kottke.org posts about Tim Carmody
Wired published a story on the web today called The Web Is Dead. The most appropriate response to such a claim is something close to Tim Carmody’s series of tweets demonstrating the parallels between the growth of the web and Brett Favre’s professional football career. The web isn’t dead yet, says Carmody, because Brett Favre hasn’t retired. It’s our culture’s most significant symbiotic relationship since E.T. and Gertie’s flower.
The web became publicly available on August 6, 1991. Brett Favre was a rookie in the Falcons’ camp, having signed a contract July 19.
1993 saw the introduction of Mosaic’s graphical browser, Favre’s first full year as a starter, and the Packers’ first playoffs since 1982.
In 1995, Favre wins the MVP, the Packers get to the NFC Championships, and Windows 95 brings the internet & graphic interface to the masses.
Brett Favre’s first Super Bowl win coincided precisely (almost to the day) of Steve Jobs’s return to Apple.
And so on. Carmody’s bottom line:
What this means: like Favre, the open web has been with us for a long time, in good times & bad. Never count it out. Never believe the hype.
Even concussed, full of painkillers, with a dead dad and a wiped-out house, I’ll let that 20-year-old vet lead me down the field. Anytime.
Come on, web, just one more year! HTML5’ll make you feel young again!
Man oh man, thanks to Tim Carmody for more than holding down the fort around here. I liked the part where he tied almost everything in the universe together. Paging James Burke.
And how nice of you to ask, here’s what I did on my vacation: beach almost every day for two weeks, sweet corn, teaching the boy wiffle ball, fishing without a hook, foggy waves, Red Sox game at Fenway, seven Mercurial commits, whiskey sours, [redacted], building sand castles, teaching the girl how to share, etc. Ready to get back at it.
I’m off for another week — the summer sun is just too tempting, as is another project I’m working on — so I’ve asked Tim Carmody to fill the editor’s seat for me. Tim is one leg of the Snarkmarket tripod; he was a frequent commenter on the site and the two founding members, instead of saying jeez, guy, shuddup already with the comments, invited Tim to join them full-time. Tim is also an academic with a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature and Literary Theory, which is a lot more book learnin’ than I’ve ever had. Things are probably going to be a lot more grammatically correct around here this week. Welcome, Tim.
And a big thanks to Aaron Cohen for helming the site last week (and through the weekend even, a rare occurrence around these parts). I don’t know where this ranks on Aaron’s list of life accomplishments, but my 11-yo self would be super impressed that Who’s the Boss’s Samantha Micelli retweeted not one but two Cohen-penned kottke.org posts from the past week (after explaining the definitions of “post” and “retweet” to tweener Kottke).
Over on Twitter, Tim Carmody is burning it up with links and retweets, mainly about the Kindle, Amazon, Google, Apple, and the future of books and media. Lots of good stuff there.
At The Atlantic, Alexis Madrigal has an interesting post about Apple as a religion and uses that lens to look at the so-called Antennagate** brouhaha. For example, Apple was built on four key myths:
1. a creation myth highlighting the counter-cultural origin and emergence of the Apple Mac as a transformative moment;
2. a hero myth presenting the Mac and its founder Jobs as saving its users from the corporate domination of the PC world;
3. a satanic myth that presents Bill Gates as the enemy of Mac loyalists;
4. and, finally, a resurrection myth of Jobs returning to save the failing company…
On Twitter, Tim Carmody adds that Apple’s problems are increasingly theological in nature — “Free will, problem of evil, Satanic rebellion” — which is a really interesting way to look at the whole thing. (John Gruber the Baptist?)
** The Antennagate being, of course, the hotel where Apple Inc. is headquartered.
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