Doug Rushkoff, Fred Wilson and the Seventies of the Web
In my last post, I pointed to two interpretations on the state of the web here in 2008. Both were pretty good takes on things in their own way, yet each was wildly different in its assessment. Ever since, I’ve been kicking these around in the back of my mind. And by looking through them both, together, I’ve had a breakthrough in my thinking on where the web is now and where it’s going. Like those stereoscopic 3-D glasses with one lens red and the other blue, considering the two angles of Doug Rushkoff and Fred Wilson at once has given me a three dimensional view of the topic. The result has been a sense of the history of the web, as we are now experiencing it and moving through it.
Rushkoff, talking about his disappointment with the web today, said, “In the 90’s, I thought the experience of going online for the first time would change a person’s consciousness as much as if they had dropped acid in the 60’s.” Speaking of the web now, he says, “”Sadly, cyberspace has become just another place to do business.” Yet Fred Wilson interprets this same modern web optimistically like so: “The web is becoming more open, more mobile, more social, more playful, more intelligent, and more monetizable every day. Happy new year everyone.”
What’s going on here?
Well for one, Doug is a cultural critic and Fred is a VC. But I think there’s more to it than that.
I think Doug is right about the web in the 90’s. It was the equivalent of acid in the 60’s. It changed people. People turned on to it and got swept away by it. Everyone was suddenly talking about 24.4 modems with their friends and having email conversations with people they had never met before, half a world away. It was intense, an overnight paradigm shift. Everyone I know who got into the web got into it because they wanted to be a part of that shift. I got into it for that reason too.
And so if we go with Doug’s interpretation of the nineties as the 60’s of the web, what then, by natural extension, are we living through now?
That’s right - we’re smack dab in the middle of the seventies of the web.
As Fred points out in his post, today there is more innovation on the web than ever. More people are working on it, taking it in more directions than ever, and there are more opportunities for making money in it than ever before. But what’s missing from it is any sense of adventure, of boundaries being pushed, of history being written. The web is all grown up and has taken over, in the same way that rock and drug culture took over as people moved from the sixties into the seventies. No longer controversial, no longer bent on changing the world, it is now the dominant paradigm. Here to stay, mainstream, and content to operate within established conventions.
In rock and roll speak, we have moved from the clubs to the stadiums. The era of Arena Rock is now upon us on the web: huge bands, improving on the ideas of the smaller bands that came before. But not much in the way of radical new thinking.
In this 70’s of the web, Facebook is Peter Frampton: hugely popular, speaking to and understood by everyone in the requisite age group, reinforcing rather than challenging shared values, bland and predictable by comparison with what came before. (The widget, or the Facebook app, is then perhaps the modern equivalent of the gratuitous guitar solo of the seventies: the central pillar that gives order to the whole system: no song - or website - can be without it).
Users of Facebook are by extension the Me Generation of the Internet: not into it because it’s mind-expanding (it isn’t, anymore), they simply want to use it to hang out with their friends and have a good time. They’re the younger brothers and sisters of the people who created the web, and they see it differently than their older siblings, who thought they would change the world. Sure, they may do the same things on the web that their older brothers and sisters did. But whatever they do, they do without greater expectations.
We live in a moment right now where everyone is more or less on the same page in terms of thinking about what the web is and where it’s going. We all hold the same assumptions, and nobody is challenging those assumptions. Like rock in the seventies.
Doug Rushkoff likes radical new thinking. He looks out on the seventies of the web and thinks “Who are all of these kids using Facebook and Twitter? Don’t they realize that the real web, the web that mattered, was the WELL in 1996?”
Fred is a business man and an enthusiast. He is the Bill Graham of the web. He looks out on the seventies of the web and thinks “Woo-oooh! We’ve arrived. This kicks ASS!” He can take or leave all of the paradigm shift stuff. He just wants to see bands, lots of them, going big.
Fred is more suited to life in the seventies than Doug.
As for me, I’m a bit like Doug and a bit like Fred. I can appreciate arena rock and all, but I really like the radical leaps in thought. Which is why I take heart from realizing where we are right now in the history of the web. Because I know that by the time Peter Frampton was up on stage with his talk box, Joe Strummer, Joey Ramone, David Byrne and others were all kicking around in the streets somewhere getting ready to explode on the scene and force another paradigm shift on the world.
So I give us another two years, max, before the whole idea of the web gets turned upside down and the world goes crazy with new ideas.
