The web is an amazing organism. It routes around obstacles; it gives ordinary people extraordinary powers of communication; it blasts through barriers to information exchange; it rewards openness and punishes small-mindedness and corporatespeak.
So how is it that people are still screwing it up so much?
Dave Winer linked recently to a great article by Eve Andersson, one of the founders of ArsDigita, a cool web content management firm that was a pioneer in releasing web applications as open source. It details how a thriving web company was brought to its knees by venture capitalists, who came in knowing nothing about the web and dismantled everything good about the company.
Now, it could be said that it was the founders’ fault bringing in the suits in the first place, if everything was going just fine until then. I guess the lure of big bucks, especially before the internet bubble burst, was too much for most people to resist. Still, it shows how fragile the web culture can be.
The story reminded me of my former employer. We had a fun and useful web culture growing there, until some management types came in and wrecked it. They knew very little about technology and absolutely nothing about the web, and didn’t much care to learn either. Our mission and our very jobs were made irrelevant by flowcharts and directives and new complex chains of command. Where before we just jumped in and got things done, now any action meant three or four meetings and explaining things to people who couldn’t care less.
It’s no wonder I became a freelancer.