So Stupid It Just Might Suck
Copyright (c) 2000 Wade Walker
The world is awash with butt-stupid ideas. I know, I know—as a card-carrying member of the Sneering Elitists Club you’d expect me to say something like that, but it’s true. Fortunately, I long ago acquired the ability to ignore stupidity unless it picks my pocket or breaks my leg, as Thomas Jefferson might have said around a mouthful of shaved but unmanumitted slave pudendum. But it’s really getting annoying how many people are making bank with less going on upstairs than an anencephalic. In fact, it seems like the dumber your ideas are, the greater your chances of scoring the mad cream. Allow me to put forth for your consideration my explanation: the stupider an idea is, the harder it is to come up with an argument against it. So where a somewhat reasonable idea will be easily shot down, a stupid idea can’t be fucking stopped. Take push media for example. The darling of venture capitalists a couple of years back, this was arguably one of the most intelligence-free ideas ever. Get this—we’ll somehow convince people to install a program on their computers that we’ll use to inundate them with junk information like sports scores and stock quotes. To pay for it, we’ll also inundate them with unsolicited junk advertising. The advertisers pay us for the audience we give them, and we’ll laugh all the way to the muthafucking bank. The genius of this idea is that it’s so transcendently stupid. If you read it in a business plan or in Wired, you think to yourself, "I’ve got to be missing something. How are they going to make money providing a service that people can already get free on the net, especially when coupled with the poison suppository of mandatory, odious advertising? There must be something to it, though, or they wouldn’t have scored so much financing from so many notable venture capitalists." But if you thought that, you’d be wrong, baby! The fact is that a plan like this, which blithely ignores niggling little details like consumer demand and business model viability, is almost immune to attack, precisely because it contains so little that makes sense. All you have to do to assuage quotidian fears like "how am I ever going to make any fucking money doing this" is come up with a catchy name for your idea, like "push media," and incorporate this name in a similarly catchy mantra. If someone asks you questions, just chant the mantra until they either go away or give you money. I like to call this "proof by repeated assertion." It goes something like this: "Push media, baby—you don’t have look for information anymore, it comes to you! Sure, it sounds paradoxical now, but once we have enough people online, there’ll be positive feedback and lock-in effects that’ll make us immensely profitable." The last bit leaves any critics afraid to risk revealing that they missed something important by asking exactly what the fuck that means. After all, wasn’t there an article on lock-in in Fortune last month? There’s gotta be something to it. How can I invest? And there are a million other ideas out there that make push media look like quantum field theory. Let me pick on Java for a minute, since it was the next example of this kind freakish mental deficit to come along after push media. Technically speaking, it’s what we programming types like to call "yet another fucking programming language", very similar to others that are already widely used, like C++. So why did famous venture capitalists Kleiner Perkins create a $100 million Java fund to start new companies whose only claim to fame is that their unremarkable products are programmed using it? Is Java like cheese, where putting it on any food makes it 12.57% tastier? How can a language ever make any money? Bjarne Stroustrup probably does all right at his AT&T job after creating C++, but he’s not exactly wearing sunglasses sitting in a solid gold hot tub, smokin’ chronic with his legion of thong-wearing, back-that-thang-up computer science skeezas. I need another computer language like I need a second urethra—I’ve already good a perfectly good one, why not just use it? Java’s big advantage was supposed to be that programs written in it would run without any alteration on any operating system. But this claim was a bit veracity-challenged. Java programs need to run on a "Java virtual machine" specially made for each operating system, and this virtual machine and its accompanying class library have to provide the same range of services as a complete operating system, if Java programs are really going to be able to do everything that normal programs can do. So sure, your Java program can run anywhere, but only if you create what’s essentially a whole new operating system for it to run on first, then load it up inside your already-existing, perfectly good operating system. Hey, you can never have too many operating systems on your machine to dick around with, right? I guess keeping a Linux/Win2K dual-boot running while posting to slashdot every five minutes via a custom Morse-code interface surgically implanted in your sphincter just isn’t enough of a challenge for some people. Not surprisingly, they’ve been having a hard time getting this anally-fissured albatross off the ground, despite the usual blizzard of hype from Sun, the language’s creators. Early versions of the virtual machine and class library had so few features available that Java programs couldn’t do anything useful, and the more features they add, the harder it is to develop and maintain. To succeed, they’ll basically have to improve the virtual machine and class library to the point where they can compete with Windows and MacOS on their home turf, which is going to take a lot more money than Sun is willing to spend. But all the proponents have to do is chant their mantra "Java! Write once, run anywhere!" and no-way-in-hell-they’re-going-to-fucking-succeed-no-not-in-a-million-years companies like Marimba that say they’re going to use Java are suddenly on the receiving end of facial money shots of equine proportions. I think the biggest problem of would-be high-tech entrepreneurs isn’t that they don’t think big enough, it’s that they don’t think stupid enough. Here’s a free one for you, just to get the juices flowing. Every time you buy something, it gets scanned by a bar code reader and stored in a computer somewhere, right? So create a new web site, eGrab.com, that keeps a centralized, eBay-like database of everything everyone has ever bought, or at least everything interesting or rare. If a customer sees something he wants while surfing the site, he just clicks the "Grab it!" button to send an email to the anonymous owner asking if he wants to sell it. If the owner agrees, you exchange contact information, negotiate a price, and voilà, instant friction-free economy! Put all that useless crap taking up space in your attic back into circulation, without the hassle of even having to remember you own it! "It’s the new ‘grab economy’! Why wait for an offer when you can just reach out and grab it?" You make deals with retailers and credit card companies to provide you the data, and you take a cut right off the top of every transaction. Make sure to write the whole site in Java and XML for maximum hype value. Send out your slick four-color business plan to the usual suspects. Adroitly manage the venture capitalist bidding war that breaks out over you and your paradigm-sodomizing new idea. Mistakenly attribute the fact that you’re perched Scrooge McDuck-like on top of a huge pile of investment money to the completely wrong belief that you’re creating a product that anyone gives a shit about. And make sure to cash out your stock before the chumps wise up.
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