The web is decadent and depraved: a case for gonzo engineering
I recently set up a project devoted to building free, open source tools for the benefit of journalists, musicians, and other creatives. The idea had been bubbling for a while - more than I realised until it took form - and it felt like high time to stick my neck out and try to make something of it. I’ve called the result Gonzo Engineering.
As pioneered by Hunter S. Thompson, gonzo journalism is personal and participatory, incorporating the author into the narrative. To my mind ‘gonzo engineering’ takes a similar tack. It is not something rigid or prescriptive, it is an outlook guided by the idea that technology should work in support of keen minds - not instead of them. It is humanistic and cheerfully strange. Computer’s run the code, but it’s written by and for people.
The modern web is a strange place. In a lot of ways it remains the wonder it’s been since its inception - a near limitless portal for knowledge, collaboration, communication, organisation - and yet it’s also become breathtakingly ugly, a space in which greed, inhumanity, and ignorance run wild.
I’m not saying anything new. The coding world is full of idealists living the open, collaborative spirit of the web at its best. They’re increasingly fighting the tide, though. Things are good until they’re not, and if the forces of old and evil aren’t beaten back they’ll crush the do-gooders into fine dust.
Some of the main casualties so far have been the freaks. The journalists, the musicians, the artists. Granted the web offers them new opportunities, but it is also a kind of moral vacuum where corporate forces can exploit them more efficiently than ever.
There are all manner of tools and platforms that would be unspeakably useful to these creatives. A fair few of them exist - often with a hefty price tag - and there are many that don’t, usually because of the unavailability of time, money, skill, or interest. This isn’t a crime, but it is a shame. If the resources available to Spotify, for example, were devoted to building an open source music streaming service that didn’t shaft musicians, that service would exist. And it would likely be wonderful.
A personal eye-opener on this was teeline.online. What started as a nothing side project has established itself as what I can only assume is one of the most used shorthand learning resources on the web. There are a lot of ways the site could be better than it is, but there are a fair few ways in which it’s better than anything that came before. With a little help from some friends, it’s filled a gap.
I think there are a lot more gaps waiting to be filled with tools that can support quality reporting, beautiful art, and an altogether less seedy and horrible world wide web. I’d like Gonzo Engineering to be a space in which I can build some of those tools, or at least try.
Carl Sagan wrote that scientists should been keen students of moral philosophy. So too should engineers, I think. Gonzo engineering has some kind of moral compass, if only a sense of outrage. Amoral technology is sick technology. Make earnest things in earnest ways that treat ‘users’ like human beings rather than data points or credit cards. That is the work, and it is good work.
The way things are isn’t the way they have to be, and the surest way for nothing to change is to do nothing.