Hellos, Design, and the End of the AirSpace

Hello. Welcome to my website. Here you'll find a collection of writings, music, video, radio shows and other things I've made over the years, to be updated regularly. I hope this blog can be a way to keep you posted on new stuff, and also a forum to explore ideas, concepts, art, and history. I may on rare occasion offer some light social commentary, but thankfully, at this point, that is merely an empty threat.

In keeping with the intended spirit of introductions, be it written or otherwise, this journal will start off with something light and conversational. I'd like to talk to you about the experience of making a website in 2020.

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Back in the olden days of the 90's, websites were simple affairs. They usually had garish, disparate colors and strange layouts. There might have been MIDI music playing loudly, without your permission, when the site booted up.

There was a wonderfully folk aspect to these endeavors. Rich or poor, personal or corporate, most websites looked about the same. I am not an internet historian, but I suspect this was due, in large part, to the constraints of data from 56k dial-up internet. To put this in perspective, the average 480p YouTube video is around 9 MB per minute, or 150 megabytes per second. This is just the video, not even the surrounding website, comments, ads, etc. It's far more. 56 kilobytes per second constrained all sites to exist in a certain aesthetic and structure, due to the limitations of what all could load.

Now that is all gone. On this site, for instance, there are photos and songs from a server. One song was 56 MB of data. It uploaded in less than a minute. or almost 1000 kb a second, or 17 times faster than dial-up.

The website "maker" program used for this program is Wix, which you might know from the constant barrage of YouTube ads. There is also Squarespace, GoDaddy, and others, including the website developer in your town who will charge you way more money than is necessary to basically make something in, say, Wix, Squarespace, or GoDaddy, but explain how they had to code something in HTML 5 with vector graph pointilism, because they know you don't know they don't know what that means either. What's fascinating, though, is that with the standardization of website navigation, aesthetic, and everything else, we see a generic quality to a lot of websites, mine included.

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I picked the "musician" theme from Wix, which includes pages like Tour, Music, and Merch. Stock photos include photos of packed crowds in a hazy neon theatre, listening to a generic rock band or DJ, and, in Summer 2020, a strange reminder of a time that no longer exists, like a photo of someone from your college yearbook now dead. There are also images of hipster record players and beautiful oak guitars and all the other detritus of late capitalist advertising. These are meant to inspire.

Each page includes stock text full of praise. Take, for instance, the generic Bio.

A Musical Journey

Shane Kimberlin has always been musically gifted. Since they were young, they have loved the limelight and were always singing, performing and playing a variety of instruments. However, it wasn’t until after undergoing some major upheavals in their life that they became a professional Musician.

Besides being demonstrably not true, the narrative is interesting because of what it's saying. Biographies are narratives, obviously, but most musicians, I'm betting, are making their own sites, and so this is what Wix has offered as the starting point: Musician was always gifted, loved the limelight, had a big revelation and became a professional. Every musical biopic ever. Or how about the Sounds of Shane Kimberlin?

Since entering the music world in 2000, Shane Kimberlin has taken music to new heights, capturing the hearts of fans everywhere. Take a look around the site and find out more about this genre-defying Musician.

Granted, this is standard press release stuff, and these are mere examples to help those coming up with such glowing praises, but, again, you can start to feel like a fraud. It'd be like starting a burger joint and the website's default text says, "Using a variety of unique recipes, Joe's Burgers has changed the food truck paradigm forever.

Again, none of this is all that surprising, and I am not contrasting older vs. modern website design as some sort of nostalgia piece. The point is that as technology improves and web design standardizes, there is a strange flattening of taste which reminds me of restaurant design.

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In the wonderful piece, "When T.G.I. Friday's Loses Its Flair" by Megan Garber, the author subtly laments the end of the cluttered, goofy spaces of places like Red Robin and the essay title's restaurant:

"The result is a kind of permeative mono-aesthetic—blond wood, clean lines, bright-but-soft lighting—that is designed, always, to “appeal to Millennials,” and that is inflected not just by Chipotle’s faux industrialism, but also by the design logic of Silicon Valley and Marie Kondo and minimalism. Strategically de-cluttered, devoid of flair—devoid, indeed, of any decor that might distinguish them from their fellow establishments—chain restaurants are melding, visually, into one tentacular beast. They are, en masse, going normcore."

She goes on to reference Kyle Chayka's "Welcome to AirSpace," a piece I am still parsing through and will write about in another post. Per Chayka:

We could call this strange geography created by technology "AirSpace." It’s the realm of coffee shops, bars, startup offices, and co-live / work spaces that share the same hallmarks everywhere you go: a profusion of symbols of comfort and quality, at least to a certain connoisseurial mindset. Minimalist furniture. Craft beer and avocado toast. Reclaimed wood. Industrial lighting. Cortados. Fast internet. The homogeneity of these spaces means that traveling between them is frictionless, a value that Silicon Valley prizes and cultural influencers like Schwarzmann take advantage of. Changing places can be as painless as reloading a website. You might not even realize you’re not where you started.

The Wix layouts are part of the AirSpace. The same fonts reused, over and over, the same insanely bright lighting on food, the rough-hewn grit texture on outdoor night shots, where beautiful thin young yuppies sit around a fire or some woman, wearing a straw hat, holds a sparkler while standing on a beach under the night sky, caked in blue tones. The streets are always clean and even the graffiti is tasteful. It's a place wholly secular and global and modern, whose values are the new, the sexy, the hints of revolution in a framework to get you to buy more stuff.

If this sounds like Steve Jobs lite, well, you may be on to something. Jobs nurtured and brought the modern Silicon Valley aesthetic to being. This is why Google ads and Samsung ads are just Apple ads. Like Wes Anderson films, it's a style unto itself, a set of propositions that are easy to emulate and even easier to parody. Combined with an Instagram aesthetic, it's become an unstoppable and comforting force in internet life.

And so, this website is a part of that world. It would be hard for it not to be. Using Wix, I am amazed at how good a site can look with little work. They do it all for you. And they do it a certain way.

You could make it weird, or discordant, or odd, but what's the point of that? Your website is meant to attract people. So get the font from Where the Wild Things Are, or Vintage Teal, or Tech Savvy, or whatever else. Get that professional photo of you standing by a tree somewhere. Get the look.

I'm not sure this aesthetic can last. The world is changing far too fast for this kind of globalized design to hold, for good or ill. There's too much division. What might the future hold? Could a type of web design tribalism trickle into the Midwest mainstream, where even Grandmas in Kansas remark that a certain webpage "sure is normie?" Probably not. But as the world seems to be leaning towards instability not seen since the height of the Cold War, one is doubtful the promises of Silicon Valley- openness, connectivity, ease, and the ever present hope for tomorrow- will continue with the same force it so wielded through the previous decade.

So let's toast to the Crazy Ones. Here's to open office ball chairs and marketing a computer with footage of Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr., to an app's overnight success and McDonalds looking like a place you could bring your boss for lunch.

Here's to flying through the AirSpace before we all crashed back down to Earth.