Content is now becoming a very liquid asset. To take Marshall McLuhan's famed dictum a step further: the message is now independent of the media.
~~ Michael J. Wolf [1]

By the time you read this, the news will be all over the Web (at least two days late on Fucked Company, but Pud was busy fending off axe attacks from his friend Eugene).

The "hiatus" of Feed Magazine and "summertime vacation" of Suck.com, that is. Plastic.com, the bold e-publishing experiment that attempted to ride the popularity of Blogger diaries and the influential Slashdot community, survives on life support. The day of the announcement, Dotcom Kevorkians were booming.

The media punditry claims this announcement is a step closer to the death of original-content Web sites. Is it?

Monkey-wrenching the New Economy's Perception Factory

Within days of the announcement, Dotcom Scoop and NetSlaves announced a merger, with DS editor Ben Silverman also spearheading Executive’s Corner, a subscription-only publication targeted to analysts and managers. Meanwhile, uber-site Salon.com has teetered, for months, on the brink of a NASDAQ-delisting.

The current shake-out of Internet content sites is analogous to a critical phase during the emergence (a metasystems transition) of the 'New Hollywood' between 1960 and 1980. The collapse of the Classical Hollywood studio system and the repeal of the censorious Production Code saw the rise of independent producers, location shooting, and a brief Hollywood flirtation between 1967 and 1971 with auteur directors and introspective art-house themes. Films such as the ultra-violent Bonnie and Clyde (1967), the counterculture hit Easy Rider (1967) and the existentialist road-movie Two-Lane Blacktop (1971) defied production conventions and distribution strategies.

Crippled by debt and disintermediation, The Empire fought back with a vengeance, starting with Frank Yablan's 90/10 exhibition fees split in Paramount's favor for The Godfather (1972), which regenerated the studio's cashflow to the tune of $86.2 million in domestic box-office receipts. For the release of Jaws (1975), Lew Wasserman 'stole' the 'four-wall' distribution technique that had been developed for low-budget children's films and documentaries, generating 'buzz' from book and television markets. The "blockbuster mentality" had been perfected by the release of Star Wars (1977), which merged 'high-concept' marketing and B-movie themes, combined with mass merchandising and the explosive growth of suburban cinema multiplexes. The rest, they say, is the betrayal of a film-going generation.

Although the finer details and respective industries are different, there's a similar industry trend for Hollywood film (1967-72) and the Dotcom Boom (1995-2000). In each case the dominant players were displaced by industry innovations and new entrants with First Mover Advantage. Within only a few years though, the dominant players had copied the new strategies, outmanoeuvred the independent producers, and achieved market supremacy by 'locking-in' a new audience. Content homogeneity and the Massification of the Web looms.

Yeah right.

Lie #1: The Myth of Dying Web Content

The Internet downturn has already left many investors impoverished; now the downturn is starting to hit the rest of us where it hurts -- in our daily bookmarks.
~~ Scott Rosenberg, "More Lights Go Out on the Web"

The Shorter "Punk Ethos" Version:
Bullshit. For every Salon or Slate or Wired, there is a self-run news blogger like alterNewswire, an intellectual oasis like M/C and MediaChannel or a community like the Octapod Collective waiting to be discovered and embraced.

You don't need a newspaper strike to prompt you into establishing your own site (use some free Web space: your global empire has to start somewhere) or forming a collective with some friends. Although e-commerce systems are still evolving, there are stop-gaps like PayPal that will enable your fans to help cover beer and pizza expenses (the crucial items for every New Media production team). Guinness beer is classed by the World Health Organization as food, so you can probably live on it while waiting for the checks to be wired to your e-wallet account. Try out this gedankenexperiment in self-generating new futures, and drop me a line about it (remember Crowley: "Do not lust after results.").

The Longer Faux-"Frankfurt School" Version:
In his savvy profile of how Automatic's death knell brings us one step closer to the demise of intelligent Web content (read: "high dotcom kultur"), Scott Rosenberg poses a question that must be lingering in every Web producer's mind: "What will they do when there's no one left to link to?"

The pervasive fear of a dotcom content wasteland is understandable, up to a point: Joey Anuff's bitingly ironic commentary wouldn't survive AOL/Time-Warner's purgatory, for example.

But the fear also reflects a misjudgment about the Web's history, its form, and its future trajectories. Having internalized the California Ideology as an orthodox perceptual viewpoint, many chroniclers focus on the same sites, the same PR-masquerading-as-anecdotal-memoir, the same geographic areas: San Francisco and Los Angeles (for the West Coast), Silicon Valley, and New York City's Silicon Alley. But the pre-broadband phase of the Web is more complex than the location of major U.S. sites (Americans are notoriously insular: just ask any Canadian), concentrated media ownership and venture capital flows, or the gunslinger shoot-out between HotWired and the East Coast Establishment. Film scholars now recognize that cinema's Silent Era encompassed more than early Hollywood, and, in the future, Web historians will do the same.

Just as the Web Revolution was intertwined with but distinct from "Old Media", its content distribution metapattern is "many-to-many" (chaotic fluxes and flows) not the "one-to-many" broadcast pattern of radio and television. By appropriating Slashdot's distributed publishing technology, Plastic.com was taking a gambit to move from an organizational pyramid (traditional publishing) to a network model. Their bold experiment came the closest yet to Herbert J. Gans' "multiperspectival" journalism model by harnessing the power of reader suggestions (Gans' "bottom-up"-driven content) and being international in scope (Gans was focused on national entities). The "multiperspectival" approach mirrors-in-part the adaptive way that our brain "chunks" information and processes experiences. Anuff and Johnson grasped, like ZNet and MemePool, that its readership are "diversity generators" (from the Bloom Pentad) scouring the Web (as pro bono workers) more creatively than an AI bot or spider ever could. "Multiperspectival" editorial is also a buffer against "shallow surfing" (Razorfish terminology for the regular sites that surfers default to when faced with overwhelming content/entertainment choices), which creates a loyal audience (short-term effect) but eventually ossifies the content ecosystem (long-term outcome).

When combined with an historical outlook that enshrines certain personalities and sites at the expense of the greater whole, "shallow surfing" amplifies the fears of a content wasteland. Television viewing is driven by remote-control, whereas the Web requires our long-suppressed "hunter-gatherer" instincts.

Unlike existing media forms that reward docility, we need to actively surf and hunt out new material (maybe a fleeting site or a single article) that can't be relied upon to be on-line in several month's time. Meaning that to really "Work the Web", you have to embrace uncertainty and live in the present. The very human qualities that other media producers seem to despise.