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Sun. Jun 17, 2007

Digital Ageism Part Two: No New Paradigms for Old Fogies

Fred Wilson apparently decided to spend part of his weekend making old people sputter.

I’ve been reluctant because I don’t want to pick at this scab of a meme. I really don’t want to be the guy who made it harder for anyone older than 30 to get funded in the web services market.

Who is developing this “clearer idea”? Who is developing the set of “design patterns”? It’s the younger generation. And its important to understand why.

It is incredibly hard to think of new paradigms when you’ve grown up reading the newspaper every morning. When you turn to TV for your entertainment. When you read magazines on the train home from work.

But we have a generation coming of age right now that has never relied on newspapers, TV, and magazines for their information and entertainment. They are the net natives. They grew up in AOL chatrooms, IMing with their friends for hours after dinner, and went to school with a Facebook login.

The Internet is their medium and they are showing us how it needs to be used…

But the truth is that some of the most interesting things I’ve seen this month and this year are the creations of kids who barely shave. And it’s not an accident.

A VC: The Age Question

I’m not sure why ignorance of what’s gone before is a compelling advantage. If it is, it’s one that will rapidly decay … when the next paradigm comes along. Seems to me the ability to adapt to changing environments is a life long skill, not just an attribute of youth.

As you might imagine, Fred’s gotten some of the oldsters durn grumpy. Like Dave Winer:

I’ve been a net native since before I was 20. Yes, I read newspapers growing up, but I also blogged before it was called blogging, and created a lot of the technology that the kids are developing now. Yet I’ve had arrogant idiotic asshole kids tell me I don’t understand the net. Yeah sure.

In every other creative field people are active into their sixties, seventies or eighties. For some reason in tech we assume people are washed up at 30? Based on what? Marc Andreessen’s experience. Hmm.

Steve Hobson was a grumpy old man, too:

To Fred — kiss my ass. Just because I have gray hair, fathered a couple of kids, been divorced more than once — you know … that thing call Real Life … doesn’t make me or any of my generation any less of a potential to shift more than an occasional paradigm.

Your assumption that anyone over the age of 30 isn’t a net native is arrogant at best. Who the hell do you think invented the net you duffus — it was us gray haired old farts when you were probably still in pampers.

Dad-burn-it!

This is about recognizing change, adapting to it, and learning to profit from it. Darwinian adaptation. The idea that youths accept and adapt to change easier than old fogies may be appealing, but minds are not opened or closed by time, youth, or the lack of either. It’s a mindset.

I quoted Steve Jobs not long ago saying, “It’s rare that you see an artist in his 30s or 40s able to really contribute something amazing.” He said that in 1985, at the age of 29. 22 years later, and days from the introduction of the “revolutionary” iPhone … do you think he feels the same way?

Let me tell you a story. Once Upon A Time, there was this kid who got his first computer a few months after he turned 17. In a couple of months, he’d self-taught himself enough HTML to build his first web page by hand. Within six months he unwittingly became the first person to cover a major sporting event in near real time on the web. In less than a year he had his own domain filled with content. By the age of 19, he was being paid to make web sites for others. He started a blog that has been online for just shy of seven years. At the age of 28, he now makes a comfortable living from something he didn’t even know existed at the age of 15. When the paradigm shift arrived, and the majority had not even recognized it yet, he hopped on board and rode it.

Who is this youngster? It’s me. Just add twenty years to all the numbers.

Because that is all they are … numbers.