It Was Ours in the First Place. Now We've Got it Back. Duh.
This article (thanks to SVN for the link) poses some interesting points about the state of the internet today. He seems to think that ‘the net’ is dead, and everyone finds it boring and frustrating. I’ve got some things to say about that.
The whole problem is that the author assumes that everyone reading his article perceives ‘the net’ to be comprised solely of those sites who had staggering IPOs last year despite a complete lack of revenue. Anyone who didn’t see this year’s fall coming must have been a complete idiot. My definition of the net is this: sites like ours, and any other site devoted entirely to the distribution of knowledge, opinion, and joy. We had it first; the hackers, the geeks, the artists. It was ours. We built it (not me personally, I was like 15 when this all started). It would only make sense that when corporations and people with big ideas of big money came along seeking only to fatten their wallets instead of making the world a better place, that their brief world would fall. Now it’s back in our hands. And we now know what to do with it.
His first annoying comment is: ‘stocks don’t lie.’ My response? Oh, yes they very well do. A company’s stock price usually has very little to do with how the company is actually performing, and more to do with how the media perceives them to be performing (case in point: the recent drop in Apple’s stock price).
And this: ‘I keep waiting for my brain to come up with answers about how to beat the conundrum of how something like this column, with its built-in ephemeral nature, could get a much better return in print, where it might already be late, than on the Web, for which it’s perfect.
And here’s what I come up with: Nothing. It just makes no sense. None at all. But it’s the unbreakable reality that no one has been able to solve. It has only gotten worse, not better, as the years go by.’
He’s wrong only because he never got it in the first place. None of them ever did. And now they can’t figure it out. And I just can’t stop laughing. :>