The History of the Web

I’m reading through Thomas Pynchon’s Crying of Lot 49 and it features this absurd and morbid aside:

How did the post horn come in? That went back to their founding.In the early ’60’s a Yoyodyne executive living near L.A. and located someplace in the corporate root-system above supervisor but below vice-president, found himself, at age 39, automated out of a job. Having been since age 7 rigidly instructed in an eschatology that pointed nowhere but to a presidency and death, trained to do absolutely nothing but sign his name to specialized memoranda he could not begin to understand and to take blame for the running-amok of specialized programs that failed for specialized reasons he had to have explained to him, the executive’s first thoughts were naturally of suicide.But previous training got the better of him: he could not make the decision without first hearing the ideas of a committee.

The absurdity of the high-level executive has been a reality for quite some time. It reminds me of some conversations happening around A.I. in the service of “efficiency.” Almost 60 years later, and we may actually be able to automate C.E.O.’s out of a job.

I’ve been digging into the invention of what’s sometimes called “Netscape Time,” the rapid acceleration of software development once it moved to the web thanks to digital access to that software. But Netscape Time also was often chaotic and without purpose. When Jamie Zawinski (one of the original programmers on the Netscape team) left the newly spun out Mozilla in 1999, he had this to say:

And there’s another factor involved, which is that you can divide our industry into two kinds of people: those who want to go work for a company to make it successful, and those who want to go work for a successful company. Netscape’s early success and rapid growth caused us to stop getting the former and start getting the latter.

Which is to say, the failure of a lot of companies that have come since.