Fortune Favors The Bold

Just learned: You can write 2,000 words of brilliance, but if you cap it off by making a simile between Johannes Gutenberg and Caterina Fake, you will surely undo all of the intellectual good will you’ve built up and then some.

It really isn’t right to call out names in an unflattering context in a global community, no matter how sure I am that the principals in Ms. Fake’s life will be unaffected by this brain dripping, so let me qualify that remark above - and let me apologize for not qualifying any prior remarks I might have made in public, because I sure as hell remember being condescending in private. Anyhoo:

I do not anoint the creators of Flickr as gilded visionaries. I do not do that as a default action for any web entrepreneurs or developers - just think about that for a second and try not to punch something - but, particularly, when you set out to create a real-time online game and you end up fucking up everything except the photo gallery (which fortunately ended up doing very well!), you will not be canonized as a modern industrialist of the tech age.

I am not going to assign fault to Ms. Fake for receiving praise that I do not agree with. Also, none of this means that I’m implying she’s BAD at what she does; I’m simply implying that I have not seen anything that PROVES her to be an unassailable source of wisdom and vision - especially on behalf of Flickr. But you could say that about anyone, too. Nick Denton is not an unassailable source of wisdom. Craig Newmark is not an unassailable source of wisdom.

But, boy, do I hate when people lazily imply that. Why, because each of them started a fashionable online application? You’re smelling your own farts, people.

I think I’m particularly outraged here because there’s so much on these people’s resumes that I find to be clumsy or ill-executed to prove them as the opposite of geniuses - enough to make the genius assumptions absurd. Craigslist, for example, is a relic; it’s not that they haven’t evolved, but that they won’t even try to do it better. (That’s just stupid, you know?) Craigslist is actually not good at over half that it tries to do… and some of the things it is good at would be better left unmentioned, ski partiers. As a better example of sacred cows being tipped early and often, there is a cottage industry devoted to disagreeing with Nick Denton. It is almost as established as Gawker Media itself. I’m sure he loves it, too.

As for the case for Ms. Fake, it’s my absolute opinion at this point that any citation of her as a leader of online trends is less a result of studied observations into her community contributions (though she certainly moves around social circles quite a bit) and more of a relic of the interactive media fashions of 2004. It seems such fashions c.2002-05 are much more influential than, you know, actual qualifications. It is simply breathtaking that someone who was, metaphorically, at the happy hour in 2004 is, in the year 2010, more well-regarded than someone who did all the goddamn heavy lifting in 2009.

Or are they? I dunno, I might be insane and dead wrong on all of this. That’s half the reason I’m throwing this out there. Thoughts?