Back to Our Roots
I could be wrong. It’s my impression, though, based on attendance at Streaming Media events and my correspondence with members of the streamingmedia.com audience, that most of the people in this industry are about the same age as me, or a little younger: late 20s, early 30s; people who graduated college in the early 1990s, and who were tarred at that time with the "Generation X" brush. Remember that crap? We were told that our generation was a bunch of listless, unambitious, counterculture-overdosed Starbucks-swilling poetry-jamming neurotics who would never amount to more than a hill of Sumatra beans. Slackers. Losers, baby. So why don’t you kill us?
Then, of course, the Web investment bubble came along, and the mass media immediately started telling us that we were the generation of capitalism on overdrive, a bunch of overambitious business and technical geniuses.
No broad generalization of an entire generation of people can possibly be true — which is particularly obvious when two such contradictory images of the same group of people are broadcast for public consumption, within such a short period of time.
The fact remains, though, that many of us in this industry rose to our current positions from very idealistic, or at least monetarily unambitious, beginnings: I, for example, was a college activist who got swept into streaming on the back of an activist project, freespeech.org. Many people I know in this industry, who have done very well, were attracted to it because they liked to draw, or write, or paint, or make music, or go to rave parties, or direct independent films: not the typical profile for a group of successful businesspeople. Very many of us, in fact, who have been successful in monetary terms in this industry (and I’m not nearly as successful in those terms as many of you) never actually planned to be doing as well as we have been over the past few years.
Yes, the business majors jumped onto the bandwagon at some point, and played games with our minds. But there’s always been a difference between people who were "in it for the money" and people who were "in it for the Web." The perfect example of this is Jason McCabe-Calcanis’ farewell editorial in "The Silicon Alley Reporter," promising to his readership to abandon coverage of the Web itself and to start covering, instead, venture capitalism. That’s an example of somebody who was in it (and proudly, and maybe even rightly) for the money. Jason, and all the other business majors (I don’t know if Jason was a business major in fact, but he certainly is in spirit) are leaving us in droves.
The rest of us are stuck with the Web that we love. I can’t blame all of the recent excesses on the business majors, as much as I’d like to. We’ve all been part of the problem. But now that the crash is over — and those of us who love the Web because it’s the Web, not because it’s money, are sitting here still — there’s been a second crash (at least for me there has been): a crash in the ego stock market, if you will. Nobody is as cocky as he or she used to be (well, okay, the business majors are still cocky, but they’re not hanging around with us anymore). Maybe we’re not the brilliant geniuses we thought we were. Maybe they were right about us the first time. Maybe we really are a generation of losers.
I don’t think so, though.
Our industry isn’t what it was last year, that’s certain. It’s still what it was six years ago, though, when we started it: the best and last chance that our civilization has to reinvent communications, to remove barriers to entry for mass broadcasting, and to give everybody an opportunity to participate on equal footing with ABC, CBS, CNN and Viacom in the eternal theater of ideas. If that’s why you’re in this industry, you should stay here, you should try harder, you should learn more, and you should succeed.