironically, this lapse into incremental evolution is self fulfilling. We on the bleeding edge are effectively just making it sharper, and in the process further distancing ourselves from the mainstream (and I’ve been as guilty as the next bloke…). This creates an echo chamber, where only other occupants of the bleeding edge are talking/regurgitating; whipping up more enthusiasm for the aimless evolution. More disconcertingly from the POV of our well-being, this disconnect from reality creates an unpleasant sensation that what we do doesn’t actually matter to our friends and peers; and the truth is, it doesn’t.

How can we actually be accelerating the number of startups and products when apparently there is no real purpose? Money, or rather, the promise of money. The advances of Web 2.0 toward democratic hyper communication (another ‘good thing’ - kind of) mean that everyone knows about the success stories, and everyone thinks it’s easy, and so they too can get involved. We’re creating nothing of significant value and yet we’re trying to profit wildly from it (and if that sounds familiar, just think ’sub prime mortgage’).

Society
This is more personal, but I sense the continued movement of society towards out & out greed, individualism, rat racing, imminent economic implosion, etc. is a further niggle on people’s minds (especially, I suspect, geeks who are naturally sensitive to such things). In practical terms, this means that when the ‘work’ is grinding you down, there’s no ‘life’ to restore your happiness. I.e. we’re losing our support structure just at the time we need it.

The Hope
This is a brazenly harsh and negative post, a ‘fuck you’ to the zeitgeist. But it’s also an afront my optimistic nature. If it wasn’t, I’d quit. In truth, I firmly believe all the things the Web promises are doable, and hugely exciting. We just need to step back (or have the froth of Web 2.0 burn itself off - I don’t care which comes first) and re-focus on the bigger pictures.

Web 2.0 has done wondrous things. It’s transformed computing into a user-centric two-way social medium, and transformed business into something truly warm and responsive to the needs of customers.
But it’s still only doing this in any significant way for geek-culture (I particularly love Upcoming and Twitter as mechanisms to unite a previously ‘anti-social’ section of society), and only in a handful of cases for the consumer mainstream (Facebook, MySpace). Really we’ve only touched the tip of the iceberg. For one, someone needs to bring it to the enterprise - the huge volume of people who really need it. Enterprise suffers with a perception problem, nothing more - blow away the dust and the big monolithic systems; and you have something that will suddenly blossom and emit intense beautiful light

I make a great play of the cruelty of a loss of direction. Maybe we’re simply consolidating. We can’t know what era we’re in until it has passed. I am quietly hopeful that the valuable things will consolidate, the shit will evaporate, new foundations will be laid, and the free thinkers will be released to once again do their thing (including those bright young things currently trapped in formal education).

When we finally stop chasing vampires and spiralling into ever more geek-niche territories - i.e. when we pull our collective head out of our collective arse - we will see the big, important and blissfully meaningful problems we can tackle. The economy/recession/poverty, global and personal empathy, 3rd world health, education for all who want it, personal happiness/stress - the usual suspects We’ll have to change how we work, more collaboration, a return to intelligent/hard problem solving, and greater ties between the Web 2.0 enclaves and the mainstream; but that is all part of the great challenge. Maybe the Web isn’t so bad after all.

In his original post, Paul Robinson asked this be tagged ‘thevisionthing’ and passed onto 5 other people (of which I’m gate crashing!). Like Paul, I’m not optimistic this is a worthy of a meme (or even if that wouldn’t cause some kind of fundamental dichotomy), but the people I respect and whose opinion I’d love to hear on this are, James McCarthy, Stuart Gray, Peter Cooper and Thomas Vander Wal (and if it isn’t too conflicting with a Startup Clinic - or even if it is - Ryan Carson).

Update 28/03/2008
In my rant about taking the easy road - solving the easy consumer problems - I overlooked an alternate viewpoint of the world we’ve created. In giving up trying to create hard algorithms to crunch our problems, we’ve resorted to just using people (user-generated content - e.g. people doing all the filtering on Digg). In other words we’ve inadvertently transformed the first-world populance into some kind of giant Mechanical Turk. But then Wikipedia is a genuine generational phenomenon, so I’m not really sure this is actually a problem…

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 27th, 2008 at 6:47 pm and is filed under thevisionthing.