Date: Monday, December 6, 1999, 4:19:48 PM
Subject: Macromedia and the 20th Century…
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Punters,
As fascinating and innovating as Macromedia’s web technology is, I always
find it quite frightening the language that is used to describe
technological innovation. How can a web site ‘evolve’ like biological
systems? Either this means that the author has little or no understanding
of how Darwinian thought has been abused this century (ie. by a certain
mid-century, mid-European man with a little moustache), has never met a
biologist, or that Macromedia has fascistic tenancies. No sure, but
perhaps if I was as ‘intelligent’ as a web site then I could use reductive
empirical observations and essentialise these to vast bodies of
intellectual enquiry in which I have little understanding and even less
respect.
Perhaps there is little or no room for humanism in understanding
technological innovation, but biology, give me a break. This 2001 Space
Odyssey Hal taking over the world narrative is over 20 years old now. The
Web is wonderful, but the multi-media god in g-strings hanging out with a
mobile phone, surfing the web for stocks, drinking beer in the London at
Beaconfield cove with early 90′s Manchester haircuts. The future looks bright!
(I hear that Macromedia’s new green web site is called photosynthesis).