Back when hubski was first born, the Internet was cool(er)
It was a newer tool. People were making use of it in new and innovative ways. Now? Now, it’s old hat.
I’m a musician and I love to buy new instruments and learn how to make sounds with them. More often than not, I’m buying an established instrument like a ukulele or a percussion instrument to experiment with.
At first, I will play it with reckless abandon. No form. No discipline. No sense of the countless people before me that have played it. No idea of “how” I should play. Just pure unadulterated “play.”
That’s the way the internet USED to be. All of us were just making it up as it came.
I feel like that’s gone now.
Am I wrong?
Prove me wrong.
I figure everyone here knows I'm a grumply curmudgeon who was there when it all started: But I'm going to take the opposite tack from what you expect. My sister is writing a book about her area of expertise. She needs a URL and web site and blog and and and... all the usual shit. In less than 10 minutes at domains.google.com, I owned her entire URL intellectual property landscape (about 12 in total, I think), set up the email accounts on her domains, the blog, and got all of the privacy controls in place. Her designer can now do the graphical work, and my sister can begin writing her content. In a year, she will be a published author, with all the pertinent domains and social media accounts, and will be able to bring her skills to the people who need them, regardless of their preferred form of media consumption. I feel like the internet is coming back around again... it began as a place for people to create things. Then it became a glorified TV, and just a place to consume. But now, people are empowered to create again, without needing to learn the secret handshake and coded/obscure/intentionally-obtuse language to operate the tools. Obama won because he leveraged the earliest version of these tools. AOC continues to set the public conversation with her ability to leverage the modern version of those same tools. Greta Thurnberg and a whole passel of "kids" are BORN with these tools, and use them as naturally as I use a pen. And, as legitimate voices speak their minds and find their audiences, those audiences now have an incredible ability to amplify that message to their circles. We are juuuuuuuust at the beginning of this. The baby has just learned to crawl, and is going to be walking - then running - in no time. I find this very exciting. I love that voices can now be heard that would have been stifled before. Even the assholes. Sunlight is the best disinfectant, and the assholes won't survive long in the blinding light of day. (Yes, they will always be there. Nazis and all the other shitweasels who have to blame others for their failure to have a meaningful life. But fuck em. They will be drowned out and left behind by everyone else as the world moves forward.) I see a positive future. I always do.
Agreed. I tend to ascribe to Martin Luther King's, "The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice." Thanks for the "Sunlight is the best disinfectant, and the assholes won't survive long in the blinding light of day. " Where'd you get that one? Poignant.
During my tenure mixing in clubs, the number one instrument sold at Guitar Center shifted from "guitars" to "turntables." Hell, during my tenure mixing in clubs, Guitar Center became a thing. Here's the thing - it'll take six months of intensive study to become mediocre on guitar. It'll take ten minutes with a beer in one hand to become mediocre on a pair of SL1200s. And then of course the CDJ came out and you could hash up anything on CDs and then Serato came out and it would fuckin' force your shit into the same tempo and now nobody even really cares anymore and the DJ is basically the guy who bought the big speakers and the lights and the used minivan because the ability to actually entertain the crowd has become so devalued that we all retreat into our Spotify playlists and pay Steve Aoki a million dollars a night when we're in Vegas because we remember that used to be a thing once upon a time. The internet was a newer tool - you had to know what you were doing, or be able to fake it. I used to do eBay auctions in Dreamweaver because it was the easiest way to make them stand out. But I mean, eBay. That there is a utility that makes posting shit online easy. Craigslist. Wix. GoDaddy. You no longer need a "tool." You no longer need to know how to use a tool. You just need to show up. The Internet used to be a place where interested people could do something new. It is now a place where disinterested people can do the same old same old. The tools are still there - you can still buy a guitar - but you're not hanging out with guitar players anymore. You're hanging out with people who just want to listen to music.