attention industry

Just because it’s online, doesn’t make it tech.

Us internet folk have a small problem. We keep forgetting that technology doesn’t always matter. In many cases, it’s an executional side-effect of what a company or person actually does.

You wouldn’t say Fed-Ex is a Car company, or a Plane company. But you could find an army of people who would tell you Amazon is a tech business. And I’ve never really understood that, except as a barrier to keep people from thinking they can understand, or contribute to something.

This came to my attention when I was discussing Wikipedia on twitter, with Spencer Saunders. We were talking about open source projects, and Wikipedia came up… But I think you can argue that Wikipedia is far more of a crowdsourcing success, than a technological one. The fact that a wiki is the backbone is less important than the fact that volunteer collaborators filled it with content.

Similarly, the fact that Amazon has a massive technological back end laser focused to optimize experience, is less important than the fact that they’re a massive retailer with the best catalogue ever.

It’s easy to see the overlap, but I think it’s important. We can’t keep pretending that everything online needs to be tech first, and something else second. There are ALWAYS going to be interesting technical problems and challenges to solve in the online space.

But this technology, for the most part, is soon going to be invisible, the same way a telephone is, or a cash register is, or a car is. Things on the web are already becoming black boxes that just DO what they are supposed to DO.

And I get that this scares people. I get that some deeply brilliant people, like Cory Doctorow, for example, will feel like a closed, Apple style product future for the web is terrible. I see his point. But what he’s forgetting is that EVERY CONSUMER PRODUCT IN HISTORY has undergone this transition.

You used to make your own clothes at home. Now you buy them in a store, and probably can’t fix them if they break. You used to build your own home. Now contractors do it, and allow you to have more complexity and range than you otherwise could have. 

You used to need to know how to maintain a car, to drive a car. Now you need a mechanic.

This isn’t downgrading or denigrating any of the skills mentioned. But it is making a very clear point - that expertise narrows over time for a reason. The average person can only master so many complex skills. And insisting everyone needs to know how to code to understand the online world is akin to insisting that someone needs to know how to repair an internal combustion engine to be able to commute.

I’m a digital person. I wouldn’t call myself a technical person, because frankly, I think we’re already starting to set the bar too low for that.

But I think it’s very important that we stop creating the impression that everything new, vibrant, and important online is really just for the internet people.

We need to worry more about making the technology invisible, for more than just the very lowest experience level of user.