Monday, October 28, 1996
Please boycott (and/or smash!) our loyal anti-sponsors:










Way New Media Gets
Way Old, Way Fast

SF, CA/NY, NY - (Oct. 28) - The fledgling digital-multimedia industry achieved a major milestone late last week, when it kicked off its first ever "Black Friday," with the suicides and/or resignations of several top multi-media executives and/or companies.

Highlighting the day were the resignation of Pathfinder President Paul Sagan and the announcement that Wired Ventures would cease all efforts to con really dumb investors into financing the continuation of its feigned attempt to be a way new something to be named at a later date.

Though Sagan claimed his resignation had absolutely nothing to do with the fact that Pathfinder sucks, Wired Ventures president, Louis Rossetto, did not.

Both Turner-Warner's Pathfinder and Wired Ventures' Hotwired were major pioneering efforts in the attempt to colonize the world wide web (the cloying graphic subset of the internet (the world wide network of computer networks and pornography servers)) on behalf of a soulless hegemony of hive-mind robots.

Over the weekend, throughout the country, in cities large and small, millions of people took to the streets to celebrate the failure of this effort and the "virtual" end of new-media and of "that seemingly endless stream of slobbering geeks rushing around desperately trying to cash in before it's too late."

And early this morning, in an effort to stem the free-flow of red ink and, essentially, save their sorry asses, both Pathfinder and Wired announced their demoralized staffs would be purchased for spare change by new new-media upstart, Project Kool-Aid.

According to Jim Jones, founder of Jim Jones Interactive and head data architect and evangelist and dispenser of Project Kool-Aid, "I think Mr. Turner and Mr. Rossetto and I speak with one voice on this when I say there'll be no significant change in the day to day operations or content or personnel of any of the 3 organizations. The changes will be mostly cosmetic and will consist mainly in switching a few brand loyalties."

Specifically, the Wired staff will switch from drinking Ken Kesey Brand Kool-Aid, to drinking Jim Jones Brand Kool-Aid -- and the Pathfinder staff will switch from General Foods Brand Kool-Aid also to the Jones brand.

For many members of both organizations, the change will be a welcome one. According to Jon E-Cash, one of the token semites on the Wired staff, "Many of us here at Wired have had the experience of looking up from our workstations, one day, and noticing, to our chagrin, that the souls we thought we had when we started here are, uhhh, no longer operative. And many of us have blamed this on the brand of Kool-Aid we were drinking. So yes, I for one will be very happy to start drinking Jim Jones' Kool-Aid."

Jones, who originated the popular Kool-Aid Site of the Day and, from there, launched his new venture, Project Kool-Aid, stated he was very happy to be single-handedly responsible for "saving" new media.

Though it still may be premature, many wise-ass punks are already bemoaning the loss of an industry so ripe for parody, while other wise-ass punks point out that the industry, already so much a parody of itself, wasn't really "ripe for anything, except maybe use in a fertilizer-based car bomb."

An unnamed industry pundit summed it up this way, "Having screamed, first, 'It's content, stupid,' then 'It's context, stupid,' then 'It's attitude, stupid,' then 'It's interactivity stupid,' and then 'It's community, stupid,' in the end, the only proposition new-media seems to have validated is the one that suggests, 'It's stupidity, stupid,'" the unnamed pundit said.




[ FRIDAY  |   ARCHIVES   |   C3F ]


Copyright (c) 1996 by C3F