this is violence

In Mark Frauenfelder’s keynote this year at WebVisions he spoke about the rise of “modern making,” the amateur inventors working out of their homes and building amazing things with limited budgets and access only to consumer technology. Early in the talk, he mentioned this statistic: in 1900 40% of Americans lived on farms, today the number is around 2%. He contrasted this with some clippings from turn of the century magazines giving instructions on how people could fix various pieces of equipment themselves around their homes or farms. Many of these assumed fairly advanced knowledge of anything from knots to mechanics and later, basic electronics. There was an expectation at the time, he went on to say, that people not only had this knowledge, but could and would apply it to fixing what they had rather than buy a replacement. It was a return to this desire to not just fix what we had, but in turn make those things truly ours that was driving the rise of what he calls “the modern maker”.

While Mark was focused mostly on the creation of physical objects, his talk got me thinking about the parallels and differences between turn of the 20th century America, and turn of the 21st century web; how both started and how both moved and are moving forward. Ignoring for now the fact that many of the social underpinnings of the web we use today actually existed in a sort of proto-web state well in advance of the invention of the worldwide web, it’s interesting to me to look at how the web really got going vs. the social dynamic of America in the first part of the 20th century. While there was a relatively steady trend in America from the individual creating and maintaining their own tools and equipment to that of a consumer culture, the trend on the web seems to be, if not reversed, at least less linear.

While the web might have initially been the land of university scientists, it took less than 6 years before it had begun to become commercialized and within a decade of it first being put down on paper, the web was in full commercial boom mode. What’s so strange to me is that simultaneous to this commercialization, there was an entire population of people working on creating these commercial projects as though they we’re early 20th century farmers: grappling with new and rapidly changing technology, finding their own way, making their own tools, and struggling to maintain the very systems they were creating. While turn of the 20th century America was a path from individuals creating and developing tools and systems followed by commercialization, turn of the 21st century web was just the opposite: businesses setting up shop in this new wilderness and then individuals trying to create and develop tools and systems to support those businesses. Even more strange is that over the last ten years rather than settling into a more linear path, things have actually become even more prone to upheaval with individuals creating ever more disruptive technology and the commercial system more and more eager to adopt each successive iteration. A weird, and oft maligned aspect to this cycle though is failure of these tools and systems to integrate cleanly into the commercial structure as we know it. The common question is: “This is great, now how do we monetize it?”

But maybe it’s not the web that’s so weird so much as us and how we approach it. There has been a concerted, if not verbalized effort to view the web through the same lens we’ve viewed other technology through: as building block on a single timeline of advancement. The web though seems to defy this, existing not just on multiple timelines, but actually in multiple dimensions at once. In one timeline, it’s analogous to 1900 America, where most people are still focused on sustaining themselves: building, experimenting, failing and discovering with no goals other than their own. In another timeline it’s more like 2009 America and the web is a digital extension of the current economy, where things move from garage to store shelf in a straight line, more quickly than ever. The real confusion though comes in that this first timeline, the DIY timeline isn’t operating in the same reality as either the 1900 or the 2009 timeline. It’s in its own dimension. One where many of the fundamental building blocks that lead the shift from DIY to consumer culture in the physical world don’t exist, at least not in the way business or society has come know them:

• In this alternate 1900, there are infinite “plots of land”, for infinite “farms”
• Every one of these farms is capable of expanding their production hundreds or thousands of times over for nearly no increase in cost
• Each farm can distribute it’s product to every person in the world instantly, for free

In a nutshell – all the things that have made our economy work, scarcity and manufacturing and distribution efficiency, don’t exist in this alternate dimension. The problems of finding a sound monetization system and thus a value for things like Facebook and Twitter show the problems of this multi-dimensionality pretty clearly. In both cases the desire to make money off these using the methods we know has been frustratingly stymied by the realities of the web. It’s not that the value of each isn’t acknowledged, Facebook has been valued at 10 billion dollars recently, it’s that this value has yet to be matched by any sort of commensurate revenue. We all seem to know they’re worth something, and clearly we all feel they’re worth a lot of something, but the gap from a virtual value to a physical dollar still seems impossible to bridge.

In the end, people will find ways to create that bridge, but it will be done on its own terms and it won’t look like the models we have in the physical world. It probably won’t be advertising, that was a model applied because we understood it, not because it was right for the web. We’re already seeing the failings of this structural mismatch, and it will only get worse. What it probably will be is a fairly loosely coupled system where the relationship between value and revenue is flexible and earned in more abstract ways based more around association with projects deemed ‘valuable’. It almost certainly will be something developed from the bottom up, starting with the people who have the knowledge and skill to fix something rather than tossing it, and the desire to make it their own. Whatever it looks like though, the first step is going to be acknowledging the fundamentally different timeline and reality of the web from the timeline we’ve built our knowledge on up until now, and, just as important, the unique and largely dysfunctional history that got us here.