February 2000
Here we are in the second month of the millennium and here I am with more good news! The four letter word url’s on the internet are all gone, finished, used up, spat out (you didn’t swallow it did you?). We can all sit back and luxuriate in the infinite possibilities for primal expression that five and even six letters will bring; water, sport, poetry, geometry, history and of course more biology lessons. The world wide web is most astounding not for the breadth and coverage of its trillion broadcasters but it’s the unanimous celebration of the aching loneliness that people feel at midnight in a basement illuminated by the light of a cathode ray tube.
The fundamental flaw in the land grab mentality of .com fever is the failure to see that there is no terra firma except for idiots. If you own bank.com the only customers who will accidentally stumble through your august portals will be too stupid to have anything for you to steal. The theory currently powering internet investment is that the people who are ‘missing’ from the internet are the ones who are too inept to have opened Bill Gates’ windows and seen the light and perhaps if we make really obvious web sites they will finally get the point. Not all .com guys are sad lonely wankers, some of them have girlfriends, wives and families, but how many of them really listen when their ‘better halves’ when they say they find the internet boring? Perhaps they are too keen to keep the four letter word side of things to themselves?
For a medium that is supposed to be based in the movement of information the internet is a remarkably monosyllabic world. The main preoccupation of the major players appears to be fixing information in one place rather than moving it around. It’s like a parliament where no one says anything and a market where no one sells anything. If you hold on to it for long enough the price will be bound to go up, but what if everybody has got bored and gone home by then? If you want to trade in secrets you need to pass them on before they become common knowledge. If you want people to believe you have to give them good information to earn their trust. There is no truth there is only opinion and behind opinion, personality. Anonymous, generic, universal concepts like books, banks, ideas, and life cannot be ring fenced and sold to the highest bidder; it is up to you to make them your own, and if you want to sell them, people need to know who you are.
Of course, the internet allows you to make this bit up, but you’d better have a good story; one that entertains and inspires and makes up for the fact that nothing is real anymore. Names and identities of e businesses have so much work to do, replacing the bricks and mortar of shop fronts, and easy phrases are easily forgotten. I don’t want to make web sites that are hard to find and hard to navigate, but I want you want me, I don’t want you to find me by accident.