The Cutting Edge

My old graphics teacher, belovedly known as Mr. Fucking Sey*$%d is one of my primary influences in life. And he once said something particularly influential, regarding in particular the role of technology in graphic design which due to the water passed under the bridge between now and 1998 I will have to paraphrase:

'The best camera you can buy in the world comes with a pin-hole attachment. Designers now saying "Photoshop is the best graphics package out there" will always be limited in their ability by the limitations of the software. If you use your hands, pencils and paper you are much freer than when you use a computer to do it.'

And by and large my experience has conformed to this pearl of wisdom. I know for sure that when it came to adding speech bubbles to Fear of A White Planet, it was amazingly complex compared to how you would go about the exercise freehand. All the best work photoshop has produced has started with a freehand sketch or a photograph.

But as far as 'technological messiahs' go, photoshop isn't bad. Infact Mr. F'n S gave me that pearl probably 5 years before I ever myself laid hands on photoshop's particular layout.

First it makes it Easier

Technology itself, is designed to automate and thus simplify something that was really tedious before. For example, you had mail, what you had to do was buy some stationary, compose a letter, sign it, date it, stuff it in an envelope (that you also had to buy) put an address on it, carry it down to the post office, buy a stamp, lick the stamp, drop it in a box, a van then had to swing by on a schedule and pick up all the letters in the box. Then that van would return to some kind of sorting depot, then the sorting depot would sort through your letter and put it in another bag, which would go into another van, which would go to a sub-sorting depot, where the mail would be resorted, then given to another van, which would then go to the reciepients local post office, and then the mail would get sorted again and given to a 'postie' who would then put it in his bag, who would then go around the neighbourhood, who would drop the letter in the address you had put on the envelope, who would then sit there getting eaten by snails until the recipient actually picked it up, opened it and read it.

Then technology came and made emailing really really easy. You opened up your emailing software, wrote a letter, could have it automatically spellchecked, and then it would go from your outbox to the recipients inbox virtually instantaneously.

This is perhaps a condescending explanation of how technology can make something easier. Like EA games NBA Live 2007 made it much easier to play in the number 24 jersey for the Los Angeles Lakers than it is in real life...

Making it easier, makes it ironically much harder

...except I'm yet to here of someone who lands a $100,000 contract for being Kobe Bryant in a video game. And the reality is, that back in the day, if you recived a hundred pieces of mail in a day, many from complete strangers, you were probably the archbishop of the Catholic Church, or CEO of Johnson & Johnson, and you had your own mailroom to sort through all the mail. You also had a secretary to filter through the mail and decide what you should read.

Now put simply, this is just about everyones experience. Whereas if I wanted to send a letter to Bryce, it used to be the highlight of his week, now if I send an email, it is merely one in 120 emails, tweets, wall-posts etc. he may recieve overnight.

And this is the rule of 'cutting edge technology' and why just about every prediction of how it is 'changing the world' is bullshit, and typically falls flat on its face.

I get the sense myself that facebooks time is numbered. Which is annoying because I don't want to have to re-upload all my travel photos anywhere else. A few of my friends have started to delete their accounts.

Twitter is on the rise, yet like facebook, it will take me a long time to get into it myself. Possibly even longer, since the promised benefits of facebook never themselves arrived.

Imagine if you will a group of moustached, victorian england gentlemen sitting about a table in a dank and musty 'pub' chewing on pipe stems whilst mulling over how they are going to generate buisiness, attention, publicity for their cause.

'We should send letters to everyone we know!' says one, the others nod their heads as if they have said something wise and interesting, another chimes in animatedly 'yes, some kind of reproduced form letter, and we will post it to everyone each of us knows, then presumably those people will be so interested, they will order their help to have copies made, and they will send it on to everyone they know!' and another would say 'pip-pip' or something. Maybe an analytical type one in the group will point out how cost effective this would be compared to riding in a handsome cab to each persons house and talking to them face to face.

Direct mail, is still a legitimate form of campaigning. Unfortunately if you sit in some kind of 'strategic group' these days, direct mail will almost never float. But people will get similarly excited and animated about 'facebook' as my non-existent victorian peers did. Yet to me, this is not a strategy, I am perpetually amazed at the time and energy that gets wasted by individuals that believe Social-Networking-Sites will actually be advantages to them.

To me, it is just a logistical tool in your repertoire, that supports whatever it is you do. If you think its unlikely that someone in the Victorian era would have their mail reproduced and sent on to their own network of friends, it is actually far more likely today.

You see any technological innovation that makes doing anything easier, the result for your average kid will be it makes competing much much harder. This is infact what we would call in strategy-speak a 'barrier to entry' which what you want is the barriers to entering a given market to be particularly high, because it keeps every dog-and-pony-show from competing against you. Technology tippically eases the barrier to entry, with the net effect of making your ability to distinguish yourself from other competetors nil-to-zero and ironically ends up entrenching the big players.

Yes the ultimate barrier to entry, is no barrier to entry. For example, I could sign up on Twitter tomorrow, and theoretically it would cost me as much to reach you, whoever you are as it does for NBA star Shaqueille O'neal, aka 'The_real_shaq' to reach you. Theoretically thanks to the new medium of twitter, I am on an even playing field as Shaq. Except Shaq is actually a distinguished person with real achievements and a huge following, arguably the most beloved active player in the NBA League today. I will never compete with Shaq until such a time as Shaq is Dead and I am a 3-time NBA finals MVP, best selling recording artist or highest grossing movie-star.

In his book 'The Black Swan' Nicholas Nassim Taleb points out that the invention of the grammerphone wiped out many an opera singer. Because before its invention, even the town over from the Vienna opera, it was cost effective for them to see the local boy vs. the National Theatre Companies master.
Technology didn't help the little guy at all, it actually wiped him out. As soon as his customers could get a recording of a world class talent, they stopped coming to see him. Nobody wanted a recording of joe-nobody.

Most people don't realise this these days, because they never even had a chance to dominate their local market. Most of the cool music, clothes, tv-shows, movies etc come from America.

I am still waiting for the person that made it big from 'Myspace' I was telling some friends about 'Lilly Allen' being apparantly the only one thus far, but alas someone informed me that her father was a music producer anyway, and rightly pointed out 'it's not like she wouldn't have made it anyway'

Which leaves only Tila Tequila, the one and only person that will ever 'make it' via myspace, an annoying MTV host from a lineball model that happened to have the most friends ever on facebook. Her fame though was especially fleeting, I'd wager most people still haven't heard of her.

Making it harder, makes it easier

Graffiti, let me tell you is not cutting edge. It is documented and famous as far back as rome, and really painting shit on some publicly visabe surface is at least as old as cave painting.

Most technological innovations have to do with waterproofing paints, which opened up the possibility of having murals endure outdoors. Then they invented spray cans, which allowed artists to easily transport a variety of colours, and then that's pretty much it.

Thus anyone who thinks graffiti started in the 80's by the hip-hop community and thus calling it 'old-school' is falling way short of the mark.

It's worth pointing out that the cutting edge technology that brought graffiti out of cave's made it harder for someone to dominate the relatively limited canvas space of illuminated cave walls, thus allowing other artists to get into the market and make it hard to distinguish yourself.

SO too did the use of coloured paint, make it harder to distinguish yourself just by painting in red instead of black.

But the invention of magnetic, battery powered lights, and projector shows has made being a graffiti artist that little bit easier. As every douchebag searching for something 'cutting edge' leaps upon the 'painting with light' bandwagon, you now have just a few less people to compete with in your chosen medium.

Every douchebag trying to make it big on youtube (despite their yet being no historic precedent) just cut down the pile of scipts on the desks of TV executives everywhere. The advent of blogging, just removed the lines on lines of people applying for journalism courses.

Webcomics, just made it a whole lot easier for you to send some pencil roughs to Marvel or DC, but not ironically Shonen Jump, where the advent of the internet has done nothing to blunt the schoolchilds enthusiasm for manga.

And certainly the prospect of landing first Violinist with the Melbourne Symphony orchestra was made much easier by 6 decades of dominance by the electric guitar.

The advent of really bad synth-rock dominating the terrible music of the 80's is what paved the way for the early 90's grunge and alt-rock movements.

Tom Morello

Perhaps epitomising it all, is Tom Morello. Who picked up a guitar with no new features or innovations since the early 70's and opened up a whole new world of sound. Morello is probably the most distinguished guitarist of the 90's perhaps competing against only Kirk Hammett of Metellica, who actually is not technically that good.

He reinvented a classic, and I think demonstrated for us all, just how little technology you need to actually wring exponentially more out of the most sophisticated piece of hardware ever developed - the human nervous system.

To me the 90's seems almost like a 'forgotten decade' the only reminisence ever done about it seems to be 'How I Met Your Mother' but for me two of the most important lessons of my life came out of it - one from Mr. F'n. Sey$&ld and another from Tom
Morello.