Fling Media

Tuesday, July 08, 2008

What's Next?

For the last few months I’ve been thinking about my future in the web, considering “what’s next for me?” and I’ve been becoming increasingly dispassionate, depressed, despondent, lethargic, bored, gloomy, vexed, anxious, perplexed, concerned ...well lets just say I’m at a crossroads.

If the web was my religion, I feel as though I’ve lost my faith.

Is it me?

At first I thought it was me. It’s only been a few months since leaving the agency I started to venture out into the world on my own. I thought it might be a sense of loss, a mourning period for something that I brought into this world. But during a minor crisis a few months ago I truly realized that I left for all the right reasons. That many of the personal consequences of running the business disappeared almost immediately after I left.

Then I thought maybe my feelings of despondency had something to do with the new business, operating with less of a net, building something on my own. Well that is proving to be surprisingly easy. With so much experience under my belt I’ve found the process of starting anew quick and relatively painless. So far business has been really good with no real end in sight (thankfully!), but it leaves me feeling somewhat unsatisfied.

I want to work on what’s next

I want to work on what is next, to help people take those next steps into the unknown. I have no interest in taking anyones money for something I don’t truly believe in, and the problem is I’m finding less and less to believe in. I feel increasingly like I’ve seen and heard it all. I secretly want someone to come along and surprise me with that spark of imagination, that moment of brilliance, to inspire me. But it seems like people are coming to me for that inspiration, and I don’t have any answers.

As I considered it more, I started to see systemic flaws with the web of today, some deep seeded root in the industry that could be the cause for my malaise. Everywhere I look I can’t help but to prognosticate a bleak and bland future. I find it difficult to get excited about “me-too’s” like the next Twitter or Facebook. It’s not like these ideas aren’t great and that they couldn’t stand some healthy competition, but aren’t they just solutions looking for problems? Are they really that important outside a small but vocal cadre of weblebrities that influence others? Will these seriously be the ivory pillars of the Information Age?

Maybe so, only time will tell. I guess I feel like there is so much more that we as a community can do. I feel like something fantastic has yet to happen, something revolutionary and I want to be a part of it. I want that to be my next move, the thing that I can dive into, fully invest myself, something I can justify to my wife and child by telling them “I have to do this. I have to be a part of it.”

I know what you are probably thinking, “What about __.com? What about Web 2.0? What about mobile?” Yes, of course, we’ve seen enormous amounts of creativity and innovation in the space after the long dry spell that was the vacuum created by the burst of the dot-com bubble.

We saw the birth of the Web 2.0 movement in 2004, but four years later has it really evolved? How many truly great Web 2.0 sites have emerged since 2005? Three? Four? Mobile is even worse. Nearly five years after the mobile bubble and we are still plagued with the same problems we had all along. We’ve had glimmers of hope, but how many game changing, life altering, career defining moments have we had in the web or in mobile over the past five years?

Is Web 2.0 like Disco?

I sometimes wonder if the web of today is like disco or grunge music: it had a few great songs, some defining moments, produced many one-hit wonders, but in the end it was a vacant trend, filled with so much hype and so heavily capitalized that it fizzled out before anything really profound could begin.

Maybe music is a good example, as I feel that technology is not unlike art. It has distinct movements or periods, where a variety of talented people influenced by a shared set of principles defined by the needs and attitudes of the time, invent something new, ultimately creating what will become the defining style of the period, an artifact of the collective consciousness of our species.

Though despite their similarities, technology has two major defining differences from art. Movements happen a lot faster—making it harder to notice its impact and ultimate outcomes. And it’s ultimately driven by money—namely the pursuit of making lots of it. Don’t get me wrong, money is great, I’d like to have lots of it, but the quest of financial gain has a tendency to kill off the passion to create, to innovate, it minimizes the cleansing and necessary creative destruction to identify what’s next.

Selling Out the Web

Whoever said money is the root of all evil, could have been talking about the web. I’ve seen it time and time again from small garage companies to the big public behemoths—the lust for profits is the cancer of inspired creation. It motivates and encourages bad long term choices for the sake of short term gains. And the few that have the keen insight to notice these mistakes are rarely rewarded for pointing them out.

Umair Haque, Director of the Harvard Havas Media Lab, recently wrote about the need for an 21st Century Industrial Revolution:

Today’s investors, boardrooms and entrepreneurs are looking for value in all the wrong places. Facebook’s game of musical chairs won’t solve big economic problems – and neither will making token investments in greentech.

Where is the next industrial revolution crying out for revolutionaries? Simple: in industries dominated by clear, durable, structural barriers to efficiency and productivity.

Is “Web 2.0” Dead?

I am beginning to believe the Web 2.0 movement is dead. Most disturbingly I think it died a while ago. Year after year we keep poking the corpse with a stick hoping more money will fall out of its pockets. Web 2.0 by its very name is an iteration of what came before it, a necessary step in the evolution of an earlier period or movement. But I believe the time has come for the next movement, to figure out what truly is next.

And I’m not talking about “Web 3.0” or anything quite so trite, I believe Umair Haque is correct, we need a new industrial revolution that will define the stepping stones for the next hundred years. We need to take a deep examination of the impact the Information Age will have on real people for generations to come.

Like I said before I don’t have any answers, but I’m intent of trying to find them. I believe the minute we give up the search is the instant when our profession, our craft, our art, all of our potential—becomes just a paycheck.

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