Death of a Webmaster ... part one ........ A personal chronology
This is the story of a little too much idealism, and where it went when it died. Not many things ever inspired idealism in me, but when I first stared at the inscrutable UNIX prompt and knew it connected me to so many other people I felt it born in me, somehow the icy vt inspires idealism a lot of people.
In the beginning was Usenet.
But that was a long time ago, and if we're going that far back than really in the beginning there was David's Amazing BBS which probably wasn't that amazing, but I liked it and I didn't have to pay for an account. That was long ago enough that BBS sysops often phoned new members to check them out before activating their accounts. Dave called to confirm my new membership and we talked and talked and had a grand time and I joined. Looking back, I don't think he realized that I was jr high age. He gave me my first PJ O'Rourke book, which primed me for net culture in a lot of ways, though mostly the raving libertarian ways I would soon discover on usenet. When I started on the net I started in the alt.* hierarchy. On the outside world I looked for outlets and explanations. I read Mondo 2000, bOING bOING, whatever looked vaguely relevant to the culture of the net. When Wired first came out I slavishly bought and read every one.
On usenet I became a net junky in no time. I was destitute and generally unemployed and sneaking time on other people's accounts but even then I had the vague idea that we were doing something important, though I had no idea about the ride I was about to go on.
A little bit after the beginning I became a college student as well. The net was just getting noticed in the smaller California colleges and I used this to get in tight with the library staff. It was there that the system administrator showed me Mosaic for the first time. I watched the NCSA and NOAA sites fly by me with a deer-in-headlights quality. I was student #2 to have a webpage up at my school, I might have been earlier if I wasn't such a talented procrastinator. I was student #1 to have an email which was nice because I was the only one that got to choose my own. I was in on the student access policy meetings. (because of both knowing something about the net and inviting myself whether anyone wanted me there or not) My fondest memory of such was suggesting putting the AUP on the student email disk and making them sign a form that said they'd read it before using the net. The deans and systems guys smiled brightly at me and said "great idea quinn!" I smiled back and said "yup, that's why I make the big bucks" and everyone laughed themselves silly. I taught workshops for the staff and students on using the net and making webpages. I promised everyone that it was easy and open and free and fun, and showed them how to view source. I promised that everyone, no matter how computer phobic or illiterate could do it, and that it would open the world up so much to the simple act of seeing each other. For a time, I even delivered on that promise.
A few months later job offers began to lure me out of school. It was early 95, and the net gold rush was beginning to trickle. My boss, the dean of the library, sat me down to talk about dropping out of college to go write webpages. He was worried that if I left school I'd still be writing basic HTML page in five years.
I told him I didn't think that was too likely.
I wrote webpages for a good two months before I began building a team and getting into project managing and net consulting. I was generally being very 22 about the whole thing which for me meant scared and not understanding what I or my ideas might be worth. I was making good calls, mostly. I gave lots of advice to companies of many different sizes. I told PBM (my employers) that 95 would go down in history as the year the net exploded and that conventional marketing would soon be obsolete and would never apply to net culture at all. I gave my mom tech stock tips. (none of which she actually took, but so it goes.) I jumped on the HTML author's guild list and similar places and began babbling about information architecture on the web though I didn't have the phrase. I designed a database website. I spoke gently to marketing until they until they understood, or at least I tried. I spoke to gently to IS, and generally found that I liked them more; a sentiment rarely returned. PBM asked me what title they should put on my card and I told them Webmaster.
They were a bit skeptical.
They brought me on full-time and worked me to the bone and underpaid me but I didn't know the difference. And for a few minutes it was really fun. The Internet was actually my job, which seemed pretty outrageous. Netscape introduced tables and I was a happy producer/developer type. Later I downloaded the first frames capable version of Netscape, and ten minutes later declared them the stupidest thing I'd seen on the net. I swore I would never use them, a promise I've broken, but very rarely. Though they are much better than they were, they are still ultimately pointless. An inside sales guy left PBM and told me that Poppe Tyson wanted a web marketer in New York for twice what I was making then. He thought I had a good chance at it, I dawdled, unsure of being dragged anymore into advertising. I watched the David Seigel crowd and felt annoyed and trapped, that things were beginning to go horribly wrong. This push towards flash without really thinking about content, or how to arrange information seemed to make the web superficial. Seigel's crowd and the browsers right behind them were making it so that I could no longer look at a corporate client and say "what do you intend to bring to the Internet?"
I quit PBM because they were so awful, but I waited so long because they always managed to scare me badly and I had no idea how small and unimportant and petty they were. I went to lick my wounds, hiding out at a game company where all my old team went when I told them to flee PBM as well. There, and still dallying with college I waited, and hoped it would all leave me alone. I decided, after so many years, to become a religious studies major. With that decision a calm came over me, and then promptly vanished. A VC from the insurance industry decided he wanted a kid net company and we heard about each other, I began to draw up a business plan for a net consultancy. The pressure got high, I hated Orange County and it was all making me hate the Internet. I got in a car and drove to Florida... where it all started up again. A month later I was employee #2 in a law services web startup called LOIS, which I ended up renaming Ilaw. Several months later and without an operating budget the whole concept folded. I stood in a Best Buy and watched them role out the webtv. I was fairly sure it was doomed or mostly doomed, but i knew what this meant was that the media giants were trying to latch on and become part of this force they had little to no baseline for. I remember standing there and thinking this is it; I could go to New York or San Francisco and write my ticket. I knew for the first time in my life how to simply make something work. Except- I didn't want to. That wasn't what the net had been for me, and if I couldn't have it anymore the way I had, I was at the very least not going to rape my own memories to build a new market share. I promised I would never be a webmaster again.
So I went into Tampa and got a job waitressing.
By then the browser wars had begun in earnest. My old faith in the W3C looked at best irrelevant. Basic universal usability was the first casualty, and more horrible to me the next was the easiness of building pages I had promised everyone back in college when I was teaching. I was really beginning to hate the industry.
CSS happened, or rather didn't. I became a stand-up comic, and realized that I loved and craved being observed. Microsoft won the browser wars and brought Apple into the fold, I became a school teacher in Oregon. AOL bought Netscape and started new war of sorts with Microsoft. I was doing Solaris administration on the graveyard shift for a telecom company in Beaverton.
Then one night someone sent me a link to a David Seigel interview in which he admitted he'd been wrong. Wrong about killer websites, wrong about the message of new media, wrong about where it was going, he'd been wrong about what the net fundamentally was, and he was backpedaling. He blamed the browser wars, which he'd helped cause. He even talked about focusing on usability. I just about danced around the NOC in triumph, because all this time he'd been wrong and I'd been right, like a voice crying in the proverbial wilderness of the Internet... except right then it hit me- I hadn't been, not at all. Not that there hadn't been any proverbial wilderness, but I certainly hadn't been a voice crying. He was involved, thousands of people were involved and I wasn't. I'd dropped out years ago, afraid of failure or success. I'd isolated, fallen behind, I'd let go of the net which at one time had been one of the most important things in my life. For all his destructive work and bad decisions at least David Seigel bothered.
Instead of showing up, I'd just died. I didn't even know when it happened, but I'd certainly laid down and died. In what ways I could I decided to rejoin. I put up a personal webpage for the first time in 3+ years, I entered the general discourse and began the painful process of catching up with some of the technologies that had flown by me in the intervening years. I read a lot, and struggle a lot with not being able to absorb information the way I had... out of practice. Given the good judgment I seem blessed with and the context my history gave me I've had a pretty good time picking out the more worthwhile subjects to focus on.
But the webmaster is still dead. Out of her ashes something else suggests itself. It is a painful and tenuous process, but I stick with it. I no longer count on the Internet to fulfill my dreams, but I do enjoy watching it change the world. Now I am trying again to see if I can add anything to that process. The Internet still embodies a hope for me, not of complete social justice and equality anymore- maybe there's nothing more than just the chance to do good with what is before me.
There's no strong way to end the story of my death of a webmaster, for the obvious reason that it's not over. Everyday I'm still writing it, and for that matter you're writing it a little by reading this. I hope there is something to be learned from my death in industry, both about the industry and about the younger people that tend to be drawn into it.