Delusions of skill and of grandeur

Michael Arrington has invited criticism of his massively popular site TechCrunch. Consider this my acceptance of the challenge. His offer is possibly a veiled attempt to bootstrap a new website he’s starting on the cheap. Whether that’s true or not, this much is true (edit: as I suspected, it wasn’t true; the author’s not being funny at all kept me from seeing the humor in it): he’s fooling himself and a lot of people. In this post, I’m not just calling out TechCrunch, I’m calling out all his friends and everyone like him.

He’s fooling himself into thinking he’s doing something important. He’s labelling and categorizing all these useless Web 2.0 startups that have no business model, speculating on their non-existent futures, commenting on and writing about the products others create. Arrington is a lawyer, not a coder. He doesn’t actually understand what a web application is the way someone whose automotive skills are limited to changing the oil doesn’t really understand how an internal combustion engine works.

Arrington asked for people to find isolated examples of where he made incorrect judgments about the future of particular entrepreneurial ventures. But what he doesn’t realize, and probably doesn’t care about, is that superfluous echo chamber pundits like him have been completely wrong about technology for decades, and they’re not going to stop any time soon. His blunders and myopic blabbering merely places him in a long line of respected, famous writers who completely misgauged the direction computer technology was taking.

He doesn’t know a thing about innovation and he wouldn’t know it if he saw it.

Industry pundits like him dismissed Lisp for decades and will continue to dismiss that strange foreign language with all the parentheses that mysteriously refuses to completely die. Then along came XML and industry navel-gazers realized that a general recursive freeform syntax could be quite useful for expressing configuration and application metadata. Their retarded, verbose hunchback version of s-expressions has now sunken its rotten teeth into every corner of the computing industry.

Industry pundits like Guy Kawasaki, Michael Arrington, and other respected, successful people who have achieved fame and fortune dismissed Smalltalk in the 70s and 80s. Virtual machines? Garbage collection? Integrated development environments? Clearly, this had no place in business computing. You know why? Too slow. Too weird. And, actually, too innovative for their pea-brains to recognize the significance of. Respected industry pundits knew that serious business computing had to be done using serious systems programming languages like C, assembly language, or C++. Now no one would think of developing a business application that has to be rapidly brought to market in a language that wasn’t garbage-collected, and, if at all possible, dynamically typed. What was useless academic research is now common sense. Now Ruby, an interesting rehash of Smalltalk ideas into a form more palatable to people used to C-style syntax, is the shit for creating web applications and enterprise integration.

Arrington and the rest of the Web 2.0 echo chamber nitwits think they know what’s innovative and where things are going. They don’t and they never have. They have no appreciation of the fact that they owe their entire careers to the work of people in academic and industry labs. The TCP/IP stack and the Internet; GUIs, the WIMP interface, and pointing devices; IDEs; garbage collection; virtual machines; relational databases; dynamic typing (Michael Arrington doesn’t know what many of those things actually are, of course); all of this comes from people with PhDs at places like Berkeley, MIT, IBM, and Xerox. When they create it, it is useless and worthless. Twenty years later, navel-gazing pundits like Michael Arrington are confronted by the fact that they have become essential in creating computer software. It then becomes common sense and it’s perfectly OK to take credit for the things done in labs by forgotten names long ago.

Where is the praise for the real innovators like Alan Kay? Kay’s work with Smalltalk and human factors strongly influenced nearly everything we consider essential today. But Michael Arrington doesn’t care about Alan Kay or any of the other people responsible for the stuff that is now his livelihood. Does Alan Kay work at Google? Does he have a me-too startup with a faux-reflecty logo and an Ajax chat application in beta? No? Then forget him.

If they had seen Xerox PARC’s work with GUIs in the late 70s, they would have scoffed. Steve Jobs instead saw something beautiful; he productized that work into the Macintosh, and the rest is history.

If you had asked the Michael Arringtons about the state of technical publishing in the 1970s, they would tell you that the declining typographical standards prevailing in math and physics journals were unavoidable. Beautiful, professional quality type that everyone could have access to, they’d tell you with total certainty, was impossible. Serious business people knew that these were the facts and everyone had to just live with it. And then along came Donald Knuth who spent a decade creating ; his work is the reason I, on a $400 desktop PC, can type things like . (Interesting open question: could Michael Arrington be taught how to prove the preceding claim by mathematical induction? It has nothing to do with the DOM or Google, so probably not. Not to imply that Michael Arrington is interested in anything as concrete as a particular API or a particular algorithm like MapReduce.)

Thank god for the Alan Kays of the world. Thank god for the Donald Knuths. Thank god for the Steve Jobses and Larry Ellisons (he made a product, Oracle, out of research done by IBM in the 60s and 70s) who recognize a good idea when they see one. May the innovators and executors deliver us from Michael Arrington and the rest of the useless echo chamber nitwits who with their popular blogs carefully catalog, label, speculate on, hype up, and dismiss the commentary and minor extensions of work and products made possible by pioneers who people like Arrington will never care about.

You want to know what the long-term future of technology is? Unlike Michael Arrington, I don’t pretend to have a crystal ball; but I suggest starting by looking at the things Michael Arrington says are useless, pedantic curiosities not suitable for serious business computing. When some of those things are ubiquituous in 20 years’ time, don’t expect any apologies from Michael Arrington for a career of bullshit and small-minded ignorance.