Time for a New Promise
A couple of weeks ago, my wife and I were making some of those great Betty Crocker brownies. You know the ones -- mystery powder plus two eggs and some water and you've got instant batter. Family tradition is to give the bowl a good lick because, well, it is the best part. We put the brownies in the oven and waited. And waited. And waited some more, until we realized that we hadn't remembered to set the timer. The well-overcooked dessert smelled fine, but the surface formed a skin that was brittle and paper-thin. This just hid the dense, wish-it-were-brownie underneath. What had been so soft, sweet and blissful had now turned into some sort of bitter mess.
What an analogy.
I've been in the "Internet industry" since 1995 -- November, 1995 to be exact. I can still remember clearly the conversation with my soon-to-be-business partner Rob where we were talking about the publishing revolution that was about to unfold. Instant access to information, the ability to react to vast numbers of people almost instantly -- all of this seemed too good to be true. We sat there in some way-away Kinko's making color printouts of our current publishing paradigm, a monthly alternative paper. And we clung to the hope that, if we really figured this all out, we'd have as much publishing power as the big guys.
So we put together a plan. The second beta release of Netscape 2.0 was just out and we did everything we could to understand every little nuance, and each and every tag. How do we get to be better, cooler, more experiential? we asked ourselves. How do we bring the promise of the Internet to life?
And that's where it started. Like the American Dream, the original promise of the Internet was too good to pass up. The money didn't hurt, either. We were going to revolutionize our entire generation. I spent three years in my start-up web design shop (née online publishing venture, Citi:Zen), then moved into freelancing, contracting, in-house positions in online product development and a cool stint in one of the largest advertising agencies in the country. It's almost a blur. But that original promise of richer communication, the one that drove me to late nights of studying feverishly over piss-poor printouts of online documents trying to figure out how the new thing does its new thing -- well, it's been growing a little stale over the last two years or so. It's now gotten to the point where I can't even remember why I do what I do, except that now I know all this nonsense about tags, browsers, user experiences, databases, connectivity and such. And if the bubble bursts further, what good will that knowledge do me? Like my wife reminds me, if I were stranded on a desert island none of this would help me at all.
Sad to say, but that original promise has run dry. What I need now, and maybe what we all need, is a new motivation to keep going. We need some inkling of how our little revolution is supposed to happen when all we seem to have is our day-after-day, week-after-week keyboard jockeying. I can tell you that getting there from here won't have a damn thing to do with standards-compliance, usability testing, internationalization or the near-constant onslaught of technology. That's just the noise of the industry, not its purpose.
Maybe we need to take a couple of small steps back to make some progress again. Right now we're inundated with sales pitches, investor presentations and other business-school crap that talks about efficiencies and "ROI." And I get that. But I don't care about that and I doubt you really do either. Besides, it's nothing more than a justification for the over-spending of the last few years. What we need to get back is the passion for that fundamental shift in communication. I just can't get passionate about doing something faster or with fewer resources than those before me. What gets me up in the morning is the hope of making a difference with people.
Frankly, I just need something bigger to draw strength from. In the end, I think I need a new promise.
And I most certainly need new brownies.
