"a fish, a barrel, and a smoking gun"
for 17 May 1996. Updated every WEEKDAY.
Cheat Sheet
[]
What defines genius? Cultural
historians, or even your average
click-theorist, would turn to
the tried and true examples:
Joyce and his linguistic
inventiveness; Einstein and his
otherworldly insight; Rancid and
their purity of expression.
[]
But in today's world of artistic
relativism, where any one of
us can (and unfortunately do)
play with Alien Skin, slap the
resulting image on the Web, and
call it art, there's no distinction
between true invention and
the lowest form of uninspired
crap. Not that it matters. Because
whatever praise you care to
direct at such heroes of
performance art, few of them
manage to realize the value of
their ideas in the only form
that counts - dollars of
Chrysler Building proportions.
[]
Look again at history. The people
who ended up holding true power
were, essentially, the kids who
cheated in school. The Romans
Xeroxed their entire culture
from the Greeks - one was
master, the other was slave.
When Windows got touchy-feely
with Macintosh, look who got
fucked. And every top-selling
rap CD? Essentially, a re-mixed
George Clinton album.
[]
Face it - the road to fiscal
health is paved with other
people's good inventions. And
thinking outside the box is just
an euphemism for looking over
your neighbor's shoulder.
Survival of the fittest is not
about obeying the urge to create.
It's about denying it. There is,
you see, a corollary to Darwin's
law: the extinct family groups
in the evolution game are the
ones who let the creative gene
override what's bred in the
bone. The genetic imperative -
the urge to reproduce - is
at heart, the urge to make
flawless copies. Preferably in
high enough volumes to amortize
the fixed costs.
[]
Which brings us to the true power
of the Web. Forget the boundless
opportunity to build yet another
DIY artfuck site. Forget the
supposed power of many-to-many
communications. What the Web
really offers is unregulated
packet plagiarism - a wealth of
other people's ideas to copy and
make a fast buck from. So many,
in fact, that anyone actually
creating original content on the
Web is choosing Fool's Gold.
There's a faster way to
cash out early, and cash out
often, and the true geniuses
around here are the ones who've
figured this out.
[Bags O' Cash]
Take c|net, for example. Ned
Brainard can complain all he
wants about the c|netters use of
View Source; while he whines,
Halsey Minor and Shelby Bonnie
snicker over sacks of specie
exactly because of their
absolute commitment to
uninventiveness. For c|net,
closing off the temporal lobe
has not only been brilliant, but
insanely lucrative.
[c|net TV]
For those who want to mimic
c|net's success, it's important
to recognize that they didn't
achieve their current lack of
creativity in an instant.
Unlearning, we know, is even
more difficult than learning.
Remember when c|net debuted as a
putative TV network, attempting
to create the "first" cable
network devoted solely to
computers and technology?
Remember when you last saw a
press release trumpeting this
fact?
[]
Like CMP and Mecklermedia in the
print world, c|net tried, as
best they could, to rip off the
model Ziff-Davis perfected in
the computer magazine frenzy of
the 1980s. But they still
managed to make one monumental
fuckup: their attempt to
replicate the Ziff model on TV,
not in print - and even worse,
as a cable channel - meant c|net
would need to be available 24 hours
per day, seven days per week. No one
had ever done it before! They
would, inevitably, have to make
something new. Then came the
epiphany.
[]
The true vision at c|net - or
more appropriately, the lack
thereof - must have crystallized
in the founders' minds when they
looked toward the Web as a
business development platform.
Soon enough, they had their
killer app - or, rather, they
had someone else's. They had
shareware.com.
[]
The monumental audacity of
shareware.com's crass
net.parasitism is inspiring, so
completely does it violate the
insufferable share-and-share
alike ethos of the old Internet.
Shareware and freeware software
ftp repositories, after all,
have been offered as community
resources on the net ever since
there's been a net. Who hasn't
used the wuarchive at Washington
University in St. Louis, or the
sumex-aim site at Stanford
University? If ever there was a
well-proven formula, this was it.
[]
But none of the altruistic - if
piss-poor - saps who maintained
those sites recognized the true
profit potential available in
them - or if they did, they
failed to act on that
knowledge. And without profit
potential to push them, those
sites could never accommodate the
number of users who were trying
to get into them. The c|net
team, of course, knew
immediately what needed to be
done. Copy a few files, throw
some bandwidth at it, plug in
some banners sold by an
underutilized advertising
department, and - bingo! Instant
profits!
[]
The success of shareware.com, of
course, inevitably brought
search.com. And gamecenter, if
not gamecenter.com, with
store.com sure to follow -
just a few of the URLs c|net owns
but has yet to exploit. There's
an abundant supply of communal
sites out there that c|net, or
anyone else, can rip off. And as
a model for either morality or
business practice, it is at once
more vile and more lucrative
than taking candy from a baby:
it's taking candy from a baby
and selling Xeroxes of the
wrapper back to the whole
nursery.
[]
We're so in love with this
paradigm, we'll even help with
some free advice (which perhaps
would have been pilfered
anyway). The sponsored version
of a home page directory still
remains to be built. Or the
commercially-supported guide to
online chats. The high-hit
winner, of course, would be the
amateur porn site directory. But
only, of course, if somebody
else has already done it.
And to those who doubt the wisdom
of c|net's scheme, we offer this
koan: Digital reproduction may
offer high fidelity, but digital
originality yields high fatality.
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