Earlier this morning, I came across a link to the origin story of Suck.com on Jason Kottke’s website, Kottke.org. It was penned by my former Business 2.0 boss and all-around smart alec, Josh Quittner. Here is a bit from that story which reminded me why I loved working for him, and why it sucks that he doesn’t write anymore. He would probably be one of the best writers focused on culture of the web, if he took up his proverbial pen again.
Because who knows when that big Web bubble is going to burst? Everyone who works on Web sites thinks about this and thinks about it all the time. The Web is driving on novelty power right now, waiting for the mass market to arrive. But what if it doesn’t? Or worse, what if it does only when big bandwidth finally gets here and the medium turns into … TV!
TV is expensive to produce, and it reaches for the lowest common denominator as a way to make it pay off. If the Web metastasizes into that, bye-bye class media.
The Web Dream is what smart kids across America – smart kids around the world – are dreaming. They might not trust in God or Family and they sure as hell don’t believe in Country; they believe in Themselves, and in the power of their cleverly customizable, infinitely scalable, robust and ubiquitous, interactive, pull-down-menu Dreams.
Candidly, I liked Suck, but I don’t fetishize it. It is a pre-hipster-hipster-white-boy-emo-site that was too way about the IQ scale of an immigrat hustling to make a living in his adopted hometown of New York.