Last month, I wrote about why Second Life failed so I didn’t have to write about why Second Life failed. I mean, that post wasn’t about reasons for failure, it was about the fact of failure. My thought was that there are many people who simply assume Second Life failed, and they’re wrong, and there are many who will passionately argue that Second Life has succeeded … and they’re wrong too. Failure can only be judged by the ones who were trying to succeed.

It would be safer for me to say that failure is a matter of perspective, for surely failure passes through the same lens as beauty in the eye of the beholder. I do understand that many SL Residents were on their own journeys, and so of course they are their own best judges of the success of those journeys. But it would be an artful evasion to claim that any of those journeys, or even all of them together, constitute the sum total equation for the success of Second Life. We were trying to do something more – or at least, something else – and we failed. (Of course, I’m talking about the team and the company that I knew, years ago. The team there today is on their own journey, which I know next to nothing about.)

So if I’m willing to be this myopic and insular about judging failure, you can bet I’d be just as parochial in reviewing the reasons. I’ve seen and heard a lot of speculation that I don’t agree with: poor strategy, worse execution; lack of focus, misplaced focus; poor technology, doomed architecture; dumb marketing, uncontrollable PR; niche market, bizarre customers; crazy culture, undisciplined development; bad hiring, bad management; feckless board, dominating board, ignorant board. I’ve heard it all, and while there may be a grain of something like truth here and there, none of these things holds real explanatory power as a reason for why Second Life failed.

We failed as people. We failed as a team. Our failure was intensely personal, particular to each person involved, and ruinous to the overall team.

I’m going to switch now from “we” to “I” but I want to be really clear about why. We Lindens were all in it together, and there is a broad sense in which all credit and blame goes to all of us … but not in this post. Here, I’m talking about maybe half a dozen people, and so it would be too much of a personal attack for me to try to describe the failures of anyone other than myself. I’m willing to attack myself in this forum, but not my former colleagues, all of whom I still respect and a few of whom I love like my own family. But I want you to remember the “we” because otherwise the rest of this post is going to seem incredibly egocentric: there’s a certain kind of self-blame that’s really self-aggrandizement, and though I regard my own failures as critical, even the most deluded version of the story couldn’t claim it was all about me.

So. I failed as a person. I failed the team. I was responsible for many elements of our strategy, execution, culture and management, and those decisions aren’t the ones I regret. What I regret, to the extent that I’m capable of regretting such a rich learning experience for me, is giving up. I don’t mean at the end, when I was tired and disillusioned and looking around at a company I didn’t recognize and a future I didn’t want to live. A lot earlier than that, I gave up on people that we needed, people who were flawed and fragile but necessary. I let people fail, I let people go, I let people hide in their illusions and fears, I let them give up because I’d already given up.

The irony was, when I joined the company, I was supposed to be an experienced hand that would bring some sanity to a crazy world. But I indulged my own worst instincts - throughout the craziest times, when I could’ve done the most good, I just brought more crazy. I was having fun, but I chose my own twisted growth over a higher goal, and at times I was just plain mean or selfish or drunk. I really wasn’t ready for the opportunity that Linden Lab presented to me. I really wasn’t the guy I should’ve been when I got there; I didn’t know what I needed to know until I left.

Too many of the key leaders at the Lab were working through similarly damaging personal limitations. You might ask whether this really points to a failure in culture or hiring or leadership, and that would be a fair question. It’s true that Linden had a way of hiring certain kinds of people and forcing them to confront their own deepest flaws – but I think that’s beautiful, a feature not a bug. What we needed was one or more or all of us to conquer our flaws, to enable the entire team to rise above the limitations of each of us. But none of us defeated our own demons, and so all of us perished.

I’ve been gone from Linden Lab for over two and a half years, and still my failure haunts me. The last day of the year is always a good moment to come to terms with the passage of time, and this New Year’s Eve I’ve decided I should finally accept the fact that I’m never going to let it go. I’ll try to reach peace through the zen realization that peace is unattainable.

‘Anything can happen now that we’ve slid over this bridge,’ I thought; ‘anything at all ….’

Race plays no significant role in The Great Gatsby, unless you adopt the ludicrous assertion that Gatsby was black. Here is the only page with a meaningful composition involving black characters. Nick sees three black passengers in a limousine with a white chauffeur, and this observation is enough to inspire wonderment at the limitless possibilities beyond the border into New York City.

Fitzgerald was only three generations removed from the Civil War, so the upheaval in the social order that he saw in the roles of the limousine riders is understandable. But there’s something he considered more improbable than that: ‘Even Gatsby could happen, without any particular wonder.’ What was so fantastic about Gatsby that we should compare his existence to the reversal of centuries of slavery?

Gatsby was a bootlegger, a scammer, a fixer, a criminal through and through. And yet he was a successful social climber, welcomed in high society and regarded as mysterious rather than despicable. But this deception isn’t enough to rate the idea of Gatsby as improbable.

What’s improbable is Gatsby’s desire, particularly his desire in juxtaposition to his contemptible reality. His dream of lost love is a desire for purity and innocence that he’ll never have – not because the time has passed, but because of the person he is. He is a criminal and no matter how wealthy or charming or famous he may become, in his actions and in his heart, he is an evildoer.

It may be that every bad man desires to have some part of his life that is unsullied by his participation – the robber who gives to the poor, the gangster that supports the neighborhood, the vigilante that protects the weak. But no action ever redeems the sinner who can’t reform his own twisted soul. Gatsby’s problem wasn’t that he couldn’t repeat the past, but that he wouldn’t have done anything differently even if he could. The idea that you can be bad and join your rotting heart to something good is the most improbable conceit of all.

Slate published an article titled “Why Second Life Failed” that also, like this post, is not an elucidation of reasons why SL failed – but unlike this post, it is not an authentic attempt to support the proposition that SL indeed failed. It is simply an effort to market a new book by posting an article with a catchy headline. There is an unavoidable paradox in that any marketable headline with the structure “Why [X] Failed” must use for X something that has first achieved at least some significant success, otherwise the title would be too obscure to attract readers. I started a company called Bynamite that folded after less than two years – no one writes articles titled “Why Bynamite Failed” because no one’s ever heard of Bynamite.

This mild paradox isn’t sufficient defense for SL’s ardent users and thoughtful critics. As is often the case with posts about SL’s demise, the comments to the Slate article are full of well-informed, intelligent and passionate conversation that puts the original article to shame. At Terra Nova, Greg Lastowka suggests that SL remains fertile ground for study, with the pointed rejoinder that “Second Life never failed – the media reporting on Second Life failed.”

As a former Linden, I appreciate the desire to insist that Second Life hasn’t failed. I joined Linden Lab in 2005, at a time when we had a few dozen employees and registered users in the tens of thousands. By the time I left four years later, we had around 7 times the number of employees, several hundred times as many users, and almost a hundred times the revenue. It certainly felt like success to me. I left sated with a feeling of accomplishment, and great hope for the future of Second Life.

But I also left feeling depleted. We had stumbled our way from obscurity to something like prominence, but I didn’t know how to take it to the next level. We weren’t making progress despite having bountiful talent, desire and resources. We had a beautiful company, a real culture of beauty and love, genuine emotion for each other and for the world we were helping to build. And it wasn’t working, not well enough and not fast enough and not big enough.

Perhaps there never was a next level. Perhaps it was always the destiny of Second Life to be an innovative niche product for a select group of people, a worthy subject of serious study, a constantly evolving emporium of edge cases. Maybe we should have just hunkered down, and focused on maintaining an elaborate playground for only a select audience of passionate and creative people. We could eke out a fine living, and damn the rest of the world who just didn’t get it.

But I couldn’t damn the rest of the world, because dammit, I’m from that rest of the world. I was never a true Resident of Second Life; I was a visitor, an outsider with the good fortune to see the incredible things that people can do in a truly free environment. I was inspired, amazed and delighted by Second Life – as well as occasionally revolted, offended and demoralized – and the diversity and depth of this experience was a revelation to me, one that I believed that everyone can appreciate.

And I still believe that, which is why I have to accept that Second Life has failed (so far, we must always say so far). The reality is that Second Life is still a niche product, and to deny that I wanted it to be something more would dishonor the heartbreaking glory of our ambition. It’s fair to say that Facebook became our second life, but it’s also shortsighted. Not so long ago, people laughed at the proposition that anyone wanted to maintain a virtual presence online that could form the basis of social interaction. Facebook did put an end to the dismissive chuckles on that topic.

But it’s equally laughable to say that this is where we’ll stop, that the final destination of online interaction consists of wall posts and text messages in two dimensions. I still believe that there’s no sensible way to define an impassible boundary between where we are today and a time when people “live” in a three-dimensional virtual environment. I’m still a true believer, an old true Linden in that way. So I have to admit that Second Life has failed.

So far.

Praise follows death like the glowing debris that trails a comet, and the writing in the sky says that Jobs was the greatest CEO ever. A few muted voices remember that he was famously harsh to work with, but this is universally regarded as an entirely justified mania for perfection. Considering his accomplishments, it seems almost irrelevant that he denied the obligations of paternity for one child, and consciously decided that his children should know him through biography rather than time spent with him, even – or especially – in the final stretch towards death, when the remaining time must be remorselessly allotted like oxygen in a sealed room.

This isn’t criticism of a great man. It’s a reminder that many of us would willingly make the same choices, were such greatness within our reach.

We say it’s not so, and try to believe it. We encourage each other to remember family, remember health, remember that a life of striving includes the quest to achieve a full and humane life through our work. But the life of Jobs is the story of his jobs, of his one true job: making a dent in the universe through the creation of products that become a part of our lives. For his success in that, we forgive and excuse his personality defects. We cannot blame a man for failing to uphold principles that we would throw aside ourselves if only we could be assured that the universe was malleable to our touch.

Saying that “you are not your job“ is a comfort; it alleviates the cognitive dissonance between your self-image and the productive economic output you contribute to the world. The lessons of Steve Jobs deny that comfort; his strongest exhortations insist that you are all about the things you make for the world – not for yourself, not for your hobbies or leisure, not even for your family and certainly not your friends if you have any. You have to do great work, never settle, remember that each day could be your last, don’t waste time living someone else’s life.

There is no obligation to community, family or friendship in these words – though strangely, there is an overwhelming commitment to society in the desire to dent the universe, for this is not a universe of cold cosmological phenomena, it’s a universe of people, and his ambition is all about changing how people live. For Jobs, if this ambition involved sacrifices of a more universal personal nature, there is no question that it was worth it. It was worth it for him, and his efforts were certainly worth it for us.

It’s touching to see the determination with which Jobs’ sayings are repeated in the wake of his death. But the message of his most appealing words isn’t quite the message of his life. He told us to follow our hearts, to trust our intuitions, to ask ourselves if our plan for this day is how we’d want to spend our last. But those are not goals, they are only beautiful means to an uncompromising end. The goal of Jobs was to be insanely great in a world-changing way. That’s the hard part of the message to understand. All of us can hope to understand what is in our own hearts, and can hope to have the courage to follow it. Almost no one alive has a realistic ambition to change the world – what many of us think of as world changing is merely interesting, hopefully entertaining, and possibly enriching.

My wife was screaming about something on TV, but I couldn’t get out of bed. My head was heavy with flu, the sounds couldn’t penetrate the haze of mucus and sick. We had moved to San Francisco from New York two and a half years ago. I still missed The City, still missed the feeling of living in the giant beating heart of the world, a heart that pounded with the rhythm of my own. I grew up in a Jersey suburb 45 minutes from the Holland Tunnel. One of the few reliable moments of magic in my youth was the anticipation of a trip to NYC, which peaked the moment the towers came into view around a bend in the turnpike. The towers were monumental, elemental, permanent – I could no more imagine the city without them than the sky without the sun.

But a plane had just crashed into one of them. Surely an accident, I’ll read about it tomorrow when I’m over this flu. My wife is still yelling, and I bury my head deeper into the pillow and ignore the looming reality. And then the second plane into the second tower. Now even my virus-addled mind has enough strength to put together the picture, or maybe, isn’t strong enough to construct an alternate interpretation. It’s not an accident. The towers are coming down, the world is ending. I finally roll out of bed with just enough momentum to come to rest in front of the TV, where I sit slackjawed for the next two days, watching the grim images pile up, the towers falling, bodies falling, people running, debris and dust and ineffable dismay, the pictures and posters of the lost.

A call from the office asks when I’m coming in, gentle but insistent. I don’t know, it doesn’t matter, I’d already decided I couldn’t do this work anymore, before that day. And now, these people, they couldn’t understand, with their happy California sunshine and bleeding optimism. They couldn’t understand what it meant to turn a corner of anticipation and be greeted only by empty sky. I wanted nothing of them. I wanted to go back, back home, back East. Now that trip could seem like a run to a ravaged home rather than a run from a broken promise.

But that was a problem; the excuse was too easy and at the same time, insurmountable. I could tell myself that I was going home to help, but no one could look at that smouldering hole in the earth and believe in selfish lies. I wasn’t running to help, I was running away, away from expectations, dissatisfactions, disappointments. The loss of September 11 deserved better than to serve as easy explanation.

Four months later, I had quit the firm but hadn’t left the Bay Area. My life had become unmoored from a certain stable career path, into a meandering decade of exploration and discovery, of triumph and loss and the subtle closeness of the two, of searching for monuments to fill the hole in the sky.

I was sure the request would be something utterly fantastic and for a moment I was sorry I’d ever set foot on his overpopulated lawn.

Gatsby warns Nick he’s “going to make a big request of you today,” but he won’t ask him directly, leaving it up to Jordan Baker to ask Nick at lunch later in the day. Nick claims to be more annoyed than interested, but this can’t possibly be true. It’s another example of Nick lying to himself and lying to us as readers.

Nick already knows Gatsby as the most mysterious figure he’s ever met, and surely the elaborate setup for the request must pique his curiosity. From a certain point of view, Nick’s right to treat the request as unworthy of the anticipation, and wrong to think it would be utterly fantastic. Instead, it’s a modest demand of impossible proportions – Gatsby only wants Nick to invite his cousin Daisy to tea, and have Gatsby drop by for a casually non-coincidental reunion. Gatsby only wants to recreate the past, to renew the idealized romance of his youth.

Fitzgerald believed that the great and small can share the same prosaic longings. He would have approved of the notion that somebody like Citizen Kane would spend his last breath on the name of a sled. In his day, some critics felt that Fitzgerald should be slightly regarded because his concerns weren’t sufficiently serious – he didn’t write about racism or poverty or bullfighting or war or incest. Almost a decade after the publication of The Great Gatsby, Fitzgerald complained, “I had recently been kidded half hay-wire by critics who felt that my material was such as to preclude all dealing with mature persons in a mature world. But, my God! it was my material, and it was all I had to deal with.”

All he had to deal with was the problem of the past as both anchor and engine for an unattainable future. Orchestrating a chance meeting is a small request, but reviving lost love would really be something utterly fantastic.

In an excerpt in the WSJ, Lutz phrases a classic question of executive management, about the tension between leading by example or by autocratic demand:

I had to ask myself, and still do today, if it is the proper role … to get down in the trenches for hours on end, teaching the love of perfection in the smallest details when perhaps a more impatient autocrat would simply have ordered—nay, demanded—that it happen ….

This question has been asked and debated across many industries over many years. In information technology, we’ve seen different answers at HP, Intel, Microsoft, Google, Apple and Facebook. Often within the same company, the story swings between democratic (“emergent” is the trendier term) and autocratic over time, but you could roughly say that HP and Google have been known for emergent corporate cultures, and Intel, Microsoft, Apple and Facebook have been thought of as more autocratic. The public imagination tends to favor stories based on a single personality as leader, so it is likely that every tale of an “autocratic” workplace radically overstates the effect that any one person can have on a large organization.

But still, leaders matter even in the most emergent management styles, and Lutz’s question is a deep one. The tension exists because when a leader is right, autocratic demand will always lead to the best outcome in the shortest possible time – but no one is always right, and the flip side is that autocratic demand leads to the most disastrous failures very quickly when the leader is wrong. Emergent management is an attempt to institutionalize greatness over a long period of time, a period exceeding the career length of any single leader. Lutz asks the right questions again:

But does the autocrat, no matter how gifted, create sustainable success? Or does his style drive away other capable leaders who would form a leadership team after the great man’s departure? . . .

The fact is, though, that my effort to instill into the organization a drive for perfection and customer delight in all things was successful. And still I wonder—was I right? Did I change the core of the product development culture by teaching, or did I rely too much on my own will and my considerable influence to get what I wanted?

Strikingly, Lutz is haunted by the failure of his lessons to stick at Chrysler. He had left that company secure in the knowledge that his standards and principles were permanently embedded in the corporate culture. But it didn’t work – new leadership quickly shifted the company into a bean-counting mentality, and the passion he’d invested there evaporated as easily as spilled alcohol. He thinks there will be a different outcome at GM, but it’s not clear why there’s any reason to believe this.

I find some divisions in Lutz’s dichotomy questionable: an autocratic leader can certainly get down in the trenches, and an emergent leader can certainly demand great results. I agree that sustainable success is the ultimate arbiter of greatness – but if the company doesn’t succeed through crisis points, which sometimes require an autocratic hand, then it will not have the chance to measure a track record over generations of leadership. So I would say that a company – and its leaders – have to be able to master both styles, and most crucially, know when and how to switch from one to the other.

I saw him opening a chest of rubies to ease, with their crimson-lighted depths, the gnawings of his broken heart.

Gatsby carries around a couple of souvenirs to support the stories of his fantastic past: a war medal from Montenegro, a picture in an Oxford quad. These trinkets provide a tangible base to solidify his gauzy stories in the listener’s imagination; their production in conversation acts as a talisman that makes the stories real. But in the end these physical objects are signifiers for false tales – like building a castle in the air on a base of lily pads.

Gatsby’s use of his souvenirs seems childish and manipulative, but they’re only a more unique and imaginative application of a universal technique. In anyone’s life, what are the stories supported by driving a certain kind of car, or wearing a particular watch, or a wedding ring? These things are not manifestations of the truth; they are symbols of a story, objects we use to paint the brushstrokes of the picture we present to the world.

There’s truth only in action and emotion, not objects, and at the end Gatsby sums up, ‘You see I usually find myself among strangers because I drift here and there trying to forget the sad thing that happened to me.‘ The truth is, he is alone in the world, without friends and without a home, unable to escape from the traveling prison of his own regrets.

He lifted the words up and nodded at them – with his smile.

The Great Gatsby contains very little physical description of the man named Gatsby. Instead there is a careful magic enchanting the narrative, where Gatsby’s effect on others is described through the dark whispers of his reputation. Even when we do get a treatment of a physical feature – in this case, Gatsby’s smile – we do not see the whiteness of his teeth, whether his lips are thin or full, where the creases of past humor line his face. There’s no imagery here, only effect. We see the effect of his smile on the words that pass through his mouth, and we understand the effect of his personality on the listener. We get a sense of his controlling charisma, his ability to invest the most outlandish story with something pure from his heart.

He’s describing a romantic fantasy in which he travels the earth in riches, ‘trying to forget something very sad that had happened to me long ago.‘ The story is ludicrous. Nick says, ‘The very phrases were worn so threadbare that they evoked no image except that of a turbaned “character” leaking sawdust at every pore …‘ But by the end, with his smile, Gatsby makes it all true.

I’m not too flexible about the term, unlike those who believe in four types of entrepreneurs. I think an entrepreneur makes a for-profit business that didn’t exist before, without the benefit of existing infrastructure. That rules out what some call social entrepreneurship, because working for nonprofit good is too different than pursuit of viable commercial enterprise. And it rules out corporate entrepreneurship, because starting a new division or business line for an existing company is very different from starting a company from a cocktail napkin.

I said different – I didn’t say harder or more admirable. The numbers probably say that social and corporate efforts are harder, as there seem to be more new companies than there are new social efforts or successful businesses started within large companies.

I’ll differentiate some more: Although I’d include both the fruit stand owner and the tech company titan within my view of entrepreneurs, I don’t think they’re the same in most ways, even at their respective starts. Fruit stands aim for some daily living, selling a well-understood product, within a social infrastructure that understands and supports the concept of buying and eating fruit. The most extreme tech founder dreams of all the money imaginable, with a product that initially seems bizarre, with no apparent revenue model, distribution channel, or plausible customer interest. Although these two kinds of people have something in common, they have a lot more differences. So “entrepreneur” isn’t a binary label – it’s possible for one entrepreneur to be more entrepreneurial than another. Labels are most useful when we use them to distinguish and measure concepts. I don’t like seeing a meaningful word diluted to appease egos or ease conversation.

Because the company I work for now is fairly well known, I should doubly-triply-quadruply emphasize that this is all my opinion, and moreover it’s my opinion about me. I can believe that for many entrepreneurs, coming to Google doesn’t mean that your days as an entrepreneur are over – those entrepreneurs are more entrepreneurial than I ever was, which I’ve admitted isn’t a high bar.

And although I’m still a startup guy at heart, I can believe that Google can in important ways return to its startup roots, even though I’m naturally inclined to disbelieve that a large company can have the “energy, pace and soul of a startup.” But I’d say that you have to measure the energy and pace in the context of the scale of the ambition. People who think that Google is slow or that the competition is anything other than the unknown future are probably underestimating the enormous opportunity remaining in the information economy.

Ah, but that last bit, the “soul” of a startup … what does that even mean? That’s tricky, and probably the topic of another post.

To be fair, 7 out of the 9 jobs were really a single job to me:  learning how to be an entrepreneur in Silicon Valley.  I’ve learned some good lessons, and although I didn’t achieve the outcomes I aimed for, I’m not sad about the experiences of the last dozen years.  How can I be sad?  After all, everything I’ve learned only gives me fodder for another book . . .

I’m going to title this book The Age of Illusions.  If I can do this properly, I’ll be working on three intertwining themes:

Illusions of youth.  In your 20s and 30s, you’re at the peak of your powers, or at least in the prime of your unrestrained ambitions.  You’re out of childhood, with the energy of youth and none of the detritus of age. Maybe I’m taking turning 40 too seriously, but I mean this as a celebration, not as resignation:  If you haven’t crashed into a wall by the time you’re 40, you’re doing it wrong.  If you haven’t learned your limitations the hard way, you wasted the resilience of youth.

Illusions of enterprise.  My core work experience of the last decade was at a startup that could be considered the most successful failure of the Internet age.  Changing the world is hard, and most of the people who say they’re doing it aren’t even really trying.  At Linden Lab, we weren’t just trying to change the world, we were trying to recreate it in a better image.  We didn’t get where we wanted to be.  Some say that failure is a badge of honor, but I can only agree with that sentiment where the goal was so great that even trying is reasonably regarded as lunacy.

Illusions of empire.  The first decade of this millenium was a rollicking cascade of unreal events.  The background of all of our tales of this decade may be the end of the American empire.  It’s a story too large for me to tell with my limited skills, but somehow I have to acknowledge that I’m fingerpainting on the canvas of epochal history.

Folks, don’t hold your breath:  I estimate that it’ll take me almost six years to write this book.  I think I’ll only average around a page per week, and I’m aiming for at least 300 pages.  Ah well – it’s nice to have a slot filled for those annual resolutions all the way through 2016.

Happy New Year!

So my first impression, that he was a person of some undefined consequence, had gradually faded and he had become simply the proprietor of an elaborate roadhouse next door.

Here’s another fine example of Fitzgerald’s ability to compress a complicated series of human behavior into a seemingly innocent and simple sentence.  Nick’s next door neighbor lives in a mansion so grand that it makes the surrounding houses look like serfs’ huts.  Gatsby is famed for his extravagant parties and mysterious background, his reputation redolent with hints of bootlegging and murder.

But you can’t remain in awe of your immediate surroundings for very long.  Humans have an enormous capacity to adapt to the most unnatural conditions.  Living next to a man with extreme wealth and fascinating identity, Nick simply packs all strangeness away into a corner of his mind where a mansion becomes a roadhouse and a living cypher is just another neighbor.

Your first impression is so often right, you’ve got to learn how to listen to your instincts.  You may lack the time, energy or desire to push your senses beyond the facade the world presents to you – but everything really worth finding out is on the other side.

Also on this page, Gatsby blurts out an uncomfortable question to Nick, “What’s your opinion of me anyhow?” Fitzgerald doesn’t answer in dialogue, but has his narrator describe, ‘A little overwhelmed I began the generalized evasions which that question deserves.‘ I love the meta-descriptive quality here: the question is so baldly inept that Nick can’t and won’t answer in detail, and the exchange itself is crucially irrelevant, so the narrator’s description of his answer is itself a generalization and evasion, which is the what the reader deserves, if only because the writer constructed this tiny trap. Gatsby seems like a simple story, but it’s these little land mines of writerly genius that make the work endure.

As a startup founder, whenever anyone tells you that your idea won’t work, that it won’t be popular, that no one will care, that no one wants it – you hear all of this as: “Your baby is ugly.”  Founders invest time, money, emotion and the goodwill of their friends and family into the company; it really can feel like raising a baby. It saddens me that I haven’t been able to find a home for our pride and joy.

I couldn’t even get the company “acqhired” - that is, have our company acquired merely in order to hire Ian and me.  That kind of “hacquisition” seems pretty common around Silicon Valley these days, but I failed to get it done.  It hardly makes a difference though – a hire wrapped up in a sale is merely a mask.  Our goal wasn’t to build a resume in the form of a company, we were aiming a lot higher than just getting hired.  It’s important to own your failures, and this experience has certainly given me plenty to learn from.

But I’m proud of what we were able to do in the time we had.  We put out a beautiful service that received nice launch coverage and some industry mindshare.  Serious publications highlighted Bynamite as a useful tool and a company to watch.  We took a little shot at the opportunity and had good enough results to seriously question why we won’t take it further.  I’ll probably detail and try to answer those questions in a later post, but not for a while.

In the meantime, I still have a passion for the relationship between online advertisers and consumers.  To the extent my new duties allow, I’ll keep Bynamite up as a hobby project outside of work.  I’ll consider selling the assets to someone who cares about the product, or perhaps even turn it into an open source or otherwise community-supported effort.  If you have any ideas about what to do with Bynamite, feel free to comment here or send me a note via LinkedIn.

He was balancing himself on the dashboard of his car with that resourcefulness of movement that is so peculiarly American – that comes, I suppose, with the absence of lifting work or rigid sitting in youth and, even more, with the formless grace of our nervous, sporadic games.

The Great Gatsby is a candidate for the spurious crown of “the great American novel,” so it’s interesting to consider this passage, the only sentence in the novel that seriously applies the term “American” to mannerisms that amount to a description of national character.  (There’s one other sentence, more famous, but less serious, in the next chapter: “Americans, while occasionally willing to be serfs, have always been obstinate about being peasantry.“)  Of course, the entire novel is about America and Americanness, but in this sentence the term is explicit.

Fitzgerald doesn’t pick an idea, an opinion or political view.  He doesn’t pick an ethnicity, race, color or class. Instead, he focuses on an inchoate mark of physicality – resourcefulness of movement – as the mark of an American.  This may seem odd, but if you’re American and have ever traveled in a foreign land where you should appear ethnically similar to the natives, you may have noticed what he’s talking about here.  Though you may wear the clothes of their country and make every attempt to appear at home, you are routinely marked by the locals as an American, just at a mere glance and before you even open your mouth.  How did they know?

Maybe “resourcefulness of movement” is the best way to describe it.  In this country, most of us grow up far from the farm, aspirations run away from manual labor, our schooling lacks what other countries consider discipline, we glorify play and try to weave it into both school and work.  These are deep sociological differences from many other nations, too complex to explain briefly, and too restlessly ingrained to avoid vibrating through your body and into the very air around you.

Today’s example: The Internet is a new platform for consumer media. That’s a striking revelation . . . in maybe 1994 or perhaps as late as 1998. This may be hard to believe today, but there was a time when it was revelatory to describe the Internet as a new form of popular media, rather than as a niche technology.  Today most people would declare the Internet as the second most important form of media (behind TV).  It seems so obvious now that the Internet is a consumer media delivery system.  And yet, it’s easy to find ways to overcomplicate this simple picture.

Take for example the argument over whether The Web Is Dead. Putting aside the easiest objection – that many claims of death are exaggerated – the thesis basically says that “the Web” was supposed to be this great open playground that changed the world forever, but a variety of closed systems now threaten the promised paradise. We are supposed to get hysterical over the idea that content that was free on the Web will not be free forever, and that there will be special access channels that only some people will be able to afford.

But the Web isn’t dying, it’s just evolving the way that consumer media have always evolved.  The history of consumer media is littered with similar patterns of free and paid content, amateur and professional content, sponsored and bought content. There are many examples where a new medium was popularly established with free content, and evolved into a tiered system of both free and paid content. Look at television – once it was free (i.e. ad-supported), then cable TV came along with both an ad-subsidized paid model (basic cable) and an ad-free paid content model (e.g. HBO, PPV).

The same thing is happening with this wondrous new medium of the Internet, and the most wondrous thing of all is that anyone thought it would be any different.  The Internet is wonderful and has changed many things in the consumer content landscape, in terms of interactivity, variety, engagement, and low production and distribution costs. But one thing it hasn’t changed is that consumer media, as a whole industry, will always trend toward payment for quality content, and toward concentration of media power in the hands of a relatively small number of players.

I wish that weren’t true, but it is true today and will always be true for as long as we remain human beings.

We like to think that technology frees us from the scarcity-based economics of the past.  And it’s true that changes in scarcity can free up new business models.  But there is no kind or amount of technological advancement that can eliminate scarcity in two areas:

• Quality. Quality content is by definition scarce: no matter how great the aggregate improvement in overall quality, there will always be some portion that is better than the rest. The development and application of new technology to content only heightens the divide, not flattens it – because the quality of the content includes not just artistic merit but its presentation and convenience to the consumer.
• Attention. Human attention is limited, both in the aggregate and for any individual. No matter what automatic aggregation, filtering, or curation tool is ever developed, we can’t radically increase the finite amount of real human attention for consuming media. Even if we develop technology that actually stops time, our biology dictates a finite attention span – there’s only so many hours of media a brain can absorb in a day, no matter how long the day is.*

Since quality is scarce and attention is finite, there will always be an opportunity to charge money for the best content – and since this includes charging for the best quality presentation and delivery, it means that there will necessarily be a two (or more) tiered Internet. You can call it surrender, you can call it the death of the Web, you can call it whatever you want – but recognize that it’s progress, it’s evolution, it’s the future as well as the past.

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On a related (and more obscure) note, lately there’s been a lot of conversation about the evolution of certain parts of the venture capital business. I can’t do the whole conversation justice – but basically the narrative is that there is a new mode of investing in the consumer Internet sector, with smaller but smarter initial investments, giving rise to an expanding birthrate of web startups, and raising the specter of a seed investor bubble.  Again I’d ask, should we try to understand all this as a new phenomenon, or is this just a different variation of a familiar pattern?

Consider that a lot of “Consumer Internet” is no longer mostly about technology development, it is about media content development. From that perspective, a lot of the shifts in venture investing are about a certain class of savvy investors becoming media investors instead of technology investors. They’re not evolving to some kind of new model of investing, but cycling into the model of investing that you see in more mature content production businesses.

I think that consumer Internet investors will become more and more like television producers and financiers, and less like “hard” technology investors.  If that’s right, you’ll stop seeing conversation about equity vs convertible debt, and will instead see a move toward the revenue-sharing model that is common in the TV and movie industry.

Some people will regard this theory as idiotic, controversial and even demeaning (if you think being a TV producer is worse than being a VC), but for me it’s just doubling back to the basic insight that the Internet is a new platform for consumer media.  Now that the original mid-’90′s revelation has come true, you can expect that the investment economics will repeat old patterns more than they create new ones.

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* I realize that there are people who believe that in the future, technology could enhance brain function as well as create endless renewable energy – making essentially limitless time and capacity to enjoy leisure activities, including consumption of media.  Without opining on the likelihood of that future, I’d just note that it’s a future in which we are no longer human, as we understand humanity today.

The first hundred times or so I heard “You gotta love yourself,” I thought:  ”No I don’t.  You don’t tell me what I gotta do.”  Then I began to ask “Why?” and I finally heard a reason that made some sense to me.

Loving yourself requires accepting your faults, and accepting your faults gives you more options for how to react in any situation. That’s a quantifiable rationale, testable both in theory and in practice – and as a bonus the measurement also gives guidance on whether you’ve taken self-love too far.  Here’s a simplified example:

Let’s say you receive a bad outcome that is at least partially based on something you did.  Here is a count of your options for how to react -

• Self-hate: Since you will blame yourself to the exclusion of other factors, you only have two choices: (1) rigorously apply yourself to skills improvement, even though it’s likely that no amount of improvement would have given a different result, or (2) drink enough to obliterate your self-hating identity.
• Self-love, of the over-indulgent kind: Certainly the outcome wasn’t your fault, so your choices are (1) smugly wait for the next chance for the world the properly join you in your love of you, or (1) ignore any possible evidence that your actions contributed to failure.  Yes, those are numbered the same because they are the same.
• Goldilocks self-love, the kind where you love yourself just right: You can be clear-eyed about what really happened.  You can apply yourself to change, you can recognize the factors that were out of your control, you can put the outcome out of your mind in good humor and good health.  You can do all of these things and you probably will.

Basically, loving yourself just right gives you all of the options of the other two conditions, with the additional optionality that comes from not being ideologically compelled to react in a way that is harmful or indulgent.  You gotta love yourself just right, because the alternatives are suboptimal.  Sure, that’s a particularly dry and uninspiring way to put it, but what can I tell ya, I love this way because it’s mine.

So when I tell you that “We are all authors of our own lives” – I don’t mean to trumpet the primacy of your own role in shaping your destiny, even though that’s a useful bit of affirmation.  I mean for you to think about the process of authorship, the task of writing a story from both facts and fantasy over many years.

Whether you realize it or not, you carry around a story in your head about who you are.  You draft, write and rewrite your internal explanation of the kind of person you are, the character you have, the things you will and will not do.  This work of self-conception is the greatest novel ever written, or at least it should be for you.

Early on, very little of your story is constrained by actual events, since you’re too young to have been in all of the situations you anticipate that you’ll experience.  You have the freedom of your imagination, and you write your story based on what you’ve seen in your family, friends and others in life and fiction.  You’ll imagine, for example, that you’re just like your dad, or not at all like your mom, or a bit like Al Pacino in Scarface, or a lot like Lindsey Lohan on Twitter.  Then as you grow older, your story becomes a lot more personalized to you, based more on your experiences and less on your aspirations.

You have years, maybe decades, to write your beautiful story of who you are, and then something happens. It may be one traumatic event, or a series of little events that are only clearly related in retrospect – but it’s something that happens that doesn’t fit into the story you’ve been spending your whole life on to that point. You thought you were a good guy, but then you did something that was undeniably bad.  You thought you were an honest woman, but you then you’re confronted with your repeated pattern of little lies.

You race back to your story, flipping madly through the pages of the Book of You.  Who is this person in this story?  Who is this stranger living this life, holding this tattered book in shaky hands?  Can these possibly be the same person?  Faced with this disconnect between your life’s work as an author, and the actual facts of your life, you have two choices:  You can rewrite your story to fit the facts, or you can rewrite the facts to fit your story.

Perhaps this is the point where I’m supposed to say that the facts are sacrosanct, and your job as an author is to fit the story to the facts.  But no:  I said you were an author, I didn’t say you were a journalist, and I can’t presume to tell you what kind of story you’re writing. You have to make the choice that satisfies your art as the author of your own life.

Maybe you’ll just choose straightforward reporting, because you do want to match the story exactly to the facts.  Or you might be like Mark Twain, writing fiction truer than fact; or Jack Kerouac, making facts into truthful fiction.  I wouldn’t advise going full-on into fantasy, with complete disregard for any events from reality.  Not because it’s wrong, but because all of the best fantasies are rooted in something real.  As an author, you’re an artist, and art without truth is trivial, and you don’t want your life to be trivial.

Finally, be aware that we are all engaged in these acts of authorship.  You can get very far in understanding other people if you think about the story they’ve written in their own heads, and observe what they do with facts that don’t match the story.

• To each his own.
• One man’s trash is another man’s treasure.
• It’s apples and oranges.
• It’s all good.

But I don’t like these easy sayings, because it’s not all good – what I’m trying to get across is hard to understand and hard to live, and has little relation to the soft-headed permissiveness implied in those easy clichés.

This happens to be the only life lesson that I actually learned in a classroom as the direct subject of a lecture, and this lecture justified a year of college tuition all on its own.  ”Incommensurability” is a simple enough concept – it just means that there are things that do not share a common standard of measurement, like the proverbial apples and oranges.

Apples aren’t oranges, could anything be simpler?  But it struck me as a thunderbolt to understand how this affects the search for the good life.  I’d always thought that the task of living a good life was largely about understanding the difference between good and bad.  Maybe I’ve got a moral compass that doesn’t have a reliable fix on true north, but that difference hasn’t always been obvious to me.

As life goes on, it has become easier to tell the difference between good and bad – or rather, it’s become harder to delude myself into believing that that there isn’t a difference or that I can’t see it.  Now I can see that choosing between good and bad was simply the entry-level exam for the good life.  The hard task of living a good life is to choose among things that are good that can’t be compared with one another.

Choosing among incommensurable goods is sad because you are by definition choosing not to do things that are good.  You know that the choices you make will sacrifice things that you would also like to have.  The good things you choose may be vastly outnumbered by the good things that you gave up.  And yet, your choices are a triumph that isn’t second-best to any other set of choices.

One of the great things about understanding this is that you won’t be limited, as many people are, to only having friends who have generally made the same moral choices that you have.  You’ll be able to see that others chose among the same set of incommensurable goods that you did, and even if they made different choices, they are still people who share a common sense of good with you.

Just to make sure that this isn’t interpreted with a mushy morality that I actually despise:  This doesn’t mean that everything and everyone is all good, it doesn’t mean that any set of choices is as good as any other, it doesn’t mean that you can be friends with anyone, it doesn’t mean that there’s no difference between good and bad.  It just means that many goods are incommensurable, and you should think carefully about what that means as you make your choices for a good life.

Now, maybe you’ve never had that superpower smartness – that’s also a good thing.  Because that means you may have had a chance to observe really smart people at the height of their powers, glorying in their intelligence and in love with their knowledge of the world.  And you may have achieved a striking insight that is beyond the understanding of many smart people, a special insight that seems to routinely escape the most massive intellect.  This insight is painfully obvious to everyone else:  Smart people suck.

Intelligence is a largely genetic trait that is also substantially influenced by environment and circumstance.  In this way, it’s a lot like height.  So before we talk more about smart people, let’s talk about tall people for a bit.  Tall people get some pretty nice prizes from winning the genetic lottery.  Tall people make more money and find more attractive mates.  Height provides some advantage in many sports, and is a virtual requirement for success in some.  So being tall is overall a good thing.

And here’s the point:  Tall people know they’re lucky.  They know that they have an advantage in life that others don’t have, and they know that they did very little to secure this advantage.  They also know that to maximize their advantage, they have to add their own efforts – if they want to make the team, get the job, get the girl or guy – they have to eat right, work out, study hard, take care of their skin, hair and personality.

Not so with smart people.  Even though smart people are generally aware of the genetic, environmental and circumstantial contributions to their intelligence, they rarely think of these as luck.  Instead, smart people tend to think they’re better than other people because they’re smart, not because they’re lucky.  And smart people often think that the world owes them something merely for being smart, as opposed to being diligent, sincere or personable.  Smart people think that being smart should be enough, where tall people know that being tall is just a start.

The problem with intelligence is that it does, to some extent, make up for the absence of other admirable qualities.  Smart people can get the same or better results as others even when they work less, care less and cooperate less.  Intelligence is a crutch. And a smart person who leans on that crutch to the detriment of other important traits can become a monstrously malformed person.  Intelligence is used worst when it’s used as a crutch to escape the hard work of being human.

People who give advice usually believe that some particular experience has given them an authority that others might want to regard seriously.  That isn’t the case with me:  although I’ve had many instructive experiences, I don’t think my historical record is what makes me qualified to give advice, and I don’t think everyone should take my advice seriously.  Instead, what makes me qualified to give advice is that I am spectacularly bad at taking it.

I’ve had the great good fortune of having many wise people tell me many wise things, and my usual practice is to squander that good fortune by refusing to take even the best advice at face value.  Instead, I question, I doubt, I criticize, I experiment, I delve down dark alleyways of impulse and instinct – and in the end I painfully find that I should have listened to the wisdom of my betters.

The problem with wise advice is that you have to have wisdom to appreciate it beforehand.  And if you had the requisite wisdom in the first place, you wouldn’t need the advice so badly.  I never understand good advice until I’ve had the opportunity to fail to follow it.  Only by living the bad consequences first-hand can I understand the underpinning that upholds solid wisdom.

Let’s hope that my misfortune is your bounty in these next four posts.

1. Intelligence is a crutch.
2. Many goods are incommensurable.
3. We are all authors of our own lives.
4. You gotta love yourself.

We launched our beta product at Bynamite about a month ago, and were lucky to get covered in the New York Times.  I wish this post could be about “How To Get Covered in The New York Times,” because that would be some really valuable information for the startup community.  But we were simply very lucky – a friend introduced us to a potential business partner who was really interested in our story, who introduced us to the Times reporter, who had been thinking and writing about related issues for a long time.  Everyone in the chain was very thoughtful and patiently dedicated to understanding what, if anything, is interesting about what we’re doing.  Sometimes the pieces just fall into place, and that’s what happened here.

Before that series of fortunate events, we had been preparing a more traditional scrappy startup PR strategy, which I learned from the interwebs.  Balsamiq‘s marketing advice and launch homework are invaluable; in particular I was focused on the 10 PR tips from Weebly.  We had identified about 45 blogs, big and small, that I intended to contact one by one, with the holy grail being coverage in one or more of the major tech blogs – TechCrunch, Mashable, ReadWriteWeb, GigaOM and VentureBeat.  Just as I was starting to reach out to the list, the Times reporter confirmed that his story was very likely to go forward in the Sunday business section.

At that point, we had a decision to make.  On the one hand, the TechCrunchosphere is the place to launch consumer tech products – the audience is intelligent, opinionated, and early adopting.  This is an audience that understands that startup companies launch “unfinished” product.  It’s not a good idea to get mainstream press before your company is really ready for it.  On the other hand, our product goes contrary to the tech orthodoxy that had largely proclaimed that no one cares about privacy.  Would TechCrunch readers be the wrong audience for our more mainstream message?

Although these are complicated concerns, we didn’t take long at all to decide, and we were swayed for one irresistible reason: it’s the New York freaking Times!  As much as I’m with the punditocracy that declares newspapers dead, I just couldn’t help myself – I grew up reading the Times, and I really wanted to see if we could get in the paper, the good ol’ physical, dead-tree paper.  So we saved the blog efforts for a later time – hopefully after we’ve learned our lessons from the beta and are ready to relaunch with a more complete product.  It’s sort of a topsy-turvy press strategy, and there’s probably a whole ‘nother post in whether or not it’s stupid, but that’s not the point here.  The cool thing today is that we get to compare results from different PR launch paths.

Here’s the Visits graph from Udemy’s launch:

Here’s a similar graph from Bynamite’s launch:

Here’s the referral chart from Udemy:

And the corresponding chart from Bynamite:

Now, the point here is NOT to say that Bynamite PR is any better or worse than Udemy PR!  That kind of comparison would draw all sorts of wrong conclusions, not least because I’ve cheated here by including 30 days of data to Udemy’s 23 days.  Also, note that Bynamite is a browser extension that records a page view when the extension bar pops up (that’s why the Avg. Time on Site is absurdly high).  Different products are going to have lots and lots of reasons for different metrics.

But the conclusion I’m willing to draw is that getting covered in the Times is roughly equivalent to coverage in the major tech blogs.  Not an order of magnitude higher, and certainly not smaller.  So for anyone hoping to confirm the relevance of mainstream media, I suppose that’s a victory of sorts, though it’s just as accurate to be amazed that media sources that barely existed 5 years ago are now equivalent to the “paper of record” that’s been around for 150 years.

It’s also interesting to note that both Udemy and Bynamite got a secondary bump 5 or 6 days after the original coverage.  In Udemy’s case, that bump exceeded the initial coverage, and was almost entirely driven by a mention in one source, Thrillist.  Bynamite’s secondary bump was smaller than the first, and was a result in pickup by many smaller sites that focus on covering downloadable apps.  Also like Udemy, our traffic has settled down to a much quieter pace, though significantly higher than the near complete obscurity prior to the press coverage.

I’m still digging through the details – and by the way, could use some help, if anyone reading this wants to drive through Google Analytics with me, let me know!

Of course, none of this stops me from spouting on and on about how to manage your early career.  One set piece I often relate is that there are only four personal characteristics that can advance your success: Intelligence, Diligence, Personality and Mentality.  Many people get very far early on with just one of these characteristics, and so they begin to believe that this characteristic is the most important or even the only important one.  When they begin to fail, they double down on the characteristic that they believe in, which only deepens their failure.

To understand why this is true, consider the other side of this same advice, which applies to people just learning how to manage teams.  There are few things as destructive to a team as the person who has one of the characteristics in spades, but lacks any useful amount of the others.  The brilliant genius who can’t get along with others, the guy who works terribly hard but always on the wrong things, the “people person” who plays politics rather than solves problems, the hard charger who plays to win at any cost – these are all different forms of the same cancer, and they must be excised from the team as soon as they are identified.

So development of the four characteristics rules both sides of the management divide.  And on either side, you have to have great strength in more than one of these characteristics, and you have to understand how all of them contribute to success.

They were never quite the same ones in physical person but they were so identical one with another that it inevitably seemed they had been there before.

This is Fitzgerald’s description of the rotating retinue of “four girls” who always accompanied one of the revelers at Gatsby’s parties.  The narrator admits “I have forgotten their names . . . the melodious names of flowers and months or the sterner ones of the great American capitalists whose cousins, if pressed, they would confess themselves to be.”  The girls are objects of art, objects of desire, signifiers of sex and wealth.  A feminist critique of Gatsby would deplore the nameless characters and the “girl” terminology.

But Fitzgerald’s gift is observation, not social commentary – and observation stands up better over time than commentary ever could.  The objectification he describes continues today, with different meaning and different dynamics.  These days a man can travel like Robert Palmer only as satire; making a habit of it just looks silly.  So we read this novel of the past with the feelings and morals of the present, which only enriches our understanding of how these crowded parties were filled with empty people.

The first volley in the debate may have encapsulated the entirety of its substance.  Doris Lessing, in accepting the 2007 Nobel Prize in Literature, asked:

How will our lives, our way of thinking, be changed by this Internet, which has seduced a whole generation with its inanities so that even quite reasonable people will confess that once they are hooked, it is hard to cut free . . .

As the vanguard and finest defender of the cutting edge, TechCrunch boiled down Lessing’s careful rumination into “the Internet makes us dumb,” and crafted the exquisitely reasoned rejoinder:  ”Meh.“

The following year, Nicholas Carr kicked the debate into high gear by asking, “Is Google Making Us Stupid?”  Carr noticed that after years of using the Internet as his main source of information, he’d become less able to apply sustained concentration to reading lengthy articles and books.  He found anecdotes and early research that suggested that the constant browsing and skimming of information so typical of Internet reading exercised the brain in a different (arguably more shallow) way than the “deep” reading of books.

Carr himself noted people often feared that new technologies would limit human progress, without being able to imagine the ways those technologies would expand our knowledge and further progress:  Socrates complained that writing allowed people to cease exercising their memories; the Gutenberg press was once decried as a tool of intellectual laziness.

Nevertheless, now two years later, Carr has more firmly concluded that the Internet has rewired our brains to crave new and trivial information, at the expense of deep analysis and critical thinking.  From Carr’s original article through the recent publication of his book The Shallows, the question has become a matter of popular, academic and public concern. TechCrunch continued its proud tradition in this debate, dismissing Carr’s question as merely his “axe to grind.”

This is the kind of debate that can go on for a very long time, because the titular question is ironically stupid, though in a clever, link-baiting, book-selling way.  Knowing what “stupid” is requires defining “intelligence,” which is a concept so malleable that anyone who isn’t stupid (and many who are) can argue without end that the other side is being stupid (or at least, isn’t being smart about what stupid is).  Carr is not actually stupid, and I think his question isn’t designed to be answered.

However, there is one way that the Internet has broken a chain that began thousands of years ago:  for the first time since the invention of writing, good writing is no longer crucial to the transmission of knowledge.

When information is available everywhere from anyone at little cost, the power of good writing is diminished as a vehicle for knowledge.  Think of it this way:  Was Plato the smartest of Socrates’ students, or was he merely the best writer?  If all of the philosophers of Ancient Greece had blogs and Twitter, would we even know who Plato was?  Would we hold any single one of them in such high regard?  I think not.  And yet, I think we would still have the full breadth and depth of Greek philosophy in our human knowledge base.

The constraints of physical media, from stone tablets to wood pulp, meant that only the best writing could survive the culling of editors, libraries, wars and time.  So only good writers could pass their knowledge through the generations.  Now that anyone can publish and everything is stored forever and can be found easily, anyone can transmit knowledge so long as it is relevant, and regardless of whether it is the best-written statement of the concept.  If that were the case in Socrates’ time, we might have heard about the Cave from any one of his students – or maybe a dozen of them would have tweeted about it simultaneously.  So we would know the allegory of the cave without knowing or caring who the author was.

This thought must torture good writers everywhere, including Nick Carr, so maybe that’s what his question is really about.  The Internet isn’t making us stupid, and to be precise, it isn’t really making us bad writers.  But it does make good writing matter less.  Oh sure, you can argue that there’s an art to a good blog post or tweet or status update.  But this isn’t like defining “stupid” – there really is a meaningful standard of good writing that people of taste and discernment agree upon, and people who argue otherwise are stupid, for lack of a better word.

The highest challenge in writing – as an act and art separate from the communication of information – is a lengthy work that commands sustained interest and concentration from a reader who enters the writer’s world, rather than the other way around.  The Internet is a reader’s world, and that probably does make readers smarter.  But it makes good writing for writing’s sake matter less, so people who otherwise would have had to be good writers to communicate their ideas can now just get their ideas out in 140 characters.  Is that a bad thing?

I’ve been in this cave my whole life, but now I’m free. OMG, everything I thought was real was only shadows on the wall!! via @Socrates