Issue #7: Internet generalists and reclaiming the internet
In which I start with a rather self-indulgent reminiscence/moan about being a generalist in a world of specialists and hopefully pull it back with a call for a more hopeful internet where perhaps the cultural sector could lead the way, and then add some links which I’m very sorry to say are more about “AI” than I would like but also some fun stuff.
Something old: whither the generalists
I have seen things you people wouldn’t believe.
Refresh tags with a 5 second loading time, a jpeg that marquees across the screen, Century Gothic used for large amounts of body text, analytics that let you see exactly who is visiting your site.
Yes, my first ever Notepad-built website was a portfolio for local artists created around 1997-8 and was, in current terms, a UX disaster. I had finally worked up the courage to share the link with you from the Wayback Machine, where it is preserved in code but missing much of the imagery. But I realised that it still contains email addresses for other people that might be actually be live, and we worry about privacy these days in a way that we never used to. So, bad luck, you’ll have to imagine it.
That’s where I started in this business. Grabbing the code from other sites and online libraries and making it my own. I created websites for others, sometimes for money, sometimes for a fair trade. I moved on from Notepad to Dreamweaver (I miss you, Dreamweaver). I learned new tags for fancy rollover effects. I never learned to properly check my work before putting it live, but it didn’t really matter in those days.
When the internet got to CSS and I didn’t have the will to learn how it worked, I knew my time was up, and I stopped calling myself a web designer. Later, Wordpress allowed me to do my own site and the occasional favour build for others, and I’ve done a fair bit in Squarespace, under duress, but I’m still not messing with the CSS and my abilities are limited.
Back in the 2000s, these skills put me ahead of the game in the brave new world of tech, in the creative industry particularly, and I forged a career in digital production. I picked up new skills along the way such as camera operating and editing, game production, user research, evaluation, social media etc. Whatever I was being called, multimedia editor, digital producer, content coordinator, etc etc, it was always a random hodgepodge of all these skills required, along with project management. (I remember working for a big broadcaster as a senior producer on a project and still having to compress a large batch of videos on my own laptop because nobody could spare the in-house expertise to get it done in time and thinking, bloody lucky I know my way around a CODEC, eh?)
But as I got to about 40, and started to look around, I saw the landscape had changed immeasurably. The “digital producers” I knew were dwindling, they had specialised or had become senior managers in their institutions. Professionalisation of the sector and the wide adoption of agile methodologies has created new roles that fit a very specific practice, the product managers, product owners, delivery managers and very technical engineers etc. (Although I would argue, these roles aren’t as clearly defined as people believe them to be, and the practice itself has limitations). Currently I am a product manager acting as a product owner on one project. On a different recent one I was a user researcher providing product support. Shrug emoji, words words words.
Really, I’m a generalist, and I feel like increasingly that these days that counts against me rather than in my favour, as I compete with others who do only one of these things, have a qualification to say so, and are steeped in the rituals and practices of agile/scrum etc. As a consultant, wide-ranging knowledge is still valuable when working with smaller organisations in particular, who may need support in multiple areas to “sort out their digital offer” but it is harder to find those rare clients who have these needs and can pay for help.
So, all this to ask, whither the generalist? I know there are a few of you about, looking at my subscriber list, other relics (sorry) from the early days of the internet, other Old Internet People. Can we own it, make it work for us or is it time to move on? To specialise? Is there still a use for someone who remembers what a blink tag is? Or will all those moments be be lost in time, like tears in rain. Time to die?*
*I am being wildly over dramatic and quoting this, for avoidance of doubt.
Something new: reclaim the internet
As we witness the heat death of the internet, I can add another reason to mourn the halcyon (?) early days to the above career complaint. I hate (not really, but a bit) to have been right about, let’s see, AR, VR, NFTs, “AI” etc etc, but fundamentally feel justified in my deep suspicion of any technology that is driven by the needs of the manufacturers and tech companies and not the users. In fact, I hate that I think of people as “users” at all, we are losing our humanity in the technology.
BUT. But. As Twitter falls off a cliff and the AI “subprime” crisis looms, a movement is afoot. For example, we’ll see whether it lasts, but the denizens of BlueSky seem to be learning from previous social media mistakes and are making a concerted effort to keep it joyful and useful, which the design of tools such as their improved block function is making much easier.
And increasingly I am seeing provocations for a new way of thinking about the internet, about designing for humanity. This beautiful quote from a recent LinkedIn (yes I know) post.
“What if all the software we used was made by people who love us?” - Melanie Hoff
What if! Indeed. What a starting principle to adopt, could we, could you, could I lead with that on the next project?
Rachel Coldicutt actually asked four years ago if we could occupy our technology with love. More recently, Maria Farrell and Robin Berjon asked us to Rewild the Internet, advocating a root and branch (pun intended) approach to diversifying the infrastructure of the internet to allow for both better resilience and a flattening of power. (Might this perhaps look more like the early internet I am mourning in the first section?).
Today, Tom Greenwood’s Oxymoron newsletter suggested: “Paradoxically, while AI might seem to be dragging us into a less human future, it might just be the thing that wakes us up and prompts us to look deep within ourselves to ask what really makes us special and unique as human beings.”
So, what would it take for this to become a true movement that has genuine influence where it needs to (e.g. with our new Labour government who unfortunately appear just as wedded as the previous one to ideas about tech magically fixing everything)? When I think about my recent projects, it is hard to see the “in” to allow this to happen. We cling to big providers for stability and lower costs. We follow established processes because that’s the language we all understand now and we cling to that too. How can we build with “love” when we cannot sustain without profit?
So I think it might be up to certain sectors to lead the way. Not everyone is so driven by profit and not all organisations are making high stakes products with teams that have little room to manoeuvre. It’s been a while since I did much work in the cultural sector, for example, museums particularly, but that’s certainly a world full of smart people doing interesting things, making lots of noises about ethics and experimentation and being people-centred and sustainable and whatnot. Could the movement start there?
Where else?
Something borrowed: links
Things that I have been reading and thinking about. Inclusion doesn’t necessarily mean full endorsement.
Making good documents is a skill. I am particularly taken with the table formatting demo in this as a terrible over-user of colour in excel spreadsheets https://www.anildash.com/2024/03/10/make-better-documents/
Design patterns for “AI” that aim to actually empower people https://medium.com/writing-by-if/new-design-patterns-for-ai-b37f4ff060ba
A rare example where I think, OK, using “AI” in this instance actually makes sense https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/how-london-museums-new-website-using-ai-power-content-trish-thomas-jzh2f/ with all the caveats about the environmental/ethics of the tools however.
However, this recent experience I had with a contractor using a hallucinatory “AI” tool is salutary https://bsky.app/profile/marthasadie.bsky.social/post/3l23pqt2thb2s (sorry, I stacked the thread using quotes as I didn’t realise Bsky was showing threads properly now). The next is https://bsky.app/profile/marthasadie.bsky.social/post/3l23q373gpn2v and follow up https://bsky.app/profile/marthasadie.bsky.social/post/3l23qfoagv52l.
So you might want a plug-in for removing AI from your search results (disclaimer, I haven’t tried it yet) https://bsky.app/profile/hikatamika.com/post/3km4qub63vs2r you can also use https://udm14.com/ to stop the Google AI.
How SEO has changed the internet, with lizards https://www.theverge.com/c/23998379/google-search-seo-algorithm-webpage-optimization
I do love an unusual art tarot deck https://shop.frankduffy.co.uk/franks-slow-burn-tarot-deck-kickstarter/
Wow, look at all these 2000s Web Comic folks still going on the internet https://bsky.app/profile/southworth.bsky.social/post/3l3bh4mbnnw2t, seems a good excuse to point you at my last newsletter on the subject https://buttondown.com/oldinternetpeople/archive/issue-6-the-ai-arms-race-gives-me-hope-and-the/
I think I could look at Japanese firework catalogues forever https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/japanese-fireworks-catalogues
I really enjoyed Adrian Hon’s description of a weekend of Nordic LARPS https://mssv.net/2024/08/21/a-weekend-at-the-immersion-larp-festival/
Would you like to look at hundreds of mapped aerial photos of Britain https://www.britainfromabove.org.uk/en?
Finally, if you will forgive me a plug, I offer a range of training for digital from game design to user research that your organisation might benefit from https://www.techworksforus.com/training/
Thank you for reading. If you enjoyed it, please do share it with others. And if you didn’t, I welcome constructive feedback!