Why I’d Leave the Web Industry: It’s ephemeral

Nigel Powell e-mailed me about my first “Why I’d Leave the Web Industry” post:

I’m going to disagree with your current post about leaving the web biz. I don’t think that excelling at something automatically means that it has to be ‘massively’ successful. It just has to have a loyal and passionate community who love what you do. This is what the record industry is having to come to terms with, as we move towards the end of the megastar era. And let’s not forget that most ‘tech superstars’ started out from a garage somewhere with nothing more than a cool idea and a stack of leftover pizzas. Or is that cliche?

I see the web business following the shareware/freeware model rather than the games model. There’s a huge shareware market out there which is thriving, nevermind Microsoft and the rest. Cool, agile web dev will never go away, and every now and then an awesome product will pop up out of the soup from around the world. Which is pretty neat.

I agree that coolness will never go away. There will always be something great to look at, things to enjoy, and people to admire. I think my concerns go deeper than that.

In the last couple of days I think I’ve worked out what my real fear is. I think it’s all about breaking free of a phase that we’re stuck in that I’ll call culture hunting. This goes deeper than the Web industry, although the Web industry is one industry that particularly engages in it.

We’ve become chickens. Peck, peck, peck..

15,000 years ago agriculture didn’t exist and people spent a lot of their time merely pecking around and hunting for things to eat. A lot of animals still live the same way. Feeding, sleeping, and breeding. That’s life. Approximately 10,000 years ago, though, people in various parts of the world developed agriculture and found that by pooling resources, farming, and having a group of the population focus on that, more could be achieved by people freed up from continuous hunting. Without this development the civilizations of the Sumerians, Babylonians, Greeks and Romans wouldn’t have come into being, and we’d still be a retarded species operating at only a few steps above the rest of the animal kingdom. Once agriculture was ‘cracked’ a lot of development took place and we got a lot of scientific, artistic, and philosophical progress over the following 10,000 years.

I’m convinced that in the 20th and 21st centuries we’ve reached another plateau, much like the humans in 15,000 BC, and I’m calling it culture hunting. Powerful developments in science, art, and philosophy are now watered down by the world’s endless clamor for ephemeral culture to digest, regurgitate, and forget. Indeed, this is a major part of the Web industry. Since the mid 90s we’ve seen a lot of good ideas come and go, only to crop up again years later. There’s little permanence, little legacy, and almost nothing that can stand strong for the future. Compare this to, say, Vincent Van Gogh or Picasso’s paintings.. they’re still valuable decades (or centuries) later and they still inspire people and have an effect. Modern culture, however, is often ephemeral and focuses on satisfying people now and then just disappears.

Who, and what, will we remember?

There are tens of thousands of people from the past we still recognize and respect for their contributions to the world. But are the people of 2200 going to think the same of, say, Kevin Rose, Caterina Fake, or Guido van Rossum? It’s possible, but not likely. Yet even the works of reasonably unimportant people like Dale Carnegie are remembered by us today. Why? Because timeless work is.. well.. timeless. Web work is not timeless. Books, paintings, philosophical ideas, and religions can all become obsolete in one way or another, but more often than not they can be timeless. Bits and bytes floating around on a dynamic and ephemeral network, such as the Internet, are not timeless, and 99% of Web work barely matters next year, let alone in a hundred years. John Dowland’s music still has a relevant 500 years on. Will Digg have a relevance in 2506? That’s not a rhetorical question.

That’s why my ego suddenly doesn’t like this industry very much. Having a kid would have more effect on the future of the world than building some web app. That’s how it is, and if you’re the sort of person who doesn’t like the endless roundabout of cultural crap going on right now, there are probably better ways to contribute to the future of the world than being in the Web industry. Of course, this is not a good / bad argument.. a lot of people love being in this industry and aren’t too concerned if their work all gets wiped out in a year’s time. Those people should continue to love it and enjoy their work. Anyone who has children gets to propagate their genes for thousands of years into the future, so why worry about work? My answer, and my opinion, is that working to produce yet more ephemeral culture (what I tend to call crap) doesn’t help us as a species, and if we focused more on advance the species, the world will be a lot better in future.

Someone I think who will be remembered fondly in 100 years is Edward Tufte. He’s not particularly famous, but he’s incredibly well respected in his field, and his work is very timeless. The principles he raises are rarely entirely new, but the way he produces his work ensures the work he produces will certainly outlive him. He’s a Vincent Van Gogh, Picasso, or Dale Carnegie of our age, and his works will live on because they’re finely crafted and aren’t limited in scope to our current time. Tufte’s sense of craftsmanship and production of timeless materials is not unique to non-technical fields. Donald Knuth is one of the world’s most famous computer scientists, and his name and work will also live on for quite some time beyond his death. Both of these people’s ideas will inspire people in the future, and continue to contribute to their respective fields for years.

There’s a certain something that people Edward Tufte and Donald Knuth do that ensures the timelessness of their ideas. They both think of the big picture, they both communicate well, and they both don’t focus on immediate gains. They’re craftsmen who have a knack for getting their ideas and knowledge recorded in such an artful way that their work has a relevance beyond the era of when it was published. They’re both artists with bold ideas, and well-recorded bold ideas are usually timeless. (Added: They’re also different. The power of difference is hard to quantify, but consider how revolutionary the Macintosh seemed in 1984 compared to all the copy-cat machines of the time. The 1984 Macintosh lives on as an icon. The other brands were ephemeral. This a clear demonstration of how artistry, bold ideas, and originality create timeless works.)

There’s nothing wrong with producing things that are ephemeral, but it doesn’t satisfy everyone, and a lot of people seem to have an unrealized yearning for creating things that have an element of permanence. I’ve realized I’m on that list and this industry alone doesn’t provide those opportunities (although it can in combination with others, which is the subject of my next post).

This entry was posted on Saturday, March 24th, 2007 at 2:49 am and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.