« Open Content Alliance | Main | Citizen media and a couple of Jeffs » A personal noteNow and then you make a wrong turn and need a chance to reassess your life and figure out whether the pieces fit. I'm in one of those places now; though I've seemed productive and active for the last five years since the Internet bubble burst, I've been struggling with a growing sense of malaise. This is despite the fact that I've found at least some projects that were a good fit for me, and very appealing. At the same time I've worked on things that didn't really fit, and I've blown a lot of energy in the process. And I don't think I've given my best to some of the projects I care most about. It's not worthwhile to talk about the wrong turns at this point, but I do want to say a little about where my head is now because it'll have an impact on the focus of this blog (and other projects as well). Through the 90s I was future-focused, in fact a bunch of us who hung out together online and offline referred to ourselves as "neophiliacs" and were focused on a future that seemed interesting, if sometimes dystopian. FringeWare was part of that scene, and Mondo 2000, bOING bOING, EFF, et al. We focused on online community, computer networks, new technology, the future of design and art, robotics, extropianism, crypto, cyber liberties, etc. Then on '97 I took a job with Whole Foods Market as their "Internet guy," and found myself committing my time and my head to the business side of the Internet (I remember how I laughed when I first heard someone refer to "the Internet industry.") If you were gonna go corporate, Whole Foods wasn't a bad way to go. It's not a traditional top-down kind of corporation, which is why people like to work there so much. Whole Foods is very "power to the edges" in its thinking... decentralized, distributed, entrepreneurial. Though my gig there was quite difficult in many ways, I was digging it. The the bubble burst and the project we were working on went away. I spent a year consulting with another company and scrambling to get my head around a diverse set of new technologies. There wasn't much work for the Internet Solutions Group I was in, hence the second layoff and our move back to Austin, where I was starting Polycot Consulting with my partners, Jeff Kramer and Matt Sanders. Polycot is what I care most about, of course. With four years of hard work behind us, we've pulled together an excellent team and completed a very interesting pile of projects. We built a consultancy at a time when there were few dollars for pure consulting so we initially placed more emphasis on our technical abilities, and the fact that we can handle complex back-end development. We're beginning to focus more now on consulting and on innovation, especially whatever pieces of "Web 2.0" that we don't regard as hype. Tim O'Reilly's overview of his view of Web 2.0 includes a list of characteristics of Web 2.0 companies that fits Polycot pretty well:
I've also been committing some time to work on the Central Texas Digital Convergence Initiative, an economic development project that fits a futurist philosophy I picked up from my friend Derek Woodgate. Derek says that futurism is not about predicting the future – it's about creating the future. I find myself repeating that quote and getting more and more into that mind set (and as part of that process, I'm joining the Board of Directors of the Central Texas Chapter of the World Future Society. And I'm currently putting together a section of the the WorldChanging book. After several years of interesting confusion, I'm thinking like a neophiliac again, and the solutions for the future that I'm trying to get my head around are more practical than utopian or dystopian. And sustainable. And despite the current political, economic, and environmental chaos, I'm feeling better. By next week or the week after, I might even feel energized and hopeful. Technorati Tags: jonlebkowsky, future jon posted this at 2:08 PM |
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