On The Wire

I spent most of the Christmas break watching The Wire from start to finish.  It made me realising the pointlessness of declaring something ‘the best’. There is a standard of excellence so rarely reached by anything that when it is all you can do is acknowledge the fact. So instead of thinking about technology I have been spending my days immersed in the world of Stringer, Wee Bey, McNutty, Bubs, Lester, Omar et al.

As a whole the series is about Baltimore, its residents and how they have been left behind the wave of prosperity which swept other parts of America. Its creator David Simon wrote:

Nor did we glory in the healthy sectors of the American economy, in the growth industries of the information age. We did not embrace Brooklyn Heights and West Los Angeles, Silicon Valley and Marin County. Hell, we didn’t even rest for more than a day or two in Roland Park or Mount Washington or Towson – those Baltimore neighbourhoods that define a viable, monied America.

There are two sides to this point, Baltimore is divorced from Silicon Valley but also Silicon Valley is divorced from Baltimore. This is not a criticism of the Valley culture per se but a broader criticism of the technology industry, specifically the web industry. The reason there are not enough original ideas and far too many derivative services is that the people creating technology are too far divorced from most people and as a result do not really know what they will find usef or helpful. The upshot is many web startups end up in an echo chamber with themselves.

Death of the newspaper

What is interesting about watching the fifth season is that it is all about the death of the newspaper and the pressure this puts on local papers like the Baltimore Sun. From the accompanying interviews it is clear that in the newspaper industry the Internet is seen as a mainly destructive and threatening force. David Simon is a former newspaper reporter who left the Baltimore Sun after a takeover which represented the start of mass consolidation in that industry.

Bloggers delight in deriding newspapers as the ‘dead tree industry’ and welcome the coming apocalypse that they are facing. This is not to say the democratisation of the media brought by tools like WordPress should be undone but that the wholesale destruction of traditional journalism will have negative consequences for everyone. The type of local reporting which Simon did and which laid the foundation for something as perfect as The Wire needs to be preserved. Those of us in the technology industry should be concerned with developing models which can benefit people outside our industry. As well as preserving something valuable from the old economy we may find that by getting outside the tech bubble we start to create things which people find useful.