A Forgotten Future
In 2015 I was invited to write the following essay for Offscreen Magazine, which appeared in Issue 11. It set in motion the ideas that led me to create my techno-nostalgist luxury keyboard brand Norbauer & Co..
I've always liked Christopher Hitchens' formulation of the old adage about the way that cultures evolve: revolutions, as he put it, tend to devour their young, and eventually turn into their own opposites. So it has been with the nerd revolution, and the online culture that it once built.
There was a time when the internet was the sole province of the disenfranchised and uncool—when saying yes to the online universe felt, thrillingly, a bit like saying no to the real world. I grew up a Star Trek-obsessed gay male in an insular, homogeneous, and socially conservative part of the rural United States, so it was obviously never going to go particularly well for me to seek a place in the society of my real-world peers. Like so many pariahs of my generation, I instead turned to my computer. The cloistered, anonymous spaces of the early internet afforded social lepers of my sort a refuge where identity was malleable and we could bond over our shared alienation, finding the kind of camaraderie and connection that eluded us in everyday life.
The joke used to be that the 'virtual world' was a sort of Asperger's ward for people who couldn't quite grasp the nuances of human interaction. But I would posit that we actually understood the realities of the tribe all too well, we simply wanted no part in them. It felt as though we had set ourselves the noble task of fashioning an entirely new culture, one that would soften the cold criteria of wealth, status, identity, and sexual attractiveness that normally tend to govern relations among primates. I believe this worked, for a time at least, because the static web pages, low bandwidth, and anonymous chat rooms of the day nudged online interactions toward the level of textual content and shared enthusiasm, rather than letting on much about the people doing the sharing, where they lived, what they looked like, or how they lived their lives. And, very much unlike the outside world, every kind of minority interest and obscure affinity had its own quiet, sequestered little home, from the darkest corners of Usenet to the discussion rooms on AOL.
Those were heady, if naïve, days. The dotcom bubble was barely beginning to inflate, Wired magazine seemed to be the voice of a new generation on the cusp of ascendancy, and it seemed like Star Trek: The Next Generation might be a realistic workplace drama depicting everyday life at the office in the not-too-distant future. As more of the population went online, one couldn't but hope that the implicit ethos of the digital revolution might spread its values to the broader culture. Notions of a forthcoming globally-interconnected world fostering values of tolerance and mutual understanding were bandied regularly about. 'The future' as a radically different, improved, and optimistic version of today seemed a palpable thing.
Investing my hopes in the internet and this idea of its future is what got me through the pains of an awkward, nerdy adolescence, and the limitations of coming of age in a place with almost no access to global culture. The internet gave me so much that I couldn't otherwise have had that it became a part of who I was and a nexus for everything I cared about. I spent every spare moment as a teenager learning the technologies underlying the web, building sites for and connecting with people who shared my dorky, recondite interests.
I got my first job at the age of 14, at NASA, as an intern in computer network engineering. The first company I founded was an online social networking startup, designed precisely with the idea of bringing together online people who felt like a beleaguered minority in real life. My second and third companies were directly related to the technology of the web itself, and the thing that seemed at the time most poised to drive it forward, Ruby on Rails. Until the age of 25, I had happily built my real life around the online world. But it was in those latter days of the internet's youth that I first began to feel a sense of ill-ease about the culture and technology I had so long adored.
As internet connectivity became widespread — and as the idea took hold that being a programmer and building things online is something that could make one rich — we who had been building the web from its infancy suddenly found ourselves in a position of unaccustomed real-world prestige. The domain of the geeks was suddenly where everyone wanted to be. And so we found ourselves holding the keys to an increasingly public platform that we knew intimately, tempted to use it to exploit and grow our newfound status. Thus the era of the fashionable nerd began. And I can't help but feel that, with it, the digital world passed forever from being primarily a sanctuary from the malign influence of respectable society into an amplification chamber for some of its more venal and destructive predilections.
Of all the vain and violent impulses that natural selection has urged upon our species, the human impulse toward respectability may be the most pernicious. This emotional drive suggests that we should squander our meager time on this planet spending our days clambering for status, grasping for resources, and obsessing about what the other yammering apes nearby might be thinking of us. It exists for evolutionary reasons, and for the most part it seems only to cause suffering. (It is, at the very best, a colossal misallocation of resources.) And it is pernicious precisely because it can creep up on one so subtly — often advertising itself to be other things — just as it did very much with me and my relationship with the culture of the web.
Given that the internet had in many ways defined my life, it seemed only natural that I should seek a place in its new age of dominance after I graduated from college. Indeed, parents, teachers, and friends alike suggested to me that to do otherwise would be to waste an enviable opportunity. And I was still full of starry-eyed narratives about the web and its grand positive mission for humanity. So, I found myself in the early 2000s, doing my best to fit in among the new online establishment. I started thinking about turning my web projects into startups and sought to build a sort of online personal brand. For my first company, what began as a low-ambition and idealistic little social experiment, I eventually decided to take on outside investment and set up an office in lower Manhattan. We hired a fancy Madison Avenue PR firm, bought advertising in major markets, and it was eventually sold to OKCupid. For my second company, a software consulting firm, I intentionally endeavoured to grow it as large as possible as quickly as possible, and I consciously wrote posturing, link-baiting articles around the web, insecurely cultivating an online persona to win the approbation of the personalities at the top of the nascent nerd hierarchy. I was quoted and praised in Wired, Forbes, TechCrunch, etc. My heroes at 37signals once even approached me about potentially coming to work for them. I was living the dream. But around 2006, I noticed that something had slowly but distinctly happened to my feelings about the web: I no longer looked to it as a place of joyous escape. It had become for me a locus of anxiety and a desperate need to be liked and praised in public.
By this time, the watchword of the web was no longer 'virtual', it had become 'social'. And I, like so many of the old guard of computer nerds, had slowly but utterly succumbed to its thrall, forgetting the pleasures of a virtual space organised around principles of equality, fluid identity, and non-conformism. The noble spirit of the loser and the outcast had been replaced by the desperate hustling of the startup founder, the 'rockstar programmer', and the needy tweeting of the micro-celebrity. The very opposite of my childhood hopes had occurred: rather than the web remaking the everyday world in its image, it happened the other way round.
The trouble is that the social web and its incessant status-jockeying engender a horrible sense of urgency, insecurity, and competition. One wakes up each morning to a stream of self-promotion from others, pose-striking on social media driven by the need for external validation that the web now so readily quantifies, from page views, likes, and retweets, to venture rounds. The sense of inadequacy that results is inexhaustible. What were once solitary pursuits like web design, programming, and video games are now real-time 'social experiences', which is to say platforms for a Darwinian struggle over nerd prestige points. And if one isn't parlaying one's stake in the digital realm into real-world lucre, one feels like a bit of a chump.
I look back wistfully to how things used to be, to a crude and unfashionable web that existed, for a brief moment, as the opposite of all of this: a technology for the creation of small, obscure oases of shared subjectivity between anonymous minds. With its eclipse, we might be making more money, we might be more productive (whatever that means), but I don't know that we're necessarily happier. And I wonder if it isn't possible to recapture something of what we've lost.
Of course, I haven't permanently closed my own browser, nor have I shuttered my personal website. Though I will confess to a brief reactionary period when I got so fed up with the angst of my life in the web world that around 2009 I sold my consulting company, eBayed my Macs, and started longing for the age of the periwig. I actually spent several months lurking around a dusty old private library in Boston before I could look at a computer screen again. What I have tried to cultivate over time, however, is a kind of deep internal scepticism about my own motives when engaging online. So many times over the past couple of years I've almost posted something about a project I'm working on or a creative product I've made, and stepped back at the last moment to examine frankly what I'm hoping to get out of clicking on that 'Post' or 'Tweet' button, only to realise it's simply in the vague hope of being seen by somebody as fancy. More often than not when this happens, I recoil and drop the whole idea. As a result, my relationship with the web, and social media in particular, has become one of general apprehension, avoidance, and even contempt.
I wish I could offer a facile lifehack of the sort that tends to characterise most contemporary online discourse, but as must by now be apparent, I can't quite bring myself to play by those rules. One is tempted to say we should somehow simply try harder to 'recapture the spirit' of the old web. But I'm not sure it's possible go back to the internet's unselfconscious early days, pure and unspoiled. It surely would be naïve to think that we could merely exhort ourselves into not thinking about how other people must be judging us online, to unlearn the impulse to coerce our digital personas into something impressive or intimidating. The fact is that people are watching, they are judging, and for many folks who currently work in the web world, one's livelihood is tied inextricably to those evaluations of one's online presence.
It may be that simply to notice the impulse toward internet respectability in ourselves is a first step toward combatting it. When we pause to examine our motives before sharing aspects of ourselves in public, we open up a little space for conscious choice. And I find that in such moments my actual values sometimes end up guiding my actions, rather than a reflexive need simply to be counted among the cool kids. In this and so many other aspects of my life as I've grown older, I've learned to slow down at critical moments and ask myself, "Is this what I want my life to be about?" before acting. And I can say with some confidence that I will not on my deathbed be lamenting an insufficient amount of time spent cultivating a personal 'audience' of faceless online followers. But to have spent much of my life bonding with other people about rare shared interests and common sensibilities, to learn that we're not alone, to partake of a bit of camaraderie in an oftentimes lonely world... Yes, I can live with that. So I try to ask myself if what I'm about to do online is in service to that latter value, or the former vice. And I find that, occasionally, I can make the right choice, without entirely ruling out what online culture now has to offer and without succumbing to its traps. In this way, I think it is possible to be a little less beholden to social forces beyond our control, and in so doing, to change our relationship with what the web — for better or worse — now is.
I continue to mourn the death of the illusion, the once-plausible future that has been lost. And I keep trying to guide my behaviour based on the aspirations and values of the old web. Perhaps a measure of conscious nostalgia for that forgotten future can make the internet of today just a little bit better.