Text and Hubris

Note: This shouldn’t have been posted. Since it was. I will leave it. It needs a serious rework, though.

I wake up and go to work
just like I did yesterday,
just like I will tomorrow.

It’s another in a long line of learned behaviors, programmed rotes, and religious rites designed for my edification, demanding obedience.

And do I obey.

After all, what am I? Another automaton: low on power and slowing as the lights dim.

I sold out. I traded up. I got ground down. And I caved in.

I broke.

So I spend another 12 hour day staring into a screen, talking into microphone, and pressing the same buttons over and over again.

I think, “Holy shit, I’m George Jetson. So where’s my jet car briefcase? “

And I’m not a cog. Cogs are losers.

I’m a sprocket, bought and paid for.

And while I bitch and press my buttons, somewhere across the pond a six year-old plugs poisoned plastiforms into metal and prays it’s only his baby teeth that keep falling out.

In the Jetsons, everyone was the same color and spoke the same language. No one was poor. No one was sick. No one was suffering.

It’s hard to see people suffer and crawl when you’re flying so high.

If only I had my briefcase.

You know, I don’t think my few readers actually care what I have to say about Facebook or Apple. Mark Zuckerberg and Steve Jobs and their planned direction for their companies may be interesting and important but my commentary on them is really nothing more than a repetition or qualification of what has always been said numerous times throughout the blogosphere. You can hear it and read it anywhere. Yes, I am fascinated by the privacy issues and implications of Facebook’s actions for its users. I am also fascinated and horrified by the lock down of Apple’s hardware and software. You may be, too. There are a lot of blogs who cover these topics. I know, I read them. Text and Hubris doesn’t need to be one of them.

In his late night email conversation with Ryan Tate, Steve Jobs wrote something that struck a chord with me:

“By the way, what have you done that is so great? Do you create anything, or just criticize others work and belittle their motivations?

He’s right. While I think he is headed down the wrong path, it is his path to choose and he is certainly far more experienced and competent than I am in traveling those paths. My critique does nothing and it means nothing. I do more by simply deciding that I won’t buy his products until I see a shift in how his company does business. That’s my choice but my second guessing how he does business does not actually contribute to world at large.

As I mentioned in my spring wrap-up, there are plenty of good ideas and very few implementers. For all of his flaws, Steve Jobs is an excellent implementer. He gets things done. He creates and he facilitates creation. The same is true for Zuckerberg. Part of being an implementer is dealing with the thousands (or millions) of people who call you crazy or wrong. It’s being more involved in creating rather than than criticizing. Jobs didn’t want to use Adobe Flash. So he created a product that didn’t have it. That’s fine. It’s his/Apple’s creation. They can do that. Don’t like it? Make your own.

Now, I won’t be making an iPad competitor any time soon. I can create products and entertainment for platforms that share my personal philosophy, though. That I can do. I can focus my time on my own direction within this space instead of caring so much where everyone else is going. If you ask me, that is a far more productive path to follow.

There are serious problems with Flash. It is a closed platform. It is owned and controlled by a single company and they produce the only toolset for it. That said, their toolset is powerful, solid, and it has given artists the capacity to create their own content without worrying about complex code manipulation. It has made content production easy.

This part of the argument always seems to be left out of the Flash s. HTML5 debate. You can have the superior technology. It can perform better, be more open, and even run safer than its competition; and yet, if it doesn’t come with a rich set of tools that make content creation relatively easy and fun, your technology isn’t going to see the penetration you would like. Let’s remember what technology really is: technology is knowledge and application. A television is not technology nor is a computer technology. They are the products of technology. They are, at best, tools. HTML5 may indeed be a better way of doing things. This is knowledge side of the equation. Application, though, requires tools. Without tools the knowledge lies impotent, unrealized, and is, eventually, forgotten. As far as the tools go, Flash wins. There is nothing to compete in the HTML5 camp and as far as I have seen there are no plans to create something to compete.

I hope this isn’t case. I love the products Adobe makes but competition is a good thing here and they have held the space for a long time. New ideas and new tools might actually open up content creation even more. I hope to see some competing products developed that really push the envelope. To be fair, some of the Javascript libraries out there are doing that but they are still very early in their development. Of course, so is HTML5 which isn’t even finalized as of yet.

On the plus side, this is an exciting time to be in the content business. The models have changed and it really is anyone’s game. There is something really exciting about that.

If I have missed HTML5 tools or are ignorant of some (scary but possible) please let me know below. I would love to check them out!