The death of Flash, the open canvas, and the future of interactive experiences

Do you remember the first time you encountered the web?

I was in my dad’s office at the Technical University of Norway, NTH, on a Mac Centris, on whatever line they were on at the time. It was just there. I knew about BBSes from before, of course, textmode menus, ascii porn, sure, I was there too. But opening up Mosaic, clicking blue links on a grey background and viewing grainy-ass Jpegs was clearly a different animal. I was in deep. If you were a cool kid (I did become a cool kid eventually, sort of), you’d be on IRC and experiencing True Internet Depravity, but for me, Mosaic and HTML was within reach. HTML made sense: Decorate text with metadata, link from document to document by path. I had already made simple text adventures with bat files and basic, but here I was making text adventures with graphics in them, and no awkward verb-hunting text parser in sight. I felt like HTML was the most natural extension of text and I was hooked.

My early endeavours into web design were obviously ridiculous. I made a Geocities site about levels I built for the (then) Mac-only “doom killer” Marathon, weird ResEdit hacks I’d come across and so on. It was a white text on black background mess of childlike ideas, but the trick to it at the time was simply that I had what I felt to be a complete canvas for the kind of things I’d possibly want to make. As I grew older, my ambition naturally grew, and while my parents did sculpture and visual arts, web content and the intricate linking of documents was my avenue.

I am a high school dropout, and I dropped almost practically the day I turned 18 to do web design in early 2001.

What a ridiculous time that was. In my first job after having been a paperboy, having just turned 18, I was making fairly stupid money, and for no good reason either. The dotcom bubble artificially inflated a lot of egos, mine included, and I felt like I was at the top of my game. Until I started bumping up against the limits of the web.

Rewind to a time where tables within tables within tables are how you build your world. Rewind your mind to a place where you slice a PSD in Fireworks and your producer expect the site to look just like that full stop, and if there is horizontal overflow, fuck it, users gotta scroll.

Horizontal scrolling you guys!

And in the middle of all this, Flash was bubbling like a pleasantly sinister undercurrent, until it suddenly became a thing everyone did.

If you weren’t there, it is difficult to convey just the breadth of freedom Flash afforded you as a designer. I started messing with it around Flash 3, but by Flash 5 the thing was reaching momentum of monstrous proportions, and I was caught in the maelstrom: My employers at the time decided I was dumb enough to threaten with firing since “you told us you were a web designer, and web designers know Flash, so YOU LIED”. In a panic I caught up damn quick.

Now I was never really a developer, I was a photoshop/fireworks/html duder, but my god if Flash didn’t whip me into shape right quick, and I will be forever grateful to having caught the wave at the time I did. Flash, as a kid with little deep experience in development, was an absolutely incredible learning environment. The feedback loop of creating the assets with designer-friendly tooling with a natural incline towards animation, and giving us the scripting capability to use those animated assets in rich audiovisual applications, it kicked me into the clouds. I had wanted to make games since I was a little boy, drawing up imaginary R-Type levels on paper, designing characters when I should have been doing my homework, and here was a platform where I could make those assets and designs, and add interactivity of some true complexity on top. It was a catalyst that would drive my career ever since.

Flash was the ultimate canvas. It gave you a viewport in the web that you were absolutely free inside of. You had your rectangle and you made of it what you could, and with the capability of easily inspecting the dimensions of said rectangle brought on an intuitive interest in responsive UI. We talk about it as industry standard now but in the mid 2000s Flash developers were building responsive, animated, rich UIs the likes of which the web had never seen. The Flash scene was vibrant, generous, ravenous for innovation and bending the rules. It was a community of bending limits to the breaking point for the greater good, because the web needed to be interesting and inspiring and we had the means to make it so.

Flash hit that sweet spot of limitation and enablement, where you have the tools to create but the showstoppers that inspire you to bring a sledgehammer. It was an absolutely fantastic learning environment, and its loss has made me feel deeply, deeply sad for the web. Without the chaos afforded by plugins and tooling, it is a miserable, miserable canvas for creativity.

Let me ask you a simple question.

When was the last time you explored the web? I mean explored it. When was the last time you didn’t google a thing and find what you needed within the first page of results? When was the last time you stumbled across the unexpected? Things that weren’t grids of data and binary interactions with some fucking video stuffed up in it somewhere. Things that didn’t ask for your Facebook account. Things that were truly generous beyond the service they provide (granted your precious precious user data of course), things that weren’t swamped in advertising, things that were there as a kind of internet varial kickflip, pure designer ability and will. When was the last time you saw anything that made you think the internet was a place of wonder? I’m going to bet you right now, those moments are few and far between, and if you had your 10-site loop in the mid 2000s it’s probably more of a 5-site loop now. The canvas has been whipped.

A grand sin we have committed unto ourselves in standardising the web is denying the artist true choice of materials. The web as it currently stands has become a corporate cesspool of predeteremined ideals, where designs are made within the confines of capitalism, where there is little room for grassroots designer uprising and disruption. We removed the plugins so that we can stuff everyone into the dogshit compound of html/css/js, and if you disagree that it’s a shithole, I will wager you simply have not done enough work elsewhere. You haven’t seen how good it can be.

That’s the trick when trying to explain to folks who don’t understand the Flash movement, because they likely weren’t there before enough to see what it was like after. Flash aside, I was wishing for a web as a a nexus of plugin, Unity and Flash and Shockwave and the undreamed of side by side to enrich our lives and experiences, to keep that internet magical and chaotic. Instead, with the death of plugins and the iron fist of the standardised web, we are stuffed soundly into Google and Facebook’s pockets. It is internet dystopia.

We’ve robbed human beings of a space in which learning is play, creation is free and the unexpected occurs as a matter of course, and it’s a tragedy.

I have successfully removed myself from web development, but given its current virulent intersection with mobile app development I am occasionally forced to dip my toe in it. I can’t really articulate how repulsed I am by web-based mobile app platforms. Not because it’s not a pragmatic and elegant solution, because it can be, but because I have already seen one prolific canvas hammered into submission by the html/css/js clusterfuck, and watching it happen again shatters my heart in a thousand pieces. I wonder at the depths of web developers’ Stockholm syndrome, where they must feel being smashed on the wheel of html/css/js has been such a profoundly shitty experience they MUST make the suffering somehow worth it by perpetuating it into the grave, because wringe your minds dry, html/css/js is indisputably a profoundly compromised idea, with a passionately harrowed open source community that creates little but solutions for itself to overcome the thrillingly mundane.

The web experience fucking sucks right now. It is grids of shitty single threaded poorly performing content, stuffed into focus tested templates, nothing is fucking interesting, nothing is generous, everything is known, nothing cuts through. The web is a billion developers, screaming into a sweaty pillow hoping for reprieve.

Here’s the thing. If you give someone tools that punish them for divergence, you will not have divergence among any but the most masochistic, and this is a stone cold sin. html/css/js are punishing tools that require too much thought, too much care, and too much knowledge. You give someone a block of clay and they can create in an instant, and this instantaneous inspiration to play is and should be the goal of furthering interactive experiences. As technology veterans we are privileged with knowledge, and we are divinely ordained to take that knowledge of past sins and applying it to making things genuinely better, not just duct tape shit together until people stop complaining for a moment.

I urge developers to seek out alternative paths. To break with the norm and seek freedom at every possible avenue, not through an endlessly deep stack of dependencies but through genuine alternatives and a hunger for delightful otherness. The web was a portal into pure networked human creativity, and it has become a void into which we all howl alone to an unyielding, pointless nothingness. We should be making things that impress and matter, and we should be doing it not just for money, but for our mortal souls.

If you don’t feel free within your canvas, find another one, or make your own. Break shit, make shit happen. It’s the only way to fly.