Grumpy Old People Want To Shut Down The Net
August 2nd, 2007
Whenever you’re down on technology and consider writing a grumpy anti-tech rant, the oldsters do us one better.
First, Sir Elton John thinks art would benefit if the Internet were shut down for say, five years. In his opinion, music was way better back in the seventies. There’s too much technology and people are spending less time collaborating and too much time blogging to create good music – like his – although the last time he had a hit I got into was Nikita. Gee, with the quality bar lowered why can’t Elton just record a great retro album and blow all the youngsters away? Or are the youngsters of today too busy with the Scissor Sisters?
Then we have grumpy geek extraordinaire, John Dvorak, link baiting with a prediction of an imminent Web 2.0 implosion. His logic is the one most often employed by cranky old folks – the young are ignorant of history so the bad crap that happened before will happen again so the old can say, “I told you so.” Never mind that no progress would mean infinite replays of Crocodile Rock on 8 tracks. Anyhow, after describing how the foundation of Web 1.0 of “e-commerce” was “crap” Dvorak goes on to blast all the buzzwords of Web 2.0. There is some irony in the fact that I read his article online in website form rather than on the pages of that print delivery method called a magazine.
But seriously, my biggest defense of Web 2.0 is that most of the mad money has been protected from the economy at large. One of the biggest reasons for the Web 1.0 implosion was the rush to IPO, and all sorts of mainstream morons were buying up any stock with .com, business model and profitability be damned. Everyone’s neighbor and kid brother was day trading and making the old people feel bad. This time around, we have some absentee business models and questionable profitability but it seems those that stand to lose their shirts are VC firms – not you, your kid brother, or your parents. They just have to worry about losing their home in the impeding housing bubble collapse.
Yes, I’m more worried about the housing market taking, which will directly affect the stock market. So… how many houses and what sorts of mortgages do John and Elton have?
Meanwhile, I’m enjoying the recent developments of this technology upswing. I have never felt more connected to a huge amount of information, entertainment, and opinion without leaving the comfort of home. I can now read the opinions of cranky old people online rather than wasting precious trees reading a newspaper.
And then when I do get off my duff and travel further afield, I realize I can pretty much do my job and post to this blog from anywhere with Internet access. The advent of the “digital nomad” is really quite exciting. Check out this Business 2.0 article that had my wheels turning of some potential future. Not exactly “Web 2.0″ but there is some serious productivity value being created via the Internet. The mythical paperless office is slowly eroding the office itself.
So I still look towards the future; bubble or no bubble be damned. When I’m old and cranky, I’ll rant about how the kids should shut down the Internet brain implants, there have been no decent songs since Crowded House’s Don’t Dream It’s Over, and how “back in the day” we had to physically go to an office where we risked getting carpal tunnel using a mouse instead of a touch screen and brain wave tracking. Grumble… grumble!
Additional Reading: The Constant Observer, Mathew Ingram, Working Nomad, Zoli’s Blog, Sixty Second View
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Posted In: Technology
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you hit it right on the nose about where the money’s coming from to support all these ventures…and that’s why, if the bubble bursts, it won’t have that mustard-gas effect. Plus, not everything Web 2.0′s all that bad. Some things are a tad hare-brained, but others will probably make it out of the mess and turn into decent little ventures. It’s now a time of sorting hype from reality–of what works and what doesn’t….as well as waiting for some geographic areas to get sufficient broadband.
It seems to me like Elton is suffering from the same denial as record label execs. There’s a retardedly huge assload of absolutely fantastic music out there, but major labels only seem to be interested in finding the latest Britney, 50 Cent and/or N’Sync. If it wasn’t BECAUSE OF the Internet, I’d be stuck listening to that N’Sync shite, or old Zep albums.
I also read a pretty funny article a while back by artist David Hockney talking about how the iPod has ruined people’s ability to see things and hence their appreciation of fine art. Yeah – a great artist, but also old – 70.
I have to admit I see Elton’s point in an abstract way … kind of like a recent city council woman (in Seattle) who decided to live on food stamps for a week. Certainly it would be an interesting experiment, but it seems about as likely as everyone living on food stamps for five years
Heh, judging from the way people freaked out over the recent internet outage at 365 main in San Francisco, if the Internet went down for five years for some experiment there would be a civil war.