Thirty years ago (early 1992), I had just started work at my first medical devices position. One of my coworkers was the company’s brand new IT guy, Richard, and he and I got curious about the new “World Wide Web” at about the same time. I’d been on-line with email and user groups for some time, but HTML and the web was new to both of us. The company, Telectronics Pacing Systems, was just beginning to face some of the problems that would eventually get the company regulated into history for a collection of disastrous product and engineering decisions. At the time, we were still flyin’ high and looking toward a bright future. (Hard to remember there was a time like that in the USA, isn’t it?)
As we got further into HTML, UNIX, and SQL coding, we could see that the days of these skills could be numbered in the single digits. When we first started out, to send an email message via UNIX, you first had to write an email editor with which to write the message. I had just learned how to do that bit of coding when HP-Mail, DEC’s All-in-One, and other email “clients” plus browsers like Mosaic (Netscape) came along and made many of my brand new skills obsolete.
About then, Richard said, “When the internet becomes easy for everyone to get into, it will be ruined.” What he meant was that for the time being the internet, before the WorldWideWeb, was pretty much a techie’s playground. Once browsers, email clients, and the rest of the crap that would come along to make the Internet accessible to “the common man/woman” the whole thing would turn into a clusterfuck of garbage, morons easily expressing their opinions, and lots of commerce. And he was right. That sequence of events has been true for many technical things: cars, motorcycles, synthesizers, personal computers, photography, audio and video recording and editing, and even engineering.
Jamkazam has been making fairly large strides toward creating an on-line place for musicians from all over the world to get together. The service just became fee-based, although you can experiment for a few hours each month for free. Recently, a new user went to the Facebook Jamkazam Jammers page to complain that she was unable to get “Jamkazam to work.” It turned out that she couldn’t get her Mac to work with her Presonus audio interface and, since her only reason for having an interface was to clutter up the Jamkazam fiber channels, her inability with her equipment was Jamkazam’s problem to solve. That is typical of my experience with the side-effects of dumbed-down technology. When the technology gets simple enough so that it “becomes easy for everyone to get into,” the quality, skills, commitment, and contributions of the people involved quickly drops to that common denominator. Now that on-line music is relatively simple (and getting more simple by the day), the people involved are less sophisticated, less talented, and way less capable of actually playing in a group.
There are at least a dozen groups on Facebook with clueless, talentless members claiming to be “music producers” and/or “recording engineers.” In today’s vernacular, I have no idea what a “producer” is or does. None of these people could swing a record deal if their lives and parents’ fortunes depended on it. They don’t know any actual musicians, so managing a recording date is hilariously out of their bailiwick. The first level border guard of recorded music used to be the entry fee: $100,000 14-track, 2” machines, half-million dollar consoles, multi-thousand dollar microphones, and million dollar acoustic spaces. Today, you can actually spend less than $500 and “make a record.” Most likely, that recording will suck on multiple levels, but YouTube won’t discriminate. Either will CD Baby, Tunecore, iMusician, Distrokid, or any of the other social media and on-line music distribution resources. You can be the absolute worst talent on the planet and still make a record and put it out there where people will have to step around it to avoid hearing it.
This is condition is sometimes described as the "tragedy of the commons." Wikipedia neatly defines this situation, "The tragedy of the commons describes a situation in economic science when individual users, who have open access to a resource unhampered by shared social structures or formal rules that govern access and use, act independently according to their own self-interest and, contrary to the common good of all users, cause depletion of the resource through their uncoordinated action." The long, but detailed, way of saying, “When the internet (or anything) becomes easy for everyone to get into, it will be ruined.”
In manufacturing, quality and manufacturing engineers have a saying, “The only way to foolproof a system is to get the fools out of the system.” When it comes to systems like the internet, music, and art the fools rush in so fast and get so deep into the structure that there is no turning back.
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