Callithump!

Remember the good ole days when the Internet was cool? Must have been, what, 3 years ago? 5? Ages ago. It was so exciting and filled with promise. It seemed poised for an explosion that would fundamentally change the creative world. But now it all seems kind of tired. All the cool kids have left and now it’s a school cafeteria filled with Facebook and YouTube. What happened?

Remember what the Internet was like when it first started? When it was all text and all business, designed to be a nuclear-war proof communication system but opened up to research and academic institutions. Then support for graphics was grudgingly added. But they had to be GIF or JPEG, restricted to 216 “browser safe” colors if you wanted them to appear consistently from screen to screen. Then, as with most good things, it took artists and pornographers to show people how to use a new medium properly. Net.artists like 0100101110101101.org and jodi.org subverted the dominant paradigms and showed us it was possible to unleash unbridled creativity in this new medium.

Some of us were extra thrilled by the World Wide Web. We’d published zines and embraced desktop publishing because of its democratizing power. Before desktop publishing, the ability to get your message out to the world was concentrated in the hands of the elite who had the money to publish books, magazines and newspapers. Desktop publishing, combined with exciting new technologies like laser printers and photocopiers, and access to places like Kinko’s, meant that for a small investment ordinary people could get their thoughts out to dozens, even hundreds of people. It may not sound like much now, but at the time it was huge and revolutionary. The World Wide Web reduced the costs even further, and expanded our audience to the whole world (at least to the portion of it that had Internet access). It was obvious that the World Wide Web would be a world-changer.

Then a lot of amazing things happened. There were real destinations on the Web like Homestarrunner.com that we got excited about. If a friend was visiting who hadn’t heard of it, we’d drag them over to the computer to show them this amazing, hysterically funny thing that a couple ordinary people had done up in their spare time. There was so much coolness happening on the Web that we needed aggregator sites like Boingboing to keep tabs on it all.

Then the Web peaked, but we didn’t notice because it looked like the start of something so big that it would make everything else that had been done on the Web seem boring. Ze Frank’s The Show aired new videos of humor and social commentary every Monday through Friday for a year. Meanwhile, on Thing a Week, Jonathan Coulton recorded and released a new song every week for a year. Both sites leveraged many of the Web’s best new ideas. Jonathan Coulton released everything under a Creative Commons license that encouraged fans to re-record his songs, make music videos, illustrate the songs or creatively engage with the music in any way they saw fit. Ze Frank  also provided a variety of ways for fans to extend The Show beyond its short videos, including international collaborative creative challenges.

The Show and Thing a Week seemed like the culmination of everything good about the Internet. Two ordinary guys, self-publishing and becoming international stars. Their work broke down the barriers between author and audience, and made the world potential collaborators. Here’s where the Internet should have blossomed into maturity and become an explosion of creativity and innovation. Instead, once Ze and Jonathan ended their year-long experiments, the Internet appeared to wind down. Instead of looking at this as a starting point, it’s almost like there was a collective, “Well, this is as good as it’s going to get,” and everyone stopped trying.

I think there’s a few reasons why this happened.

Facebook. I blame Facebook, for starters. I think most of us have ideas we want the world to hear. Some of us are more driven than others. For almost two decades it’s been possible for anyone who wants to be heard to get their word out there. It just took a level of skill, effort and expense. Facebook reduces these all to zero, while still providing an audience that can be huge in comparison to other mediums. Unfortunately, there’s little incentive to do better. Take this post, for example. I’m putting more effort into it than anything I’d do on Facebook and yet a fraction of people will read it compared to my most banal post on Facebook. Before Facebook, we had blogs that filled the “I want to be heard” niche. Blogs reduced skill and expense to zero, but still required effort. You had to write, and what you wrote had to be interesting, readable and timely if you wanted to build an audience. On Facebook you have a built-in audience of friends and family who will read anything you post and “like” it. I believe that blogs for some were a gateway to bigger and better things, or at the very least, to better blogging, because the feedback loop encouraged it. The better your blog, the more comments and more traffic you got, which only motivated you to write more and better things. Facebook does the opposite, reducing creative output to a mere popularity contest. At the same time, striving to create content outside of Facebook is discouraged because when you’re starting out, you won’t get the same level of attention and positive feedback that Facebook gives.

It got too easy. For many creative types, it’s not just a desire to be heard that motivates us. It’s the feeling of accomplishment you get when you overcome a creative challenge. There was a time when creating quality content for the Web was challenging. In a short time, though, the tools got easier to use, browsers got more flexible, bandwidth increased, costs came down and everything got very easy. It was around this time that I started doing the Callithump! stuff, creating materials that existed only offline and trying to figure out what sorts of experiences I could create that could only exist off the Web. Around this same time we saw a resurgence in things like silk screening and letterpress, and yarn bombing and the whole “new” craft movement. I think a lot of people who might have once turned their attentions to making interesting things happen on the Web packed up and left for more challenging and “real” creative spaces.

There’s no “there” there. The Internet itself has changed from a specific destination and activity to more of an extension of ourselves. We don’t “surf” the Web now so much as inhabit it. It’s integrated with our daily lives. Even the most modest cell phone now has Internet access. We’re constantly connected in ways we don’t even realize. Getting maps and directions on our GPS, texting, checking stocks, looking up recipes in iApps, watching movies on Netflix On Demand. Not long ago we accessed the Internet through a specific device, a computer, with a specific application, a web browser. Things like Homestar Runner and The Show and Thing a Week are destinations that require attention and involvement in order to work, just like the Internet itself at the time.

Will the Internet ever be cool again? Technologically, all the pieces are there for a creative explosion the likes of which the world has never seen. We’re at a paradoxical point where although the media monopoly is stronger than ever, the mediums themselves are the most democratic they’ve ever been. The tools are easier and more affordable and there’s a diversity of publishing platforms. Whatever your creative desire, you have the means to reach a wider audience than at any point in history. We could be doing amazing things. I should be doing amazing things. And I will, once I get done updating my Facebook status.

A recent piece in the Callithump! vending machine ended on a more downbeat note than I’d intended.  The three part piece, called Freedom of Choice (yes, after the Devo song) discussed how the Gillette company combined company founder King Camp Gillette’s “razor and blades” business model: sell something at little or no profit (in this case a razor) so that one might sell a lot of something at greater profit (the blades).

King Camp Gillette himself was actually a really nice guy, a Utopian Socialist who planned to use his great wealth to build a better world for everyone. It didn’t work out that way, and the company he started continued without him. The razor and blades business model got nasty by incorporating  proprietary formats (in this case plastic cartridges containing multiple blades) to eliminate competing blade manufacturers. Before Gillette (the company, not the man) did this, you could choose between more than 30  manufacturers who made blades that fit Gillette razors. Now in grocery and drugstores you can choose from Gillette or Shick razors and blades. These aren’t interchangeable. Once you buy a  razor, you have to buy specific blades that fit that razor. We went from having many choices from many companies to severely limited choices from two companies.

The razor and blades model is now pervasive. Companies sell need, not solutions. We buy a television, we need to get cable TV and buy a game console. We buy the game console, we need to buy peripherals and games to go with it. We buy a game and a year later the bigger and better version of that game comes out And so on, in perpetuity.Think about how many of the purchases in your life only guarantee you have to buy more.

It doesn’t always need to be this way. Of course, we’re consumers. It’s wired into in our animal natures. However, there’s genuine need and the perceived need that’s put into our heads by marketers. There are more choices, but they aren’t necessarily on the rack at the supermarket. The fact is, the multi-blade proprietary plastic cartridge razor blades never shaved better than the single-bladed safety razor. It was all just marketing.

I discovered this a while back. I was holding my 5-bladed Gillette Fusion with Lubricating Strip and battery-powered vibration, and I was trying to decide whether to torture myself for a few more days or not buy food because the blades were just so expensive, and I was thinking, There has to be something better. It turns out there was, and always had been. You can still buy safety razors of the sort King Camp Gillette first made. If you shop around you can still find safety razors that were made in King Camp Gillette’s day for cheaper than a Gillette Fusion. There’s all sorts of myths about these razors like, “They’re hard to use,” and “You’ll cut yourself.” This is true for about the first two weeks of using a safety razor (aka, dual edge or DE razor). Once you get the hang of it, you’ll get a far better shave than you’ll ever get from a 5-bladed monster razor.

What’s even better is, for the price of an 8 pack of Fusion cartridges, you can buy a pack of 100 Feather dual edged blades. Feathers are regarded as among the best DE blades you can buy, and yet they’re so cheap compared to the Fusion that you can swap out a fresh blade before it even shows signs of getting dull.

Make the switch to a shaving brush at the same time, and you’ll discover that there’s many more choices beyond the canned chemical goo that the stores try to pass off as shaving cream. In the morning I have the joy of a hot lather scented with things that I recognize, like lavender or lime, made with non-toxic, natural ingredients. Making the switch away from expensive gimmick razors has turned a morning chore into something I look forward to. I wholeheartedly recommend it!