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A Monk's Descent Into Dotcom Hell: The Content Wars Are Over. Banality Won. May, 2000 "Content is king"--the three most disingenuous words in net vernacular. Content isn't king. If by "content" you mean thoughtfully conceived writing, image and performance, that's more than sophomoric pranks, potty humor, or bite-sized chunks of dull consumerist drivel. Technology is king. Technology is the meat at the dotcom table; content is a condiment. This is the painful realization I discovered upon entering the dotcom "space." Though I'd been producing net content since 1993, I didn't dive in until1998 when I left New York University's Masters program in Cultural Criticism to spin the dotcom roulette wheel. As I read of average guys getting unseemly amounts of capital to pursue their bland geek visions, I got caught up in one of the great myths of this era of gluttonous hyperventilation: "the Internet offers an historic opportunity for wealth generation that will never be seen again in our lifetime!" 'Bigger than the Industrial Revolution." The BIGGEST revolution of all time!! Those were actual words used by real people in real conversations. It was either the Gold Rush on steroids or the biggest pyramid scheme in memory. Being a son of the Nebraska plains, I was skeptical. I'd seen the hype before--emu ranching, the jojoba craze, multilevel marketing, Kansas State football. I stood above the fray, gazed down with Buddha-like detachment, and declared all "samsara." Anger, ignorance and desire? All-pervasive in this "new economy." I knew better. "More money has always been made from selling shovels than from using them," I lectured. But no one was interested in instructive 1850's metaphors. And I wasn't living on the free and open road anymore either. I was in Manhattan, in the seething heart of the biggest flack machine on planet earth. And after awhile, I could no longer withstand the power of that daily hype. My measured, innate Nebraska skepticism, which found perfect expression in the steady investment strategies of Warren Buffett, suddenly gave way to messianic fanaticism. "The Wizard of Omaha is wrong. The perennial assumptions around profit, value, and slow steady growth have been rendered obsolete." This new religion had turned my world upside down. Jealousy, panic, and desire engulfed my very soul. "What the hell am I doing here? What the HELL am I doing here?" I would repeat the line over and over like an accusatory mantra. There was a boiling anxiety in my heart--"New York is not where it's at. New York is NOT where's it's at." For every other revolution, New York had ALWAYS been where it was at. But the qualities needed for this revolution New York corporate culture lacked: a courageous freedom to experiment, a phoenix-like ability to die and be immediately reborn, and an unflagging desire to tinker with technology for its own sake, with no ulterior motive than to "get the thing to work." Rather than innovators in the dotcom "space," New Yorkers struck me as followers, like bridge and tunnel kids waiting outside a trendy Manhattan nightclub, praying to get in. The New York velvet rope culture had long been rendered archaic by the democratizing spirit of the web, yet corporate New York was still frantically searching for ways to put those velvet ropes back up, to preserve their illusion of status even as the seeds of digital insecurity gnawed at their very foundations. But trying to erect ropes in cyberspace was intrinsically absurd--there were so many alternative entrances, so many other parties only a click away. In my mind, "New Yorkers didn't get it." Sure there was a "Silicon Alley," a cadre of digital serfs, but in my conversations with ad agencies, writers, the young and Java Scripted, the average New Yorker seemed technophobic, into the net to maximize assets, "repurpose content," because of fear. There was not a love for the Internet qua Internet, no passion for digital innovation for its own sake. Corporate New York was hopping on the e-bandwagon because they didn't want to be left behind, because they needed "a net strategy," not because they were giddy with the revolution's liberating potential. That sort of euphoria and free-form experimentation was happening 3,500 miles away. My panic crossed over into hysteria: "I must get out of New York NOW!" If there was a 12 Steps of Failed Dotcoms Anonymous, it would warn against pulling a "geographic"--moving somewhere in the hopes that your capital-raising dreams will be fulfilled. I knew that was true, but every day I read stories of ridiculous public offerings from companies who invariably were based in one of those mid-size interchangeable towns in Silicon Valley--Redwood City, Foster City, Santa Clara, San Mateo. Places no one with any sense of cultural adventure would ever choose to live, especially with the far superior metropolis of San Francisco so nearby. In my elitist view, these Silicon Valley cities served one function: factory farms for well-funded high-tech start-ups. Now infected by the new religion, my mercenary, if not cultural, hankering for Silicon Valley knew no bounds. I would read of fantastic networking parties, capital flowing like Pellegrino, dozens of friendes crowded into small cubicle farms with bright hopes of striking it rich. I particularly remember a quote from one Sand Hill Road VC: "You'd have to be an idiot not to get funded in this environment." Problem was: I couldn't afford Silicon Valley, couldn't afford San Francisco either. So I moved to Los Angeles, home of the nascent "broadband revolution," with hopes of making frequent trips up to bland geek burgs like Burlingame, Sunnyvale, Milbrae, Milpitas, and San Jose. I engineered an abrupt and radical paradigm shift. Like millions of sorority girls, fraternity guys, and other gullible saps, I was frantically sending out business plans (the dotcom world's answer to a Hollywood screenplay), networking, schmoozing, digesting the hype, feeding the desire, going with the herd. I had taken on a third business partner, a roommate from Northwestern University. We made some headway--a content deal with Playboy, others in the works. We headed to Europe to "Monk" the continent, to establish new beachheads, fueled by the promise of more content deals, more angels, then venture capital and the eventual IPO (the dotcom equivalent of Valhalla). Over in Europe I morphed into Mr. Net Zealot, like Wired founder Louis Rossetto, circa 1994. But I was preaching in Berlin, where the dotcom revolution hadn't made a dent in the post-Wall calm. My dear Berlin friends just listened and laughed. "Wireless Internet? Who needs it?" "But you don't understand. Technology has its own imperatives. Whether we want it or not, it forces its way into our lives." My Berlin pals just smiled, and went back to enjoying those analog virtues of face to face conversation, peaceful afternoons on the back lawn, dining at tables instead of at the computer. I couldn't wait to get home to sell my vision of "Monk: Simple, Mobile, and True." But the joke was to be on me, not my friends. While white bread destination guides like CitySearch, Digital Cities and Sidewalk had already been majorly funded, the pioneer of the groovy destination guide concept didn't merit a meeting. While the well-funded wrote trite, sleep-inducing prose about the merits of such cutting edge attractions as the Statue of Liberty and the Golden Gate Bridge, I was pushing Monk readers to the Museum of Jurassic Technology, Coney Island's Sideshows by the Seashore, and The School for Boys Who Want to Be Girls, prodding them to stretch their boundaries and seek out the Banana Man, the Cacophony Society, and Leonard Knight's Salvation Mountain. Monk offered customized tours, a network of alternative travel companies, broadband entertainment, local experts, complete destination guides, e-mail, web design, hosting, mapping, a worldwide calendar of extraordinary events, and a few other bells and whistles I'll keep under wraps. No one gave a dotcom. 40 venture capital firms rejected our plan without even a callback. Some young kid from Flatiron Partners took a meeting in order to hear some racy stories about our friend "post-porn modernist" Annie Sprinkle and her lesbian-separatist-turned-transsexual-male lover, Les/Linda, who liked to be locked up in tiny closets. I thought such stories would show how in tune we were with the "alternative culture" zeitgeist. But the Flatiron kid's expressionless goodbye said it all: "great story, monk." My conclusion? I wasn't trying hard enough to get the message across. I tweaked the plan, tightened up the Monk site, and got my Northwestern friend talking turnkey to his network of "B2B" bores, who wouldn't know Gene Pool from Throbbing Gristle. We got a few meetings with some straight-laced Virginia money men. And, naturally, they all rejected us. They had their reasons--"no proof of concept," "we don't invest in content." That we were a strong preexisting brand, with bestselling books, 40,000 PAID subscribers, not just "first movers" but inventors of our niche, with a compelling database of content (including celebrity interviews with the likes of Gus Van Sant, Kurt Cobain, Courtney Love and Willie Brown), huge amounts of publicity no amount of advertising could buy (including Time, Newsweek, the New York Times, the BBC, ABC, MTV, CBS, Fox, Rolling Stone, NPR, and hundreds more) all mattered NOT. Meanwhile, other boneheads, with no experience, no "proof of concept," no brand awareness, were shopping around a lamer version of my master plan and getting millions. Two years passed. It was now July, 2000, the denouement of my foray into the land of Covad, Intel, Crosspoint, streaming, networking, customization, personalization, a whole bunch of other "izations," ISP's, WAP's, solutions, transmissions, data, head-ends, scalability, latency, capabilities, routers, data centers, master feeds, terabytes, server clusters, transfer modes, backbone, bandwidth, functionality, mcommerce, ecommerce, i-this, i-that, and all the other Orwellian net doublespeak I've now come to loathe. I might as well have been inside a cult of construction executives or a retreat for plumbing salesmen. I even heard terms like "best-of-breed" (What is this, 4-H?), "earballs and eyeballs" (What's next, hairballs?). Not very fertile soil for genuine art to grow. In particular, I've just returned from a dotcom-ference called Internet Content West, at the Beverly Hills Hilton, hosted by a London-based bunch named First Conferences. Everywhere I walked there were short charming British women with clipped British accents and pale British faces. This was preposterous: The Brits couldn't even get a Ferris wheel to open on time, and they were running an American tech conference! Topsy-turvy indeed. The week before, a French company, Vivendi, made public its plans to buy a North American entertainment megalith, Seagram's. "Oh forget all that xenophobia, we're over that," was the new French mantra. Parole ce qui? (Babelfish for "Say what?!") It never ceases to amaze me the false optimism that pervades every industry in this country; an optimism that finds its zenith at each industry's trade show. Internet Content West was no exception. Sure, a few "content providers" would ride the current shakeout. But underneath the business-as-usual veneer I sensed a growing unease, now that "dotcontents" like Boo (Boring Old Opportunism) and DEN (Dweebs Entice Nubiles) had shot their wads. I smirked when I saw a guy from TheGlobe on one of the panels. TheGlobe stock had plummeted to near zero from its stratospheric first day high, but that didn't halt the hype. "Guess that's business in the new economy," I smirked in my Mr. Burns best. "If you're not 'irrationally exuberant' about your little 'e-commerce solution,' Smithers, you're sunk!" I came to Internet Contest West because it was ostensibly geared towards guys like me: content "providers," "syndicators," "aggregators." Egregious terms, as if creative writing was just hamburger meat, which, in this artless, edge-less environment, it was. In that context, it came as no surprise that three well-groomed guys at a company I'll call FratBoyConcepts.com (FBC for short) to save on legal bills, spent a good hour earnestly spilling out their "solution" to me. Lots of rhetoric about locally produced "insider" content. Hmmm. Written by seasoned locals, who update the section once a week. Hmmmmm. Translators. A plan to syndicate. Delivered to Internet, wireless, and digital TV. Hmmmmmmmm!! "Gentlemen, let me direct you to Monk Magazine, the Mad Monks guidebook series, Monk.com, and the Monk business plan circa 1990," I thought. "Let me direct you to live Monk Internet broadcasts from 1994. To the dotcom Monkmobile before a slough of Internet start-ups discovered the idea." Oh, nevermind. These FBC normals had been majorly funded to implement MY vision, and now were feeding back to me my very own business plan of 10 years previous, no doubt picked up from some FTP file in the global brain, or via some unscrupulous VC from my list of 40, or just by dumb luck years after the idea had been hatched. "Those FBC cats must have some mighty fine content to get all that funding," I reasoned. Heck, in their propaganda kit they even had the temerity to utter that cheesy bromide: "content is king." I took a look at the FBC site: glowing reviews of standard white bread attractions. It was so vanilla, so innocuous, so Chamber of Commerce, so completely and unambiguously unoriginal, it was heartbreaking. And with punctuation and spelling errors too. And brutal foreign translations. The boys kept talking about their big client: American Airlines. "American Airlines is going to love this!," I privately scoffed. But then I thought, "Well, OF COURSE American Airlines will love this." American Airlines will definitely syndicate FBC content. And these nice white fellows in their faux Armani garb, Gold's Gym physiques, and marketing degrees, will find other partners to syndicate FBC content too. Just like they found investors to invest in their FBC site, a half-baked shell of the dream I had been pitching to deaf techies for years. And their competitors at 10Best.com would fare just as well. And probably FollowTheRabbit too, despite their goofy "Matrix" moniker. And Digital Cities, and CitySearch, and LocalYahoo!s (sounds like "Deliverance"), and RealCities, and all the other destination clones. And what did all these dotcoms do differently than my beloved Monk? What was their killer app? It was crystal clear: they stayed the course. No matter what the human potential gurus tell you, once you veer far enough and long enough off that corporate career track, there is no turning back. You lose the ability to think like the herd. And the herd takes its revenge. The herd doesn't understand originality, art, deviation. The herd understands the lowest common denominator. The herd understands allegiance to the herd, and the language of the herd, and "The Boiler Room" lifestyle worshipped by the herd. Here I was doing at mid-life what I had rejected as transparently shallow 20 years before. I was attempting to play the money game without paying my dues in the club that would have given me both rights and access. Like Tom Cruise finagling his way into the secret party in "Eyes Wide Shut," I didn't belong. I was an outcast. Blazing original content, steeped in thought and feeling, that was for outsiders. I took the road less traveled by, and that did make all the difference, no matter how far I might travel back down to see what I'd missed. I walked out of Internet Content West, bitter, dismissive, yet still envious--face to face with cold hard reality. The Internet? It's about technology, stupid. Not "content." Real content, that is. Content that has heart and innovation, and touches humanity in new and unexpected ways. Content that can't be pigeonholed into neatly defined niches that make sense to frat boy investors, poll-driven producers, and Playstation geeks, whose idea of "killer content" is GolfServ. There's been a war between technology and culture, and technology has won. Those succeeding in the Internet game, all those callous mercenaries who now populate my favorite cities--San Francisco, Seattle, New York--they have absolutely no connection to the revolutionary currents birthed in the 50's and 60's in this country. Those who started the PC revolution had roots in that consciousness, or so Professor Theodore Roszak claims in his little tome, "From Satori to Silicon Valley: San Francisco and the American Counterculture." But those ties have been severed. Sure, you have your pony-tailed front end designers, your sensitive back end boys, but sooner or later they will opt out. Far outnumbering the "cultural creatives" is a class of conventionally capitalist drones. A generation of men and women raised by computers, who think like computers, act like computers, who've been programmed to want stereotypically nice things, described, fetishsized, and sold through computers, who've been programmed to worship the market, and see all of life--ideas, parties, people (excuse me, "human capital")-- in its strict market potential, who've been programmed to shun true art, true originality, in favor of what can be easily understood and classified. Ones and zeroes. Mustard and ketchup. Windows and Mac. Want fries with that? Content is king, my ass. |
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