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

by: How To Be Content With Your Life in Tech (or Why Your Work With Web 2.0 Is Not A Waste of Time)

Mon, 07 Apr 2008 17:54:42 +0000

[…] A couple of weeks ago, Paul Robinson, the organizer of the excellent BarCamp Manchester, wrote “The Vision Thing“, a piece where he ponders on the banality of the Web-related industry. Andy Mitchell quickly followed up with “10 Reasons I Hate Where the Web is At” and encouraged me to post a response. This discussion somewhat echoes two posts I wrote a year ago, Why I’d Leave The Web Industry: It’s Hard to Excel and Why I’d Leave The Web Industry: It’s Ephemeral, but I want to recover the issues since my personal views have changed significantly since I wrote those posts. […]

by: Sanat Gersappa

Sat, 19 May 2007 17:10:15 +0000

Whether something lasts 5 years or 500, it is still ephemeral.

by: Antisocial

Mon, 02 Apr 2007 20:23:04 +0000

“we’d still be a retarded species operating at only a few steps above the rest of the animal kingdom.”

I have to semi-agree with a previous poster, but I’ll up it. 99.9999999999999998751 % of the UK is retarded. Socialism doesn’t work. Let your pitiful government know, and maybe the rest of the world will give a flying f— what your opinions are. You want to move into the 21st century? Start a new revolution

by: John

Sat, 31 Mar 2007 06:47:44 +0000

I have been feeling the same way. Like maybe I should write a novel, or start painting again. I am toying with the idea of starting a clothing company and leaving the web biz. You may want to check out “Idiocracy” its a film by Mike Judge about the future, and it makes some really good points about current trends, and the future of the world.

by: Nigel

Tue, 27 Mar 2007 21:21:28 +0000

Heh, nothing wrong with a good healthy ego, Peter. We’ve all got them, and they’re pretty useful. Maybe yours just hasn’t found it’s niche yet?

by: Reece

Tue, 27 Mar 2007 00:21:20 +0000

Peter, I have to say this is one of the finest pieces of writing I have ever read. I mean that, seriously; you have fleshed out the essence of what I think many of us have experienced over the last few years. I can only hope that this essay (I hope you don’t mind if I call it that) will stimulate heaps of discussion — something long overdue.

by: peter

Mon, 26 Mar 2007 14:52:28 +0000

Great comment, Nigel! You bring up a lot of good points, and I think the majority will agree with you.

I’m guessing this ant, however, has a bit of an ego

by: Ed

Mon, 26 Mar 2007 08:23:20 +0000

Maybe you should look into bioengineering.

“we’d still be a retarded species operating at only a few steps above the rest of the animal kingdom.”

Arguably, 75% of the UK can be described that way, or in shorter terms: chavs.

by: Nigel

Sat, 24 Mar 2007 13:47:03 +0000

Peter, I understand exactly what you’re driving at and it has a solid core of truth. We do live increasingly in a transient world, with a pathetic focus on fashion, celebrity and instant success. However I think that working away deep in the background of our civilisation are people who are, as you, totally and implacably opposed to this kind of attitude. And they are the ones who create the icons of each era in different fields. I remember talking to a scientist a few years ago at a blue-sky lab in Princeton who explained very patiently to me that he had been working for 12 years on a single nerve in a fruit fly to try and work out some detail of its flight. When I asked what he was going to do when he finished he looked at me as though I was crazy and said something like, ‘but there are other people who have spent more than 30 years on the subject’. I crawled away shortly after.

The point I’m making is that the Web is in its infancy. The core of this amazing network is not the application per se, but the fundamental shift in the way that we communicate with each other globally. What we are seeing is the first faltering steps of a mesh of humanity, which will bind us all together - knowledge, work, leisure, information, entertainment, politics - in one glorious whole. It’s our destiny, it’s what we are, a social species.

During the course of its development we will inevitably see trivial applications come and go, we’ll see memes, ridiculous focus, dead ends, sidetracked technologies etc etc. But the network will develop and improve anyway. It will become fast (oh so fast), fat (unbelievable levels of bandwidth) and utterly ubiquitous (literally plumbed in to our existence, maybe?). And as it develops into this amazing animal we will see works of permanence and genius develop out of the mists which will define their epoch. Please do not mistake these early commercially oriented stumblings for the real thing, any more than you would take the first days of the Ford Model T to predict the impact of mass transportation on the world.

The real beauty of this process, however, is that every brick in the wall is a vital contribution to the development of the ultimate result. eBay may seem trivial and destined to disappear up its fashionable fundament, but in reality it is a crucial element in attracting users to a network which desperately needs users in order to flourish. Not just eBay but every application, technology, concept, design rule, and server on the network is a part of the tapestry which will turn out to have played a vital role in the end product.

It’s impossible to identify or describe how the Internet and Web will turn out, we just have to wait and see. We may not even see the result in our lifetime. But I’m still incredibly excited to be contributing to the birth of this incredible incredible thing, no matter how small my efforts. I don’t profess to be doing anywhere as much as Kevin Rose (!), Sergey Brin or Gordon Moore, but it doesn’t really matter. If a billion ants contribute eagerly to their workload, the result can be breathtaking in scope and grandeur. I have no problem being an ant, because this ant hill rocks!