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.

What’s got me sort of fascinated with these is the notion that they really represent the democratization of space, and what that means for all of us. In the last Small Things post, I linked out to Undercurrents’ great little post on how the internet makes everyone small. Thinking about these tiny satellites though, it makes me wonder: is it that the internet makes big brands small, or that technology makes us all increasingly the same size? If a university can launch essentially a throwaway satellite, can Nike? Can Botswana? Al-Qaeda? Me? In the way that we can all have a piece of the web, will we someday soon all have a space program of our very own? If we’re all flying around observing and transmitting away, what does that mean for the relationship between large, rich countries and small, poor ones; between countries and corporations; individuals and the rest of the world?

At the beginning of The World is Flat, Thomas Friedman says “…I was also excited personally, because what the flattening of the world means is that we are now connecting all knowledge centers on the planet together into a single global network, which – if politics and terrorism do not get in the way – could usher in an amazing era of prosperity, innovation and collaboration, by companies, communities, and individuals.” Though the current state of technology and the still non-trivial (though rapidly dropping) cost of launch means that wealthy governments will maintain their position in space for years, I’m not sure how many years. And with technology continuing to become more accessible while becoming more powerful, it makes me wonder how long governments or terrorists will be relevant to the equation.

Ultimately, what I love about these tiny satellites, more than their practical application right now, is their symbolic importance. If what the web provides is cheap, accessible, standardized, distributable software; then the cubesat, to me, symbolizes the height of cheap, accessible, standardized hardware integration to this software. It is, to me, the ultimate manifestation of our desire to go forward and our unwillingness to wait for permission.

Im nothing if not macabre, so this naturally lead me to thinking about advertising. Specifically, advertising and brands online

I wouldn’t be the first to talk about the failure of advertising on the web, or the minimizing effect the web has on large brands, but I think the most critical thing that the marketing industry is missing is that the miniaturization of technology and the hyper connectedness this enables is not the ultimate advertising tool we’ve been lead to believe it is, it’s actually the most destructive concept in the history of our industry. We work in an environment in which any day, and increasingly day-by-day, without warning, without the support of a major brand, any individual is capable of introducing a piece of technology that completely disrupts the existing landscape.

With a system unencumbered by the notion of scarcity, or locality; and where an individual can create and distribute an idea or a digital product with the exact same effectiveness that an major multi-national corporation can, what use is a big brand? And if big brands are of no use, what use is a big ad agency? While we’re frantically trying to understand how digital integrates into our latest campaign, or what metrics to track for our banners, or what our Facebook strategy is, the same people we’re trying to sell to are making their own entertainment, sharing their own information and making their own products and services without us. Agencies are all scrambling, looking for better advertising, and we’re missing the fact that people don’t want better advertising, they want better experiences and what we’re all witnessing is that they don’t have to wait for us, or our brands, to give it to them, they’re taking it themselves.

Unfortunately, for large brands and the agencies that support them I think the biggest problem is structural: Agencies are designed, both physically and culturally, to codify methodologies within static systems. Historically, this has been their strength. Television, radio, and print all work this way. There is a definition to the medium and it’s relationship to the viewer, a fundamental and fixed structure. We then take this system and wrap it two or three times a year with a bow we call the “campaign.” But none of this exists online, there is no singular “web”, there is no context to how people get and experience information, there are only contexts, and they’re growing and changing every day. Every new site, every new product, every new project is disruptive and there is no possible way to know in advance the level to which any of them will break down the entire system we’ve designed our system around.

The key to survival is going to be rethinking our relationship to both our clients and their customers. We will have to acknowledge that we’re not dealing with a broadcast medium and that the notion of a campaign is anathema to how people interact with the web. Rather than slogans and one-liners, we need to be designing products, digital products, but products none the less. We will design these and release them and people will use them in ways we didn’t imagine and that we’ll have to adapt to. The idea that we launch a project and it’s finished is also over. We’ll become comfortable with idea the our projects will grow and change and adapt not based on our plans but based on what our clients customers demand of them. Most important though is the we need to abandon the notion that we know how all this is done. The agencies that survive will be ones that learn to love change, that understand that every project is an entity all it’s own and that it’s not technique or new technology that will save us, but a fundamental understanding of the medium and the human element that defines it.