1977. Star Wars, Queen Elizabeth II’s Silver Jubilee, the death of Elvis Presley and the arrival of punk rock in the UK. What a time to be alive!
I was there, busily chanting my multiplication tables in unison with my classmates at junior school.
It’s hard to convey just how dangerous, how subversive those first punk records sounded at the time. The Sex Pistols, the Clash and the Damned all sounded different from each other, but they all reeked of the same devil-may-care, anti-establishment attitude. This was music made by ordinary people, not glossy, virtuoso musicians. It was brash, raw, defiant, exciting. As young kids, we were all in awe of the whole thing; owning a punk single or two immediately granted you status among your peer group.
Leaving aside for a moment any discussion of whether the Sex Pistols were a cynical commercial creation by Malcolm McLaren and Vivienne Westwood, they and their peers the Clash and the Damned spawned dozens of imitators. Inspired by the perceived do-it-yourself ethos of the punk movement, these new bands began one of the most innovative periods of British musical history, which included the growth of independent record labels. Bands were no longer shackled by the need for a major label deal to release their music. It was a period of great creativity and experimentation because the barrier to “having a go” had been lowered.
Let’s fast-forward the story 20 years or so to the mid-1990s, where a similar revolution was about to start to take hold in the world of technology. By this time, I was on the other side of the schoolteacher’s desk, teaching science at a high school in west London. The school possessed, if I recall correctly, a handful of stand-alone PCs with 486 processors, running DOS and occasionally Windows 3.1, in the admin offices. In other words, computers were still relatively uncommon.
I first encountered the internet at a small business expo at Wembley Conference Centre; I had been invited by a friend who was hoping to start a property rental agency. At the expo, various small businesses, as well as a few larger ones like AOL, were touting their wares, namely internet access, dial-up modems, HTML editing software and the like. In short, everything you needed to get online and on the Information Superhighway, as people used to say back then.
Looking back on those days, the 1990s-era internet had a lot in common with punk rock. The World Wide Web was largely built by enthusiasts and academics; the business world for the most part didn’t know what to do with it yet in order to make money.
The bar to entry was again relatively low – the cost of a modem and a small monthly subscription was all that it took to get yourself online. People created personal web sites devoted to their enthusiasms, no matter how quirky those interests may have been. People chatted and argued with each other on newsgroups and other online forums. It was another time of creativity and exploration, where do-it-yourself was order of the day. Even eBay, one of the first modern e-commerce sites, began life as an auction site for collectors, specializing in obscure, niche interests.
A similar thing eventually happened to both punk rock and the internet. Corporate interests found a fertile ground for profit. In the 1970s and 1980s we saw the full-scale commercialisation of punk and new wave music. The market was flooded with records of questionable quality in the hope something would catch on. Witness even today the array of punk-themed clothing available at shops like Hot Topic, celebrating bands that existed long before the shop’s customers, or even their parents, were born.
In the same way, as the 2000s gave way to the 2010s the online world became predominantly a place to advertise and sell things, with personal websites largely being subsumed by social media giants hoovering up users’ personal data so as to better serve them advertisements.
I recently read an article about Generation Z, those born roughly between 1997 and 2012, and their growing interest in CDs, cassette tapes and non-smart mobile phones. In other words, the type of technologies that their parents would have used and that they themselves might vaguely remember from their childhood.
The article went on to say that the Gen-Z-ers interviewed had a hankering for the pre-social-media, pre-smartphone days, even if they did not personally experience them. It seemed to them that it seemed like a far less stressful time without the constant connection, the feeling that you are always on display, having to show your best self and “build your brand”. The feeling that so much of your life is coming to you via your smartphone, tablet or laptop and being monetised by corporations.
It was interesting that the article went on to talk about the growth of “digital detox” weekends, cafes where electronic devices were not allowed and the like. It pointed these things out as being possible business opportunities for the future, where someone was going to be able to make billions of dollars. In this I think the article’s authors rather missed the point of what the Gen Z-ers were saying they were missing. The punk bands were making music because they enjoyed doing it. The internet pioneers were creating their websites because they liked sharing their enthusiasm with people around the world. The people who developed the then-new technologies loved the challenge. The fame and fortune was a side effect of this, not the primary aim.
Someone once opined that if you can’t identify what the product is, then you are probably the product. The Gen-Z interviewees in the article were only too aware of the fact that everything is commodified and monetised now, and it sounds like they are getting tired of it.
Psychologists have a term “anemoia”, meaning feeling nostalgic for a time that you didn’t experience. It sounds like this could be what some of Generation Z are feeling right now, a yearning for a slower, less connected time. Maybe they are yearning for a time when the internet was still a thing, but it wasn’t the only thing. Maybe they are yearning for the days of the punk rock internet.
Leave a Reply