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why so many people?
Tuesday, May 15 2001
Those of you who remember the way things were back in Charlottesville, Virginia have probably not yet forgotten Chaz and other self-proclaimed "skinheads" who terrorized the party circuit back in those days. Well, now it seems Chaz is no longer a skinhead and is instead sporting a dashing Leonardo DiCaprio haircut. But you'll be pleased to know that he is still getting in trouble every bit as much as he did in the days of yore. My man Doyce Dees sent me a link to some video footage of Chaz getting beat up by a big motherfucking redneck at a UVA party. Definitely stick around and wait for Chaz to say, "I am a warrior!" Also, the redneck accents of the extras in that clip are priceless. "Calm down, man!" and "All the ugly motherfuckers go home!" are particularly memorable.
This whole maddening two and a half year experience with working in the dotcom economy (such as it was) has me thinking about what was so obviously wrong with these companies. They were all too big and too, well, brick and mortar. Building glitzy trophy office buildings and filling them with hundreds of employees is not a revolutionary thing to do; it will not change the world, and without profits, it won't last. Doing thing the old way, with lots of people and lots of real estate doesn't take advantage of what the internet truly has to offer. If these dotcoms had been smart, they would have figured out a way to build and operate their websites with a tiny skeleton staff. I don't know why a huge dotcom can't be completely automated and operated by, say, five people. All the work should be done by computers. In my experience, after a certain number, additional people don't really add much value to a company. Today while at work I was thinking about building a content site something like Salon.com in which all the writing is contributed for free by participants in a community and placed on the front page based on an algorithm that considers timeliness and the overall popularity of the author. Advertisements could be put on the site using a completely automated auction system for ad placements: there would be no ad sales staff. I could build and run the whole operation myself and if it didn't make any money I could maintain it as a curiosity for years. I originally made these claims while at work today to Jami via AOL Instant Messenger, but later on tonight I was again making them to my housemate John. "Write a business plan!" he demanded. John figures that if I can properly articulate my idea (especially with regard to how to run the company I work for now, whose market capitalization is an affordable six million dollars [we can rebuild it!]) maybe I could get his brother in law involved. This brother in law is one of the few people who actually made real money from the dotcom bubble, having been there at the beginning and having cashed out sometime around March of 2000. By the way, if I were that guy, I wouldn't boast about such luck too widely; there are plenty of grumbling former paper millionaires about, and some of them might be armed.
In other news, tonight Pinkis was out eating sushi with John's sister Maria and John and I were eating a non-albacore tuna salad when John found a strange fleshy tubular structure mixed into the frayed fish meat. We still don't know what the structure was, but it was weird enough that we completely lost our appetites.
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