Categories
Happened

The Private Psychedelic Stack

Among my limited office decorations is a complete CD-ROM boxed version of Hypercard 2.4. People spotting it have one of two reactions: “OH MY GOD, HYPERCARD!” or “What’s Hypercard?”

Triggered by the latter response today, I went on a brief Wikipedia dive and discovered that Hypercard was – in part – inspired by an acid trip:

It occurred to me the weak link for the Blue Marble team is wisdom. Humanity has achieved sufficient technological power to change the course of life and the entire global ecosystem, but we seem to lack the perspective to choose wisely between alternative futures. But I was young, without much life experience or wisdom myself.

Bill Atkinson

Categories
Reflected

Self Defense Against A Decaying Internet

In terms of blog neglect, 2018 appears to have been a banner year. Despite well over 20 article false starts, I published exactly one blog post in the entire calendar year. (Well, two, with this one.)

This is not limited to my blog, though. I have grown quieter on all networks I still participate in. My conversations are increasingly in private messages, in group chats, or in a draft tweet that quickly gets deleted.

Why? Two reasons, I think.

One: we – royal internet We, to the extent that there is one overarching culture – have mutated to a point where I’m not entirely sure I fit in to that culture. Worse, I’m not sure I want to.

Two: the social networks are part of the problem, and the people running them have signaled pretty clearly this year they have no desire to fix them.

My natural response to both of these has been to clam up, to shut down, to say less. This is hard for someone who’s proudly waved an online presence for nearly three decades.

So may I wave this dusty, underutilized presence that’s mine once more. May I turn the comments off and the frequency up. May I micro-blog less and macro-blog more.

May I find my voice once more in 2019.

Categories
Created

The Web is a Flat Circle

Twenty-something years ago, around my junior year of high school, I applied for an Independent Study project. The proposal: build a website for my school district.

That project was old enough that it predated archive.org, so I can’t even pull a screenshot out of the archives.  But a few times a week, I trudged along in assembling a website for the three schools in the district.

This was, strangely, not new work for me at the time: I was already holding a part-time job for the one web design firm in my tiny town. So roughing out a site structure, scanning photos via a SCSI flatbed scanner, hand-writing the HTML code and picking the right hex colors was a relatively familiar feeling.

The site launched at tburg.k12.ny.us, which was a particularly weird domain, even then. (In a weird bit of internet trivia, the hosting was provided by John R. Levine of “Internet for Dummies” fame, who not only lived in my town but later became the mayor.)

It wasn’t a particularly great site or deep site – you get what you pay for having an angsty teenager design your theoretically professional website – but it felt good to build an internet presence for the place I spent most of my time.

Today, after 13 months of work, 639 tickets, and more meetings than I can genuinely remember, we pulled the trigger on the relaunch of weill.cornell.edu.

Nothing about it is what would qualify as a marvel of modern web engineering. There’s no blockchain, no bespoke node.js content management system, no deep social integration at the cost of your personal data. It’s just a nice website that tells some important stories about a medical school. (I’m big on storytelling this year.)

I’m grateful to have had a great team working with me every day to pull this off, even when I’m spitballing new ideas late in the project.

I’m grateful to have management above me who trusted my vision and my approach, even when what I’m explaining is confusing and foreign.

And I’m grateful that I got the chance to leave my imprint, however temporal a website may be, on an institution like WCM.