Web Appreciation 2

🌐 The Magic of Instant Publishing

I really like this magical feeling of a worldwide instant publishing platform. It sort of expands my mind and helps me appreciate what we have - instead of being brought down by it being inherently niche compared to more image- and video-based and consumption-based social media.

But so what? A lot of things are going to look small compared to that. Hell, Hollywood is even struggling for eyeballs and attention compared to TikTok. So forget the relative comparison. Look at the absolute side of things.

The web as a primarily text-based publishing platform for independent creators is fucking huge. You take that small, niche audience of people that are craving an alternative to these larger mainstream channels - or just looking for a way to contribute themselves in a way that feels more authentic, rather than the unfortunately performative side of a visual medium - and you add that all up, and that is a huge global audience.

And exactly an audience that I loved and fit in with from the very beginning: outcasts, independent thinkers, freaks and geeks, pirates.

👉 This section ramps up pretty quickly to being very grandoise in scale. Actually could make a good wrapup section, so a smaller and much shorter introduction focused on tinkering would be a better way to kick things off. Swap in from the other essay or create something from scratch along those lines.

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🍽️ The Web’s Hidden Superpower: Consistency

But there’s another aspect to the web that actually makes it magical beyond just instant worldwide availability, and that’s consistency.

I’ve been watching a lot of Hell’s Kitchen lately because I’ve been craving some of the energy and chaos of the early episodes of The Bear, and consistency seems to be at the very top pinnacle of their criteria on that show. And you can see why.

Basically they weed out the amateur cooks from the pro-grade chefs in the earlier episodes to see who has the foundational skills like taste and creativity, then focus on who can most consistently deliver.

Alternate take: they focus on this the entire season. First with whether they can consistently serve up dishes from an existing menu from Gordon Ramsey. Then, as they whittle down to the finalists, they look for not just the creativity and originality of their own creations, but who can can consistently deliver their menu’s expectations to a full restaurant.

A lot of other aspects of an incredible fine dining experience are foundational: the quality of the food, how it tastes, the creativity of the individual chef, the presentation of it. Those are the kind of things that come up when they’re first whittling away the initial contestants, until there’s only a few of them left and the differences move up the stack to issues like teamwork and consistency.

The early rounds of Hell’s Kitchen weeds out the cooks from the chefs.

Because in the end, a chef has to labor away not just to come up with a creation but to then organize a brigade of people to create that exact same experience day in, day out, night in, night out - for infinity.

That’s one of the differences between a cook and a chef: scale. A cook knows how to make something themselves on a one off basis for a small group of people, all on their own time and schedule. A chef knows how to get a team of people to make scores of dishes, all with the same level of care and precision, again and again, day after day.

Think about how hard that is and what a difficult business it is. Just one slip-up, and a tiny percentage of your products that you produce could create such an outsized reaction. Whether it’s dissatisfied customers because an entrée was too cold, or all the way to the extreme of someone getting E. coli poisoning and it spoiling the business of the entire restaurant.

Think about how difficult it is to achieve that level of consistency. And when you watch the show, you see how it weeds out the people that don’t have those foundational layers - and how much consistency matters at the end.

When you have a finale, like the season three that I just watched, where both chefs created amazing food, you could tell consistency was the razor-thin fine margin between the two candidates. The experience of one as an executive chef - someone who had gone through culinary school, knew how to give out orders, and marshal the brigade - created that extra edge. Whereas the other one, from a self-taught nanny background, couldn’t organize her troops and had chaos in the kitchen that led to some orders being returned.

👉 This section is way too long. Probably deserves to be it’s own post that you can link back to later on. Instead, just make a quick reference to consistency of cooking. Making it shorter means you can lump it in with the other trends below like theater to tv and movies, old school graphic design to desktop publishing, and give this tipping point a name. There’s maybe even more trends you can pull in from computing? Like the way a CD for software could be scratched or missing one floppy from a series that you needed to install something. There’s some kind of industrial age lesson in here, right? About producing at scale. Andy Warhol on Coke being the same for a king as it is a pauper. But think about the enormous expense of the distribution channels for those other mediums or products compared to the web - we can now put our own voices out there, write words of our own, designed in our own way, collected together in whatever way makes sense in our own brains, then shared as one entire thing. Not diluted by ads or other people’s thoughts, crowded together until they all drown each other out and blur into one scrolling session after another.

A website isn’t just niche or retro, it’s a premium experience. It’s fine dining. Each site is its own magical creation, lovingly served up for us to consume in a leisurely way, not nuggets of fast food meant to be crammed by the fistful during a work break in the rat race.

🏆 Ooo, we found a winner! That’s the angle: how a personal website is like fine dining. Sleep on it and expand on this later…

(what about the idea of magic being a ton of effort into making something special? the simple and effortless thing is to just dump your words into an online service. putting in more elbow grease to give this words their own platform pays off by making something unique. you can tie this into the fine dining part easily, just make it about how you elevate a tasty dish in unexpected ways, especially with the modern trends of reinventing comfort food or fusion cuisine that makes unexpected combinations. That takes work, creativity, experimentation, and all the sweaty fun parts of what innovation is like in the real world. Not a single eureka moment but a slog of moments where you tinker away endlessly until it’s just right. That’s where the magic comes in in anything worth doing - putting in more effort than is actually needed on paper.)

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💾 Replication Without Effort

That’s the kind of consistency you get for free with the web.

You can pour in all the upfront that makes something magic - where you put in way more effort than someone might imagine to create a little piece of magic - and then the work is done. You can dash off a quick rough note or you can make something magical. But either way - whether you’re making a quick hit of a nice little snack or a larger, elaborate dish on a level of fine dining - your work is replicated perfectly for everyone.

It’s kind of similar to the magic of TV, compared to the inherent difficulty of reproducing performances in theater or musicals. Or in graphic design - you can design the perfect poster, but then you still have to find a place that can reproduce them all at a high quality.

This consistency is amazing - and something you get for free with the web.