Picture the scene, it's the seventies and the jocks are administering the usual, time-honoured beating to the class nerd. The nerd takes it. It must be endured, it's the way of the world. Fade-out, scene two. It's the eighties, same scene, a beating. But the nerd takes it easier this time. For ten years down the line, it's a start-up computer company and millionaire status, like Bill or Steve or Nolan. Jump-cut, it's the nineties. The scene has changed, no beating, no nerds, no jocks.What's going on?
It's the new digital future, with no Jocks, no nerds and simply everyone has a website, everyone knows HTML and everyone is a geek. The nerds would disappear to hard-core technology, only there isn't any. The cutting edge is blunt, Toolbook, Website Creators, Java, Visual Basic. Computers are friendly. The jocks? Well, the jocks are coding! Great eh? Computers on every desktop, as we all link arms towards the millennium and a utopia of technology. Only it isn't. It's just bad websites, poor software and a scarcity of content. Designers aren't Neville Brody wannabes twisting their imaginations to force the limits of what is possible. Designers are Joe Bloggs with user-friendly software, one press of the Po-Mo button and hey presto, instantly cool looking content. The limits of technology are way to high. Want to push the limits of technology? Don't bother, wait a while and someone will invent it for you to steal.
This is not what was supposed to happen. Computers were supposed to bring out the latent talent in all of us. They were going to shove the talented but dispossessed to the fore, they were to break down the barriers of the elite. Well, they did that. Only the talented were swamped by the masses and their off the shelf creations. They are drowned in the noise of all that latent talent. When we got it, we saw the barriers were there and our talent was latent for a reason. We can't all be Peter Mollineux, that job is taken. But we can all copy him quick enough as makes no difference. It's too easy.
Remember that rush when you saw technology doing something you hadn't envisaged. How did they do that? The alien sounds of Kraftwerk, BBC model B speech, the twisted imagination of Geoff Crammond's Sentinel or Andrew Braybrock's Paradroid 64. A Korg M1 or Alta Vista and Yahoo atually being on the web and being useful! The techno-utopia was going to happen. When was the last time you had that rush? These talented individuals were going to show us the way. Well, they did. This marvellous technology was at our disposal, we turned it into teen-porn Jpegs and Diana joke servers and we did it in double quick time.
Pirate Radio is now on the Internet, 80,000 people across the globe tune into Interface to hear the cutting edge of new music from a flat in London. I give it eighteen months before we see a million bedroom radio stations broadcasting wall to wall AOR and sub Monty-Python sketches. And wait until we get video on demand. Imagine if all the 'this is a picture of my cat' websites suddenly have 'and here is my family's hilarious new sit-com'. Imagine being able to see me rant this crap on your screen? Don't worry you won't. Because you would have spent your time looking at the ten million other sites in the vain search for something interesting.
I want websites designed by designers I want content by writers and artists. I want to know that the media I am receiving was sweated over, was painful, came from the heart. When the underground is the new mainstream, the noise is deafening. We, the barbarians, really are at the gate and the gate is there for a reason.