The Beginning of Hypergrunge

November 1993 - Seattle, Washington

Seattle has an extremely beautiful downtown district - ornate, richly marbleized gold-plated malls, wonderfully monolithic brick buildings, a great bayside market, a clean museum, and lots of young urban professionals in trench coats with neatly combed hair. The words I would use to describe the city: cosmopolitan, mature, convention-oriented, unnerving.

Why unnerving? Because as I walked among the banks and through the valley of the dollar, yea, I spotted young postpunkers that stood out of the crowd like bulls in a china shop. Now, Seattle is very cold to me, coming from Hawaii, where the weather is always perfect. In the islands, many of the leather and chains types wear shorts, no socks, and slippers. But up the chilly Northwest, kids with an attitude still have to dress warmly, and so wear thick ripped sweaters, multiple layers of plaid and leather, thermal underwear, and major foot coverage. They're not your average punks - they're mini grungemonsters having a bad day.

Now, I like postpunk grunge sounds. They rock. If one goes by the sheer emotional angst in music, Seattle is definitely the capital of angry young people. So it's no surprise to me when I see Gucci shops and minimalls that put Honolulu and San Francisco to shame - think what it must be like growing up here! To be struggling teenagers in the midst of a budget crunch, where going outside can be a clothing hassle, where all you can do is stay inside, go to coffee shops and bars that you can afford to go to, and wait until your hard working stepparent gets home. Then to go downtown among the security cameras and tourist traps to try to find a McJob, it all seems so sad. Well, that's my idea of it, anyway.

So think of the hypermedia researchers and the beautiful, delicate theoretical constructions they make, the monolithic lists of references they make in their papers, and the various scientific-sounding catch phrases they create to attract funding and press as the opulent city. Think of the new kids on the block, the grad students, teachers, and dropouts who are creating rather than theorizing and are just too giddy with the excitement. Are they the bulls in the china shop?

I'm tired of theorizing and don't want to see another word with "hyper", "neo", "info", "multi", "meta", "space", or "media" in it. I don't want to hear of obscure or abstract structures, I don't want to see precise, articulate schematics that look like they were drawn by an Etch-a-Sketch groupie on acid. I don't want to read another technical paper with one or two sentences of real meat and three pages' worth of references.

If a student activist only has contact with researchers, theorists, and philosophers in their studies, I'm willing to bet that he'll either drop out or become one of them. If a student activist only has contact with the Internet, I'm willing to bet that he'll create global chaos! Well, I say variety is the spice of life, for better or worse.

It is both sad and uplifting to think that two graduate students could create in a few months what visionaries, theorists, and corporations couldn't do in thirty years. An informal group has gathered at Hypertext '93 to try to get a grip on all the various hyperphrases that have sprung up lately, and it's getting pretty popular. That's sad. The sudden student population growth at the conference coupled with the gung-ho attitudes of World-Wide Webheads - that's uplifting.

Richard Feynman, a really cool physicist, once said that if you can't boil information down to a (freshman) level where it can be easily understood, perhaps you don't really know what you're talking about. Research is good, groups of graying visionaries with strong opinions are OK, but let's get the ball rolling, folks. Here's the call to arms: pull up your sleeves and let's start creating! And don't stop causing trouble until you become a graying visionary.