Is Medium More Like Drake or Eugenics?
What to make of this strange experiment of ours.
I’ve been on Medium for a week or so now. I feel like I’m already part of the club. Not in the sense of knowing anything at all, or having any real-life experiences, or having more than the 7 or so followers Medium automatically assigned me out of pity when I created my account — but in the way a new baby is technically part of the family even though we all know they are years from contributing anything useful. So I should probably shut the hell up and just listen for a while. But I won’t because I owe it to my 7 followers to produce something not syndicated from my personal blog.
Here are my initial impressions of Medium:
It’s piercing white. It’s, to borrow the title of a good book, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close. Its green hearts are strangely reminiscent of St. Patty’s day. And for those of us not already belonging to the cabal of infamous self-help gurus, it feels like maybe they should just be four-leaf clovers since finding them at the bottom of your articles feels about as rare. Yes, I could say, as I’m sure everyone has said or thought at one time, it’s like Blog-tweeting, or Tweet-blogging. But that doesn’t really do justice to it. It’s more than the sum of its Ev-founded parts.
This is some experimental shit.
It feels like I showed up to a comedy club where this comedian is up on stage doing her routine and rather than sitting around and watching, the whole audience is walking around the room telling jokes to one another.
“Will you all shut the hell up?” I shout, “I’m trying to hear the comedian up on stage.”
“Oh no,” someone says, stepping forth from the crowd. “She’s not a comedian. That’s Sandy. She told a hilarious joke a few minutes ago that got a lot of chortles in the room and we nominated her to get on the mic. She does an awesome bit where she’s this self-conscious comedian who is worried no one finds her funny.”
A stranger passes through the crowd handing out a pamphlet — I Was On Stage For 15 Minutes and Here’s How You Can Get There Too.
“So where’s the person I came to see?” I ask.
And they shake their head at me and laugh and walk away with the sort of creepy indifference commonly found in a David Lynch character. And I stand there wondering if there never was a headlining comedian. Or maybe there was and these people killed her.
Meanwhile the owner of the club is off giving interviews and talking about the future of comedy.
What is it? We aren’t sure yet. It’s an experiment right now. We know what comedy won’t be going forward, with all the different clubs spread throughout the city. Nobody wants to have to Uber to completely different sections of Manhattan to see different comedians perform.
People want their comedy in one place.
And nobody wants to just sit around and listen to someone else tell all the jokes. ‘Everybody is a comedian’ is our motto and we want to give the world the comedy platform to prove it. So, we are gathering all of the comedians, and jokers, and clowns, and even the homeless people with ironic sensibilities, and we are putting them in this one giant club, which is a repurposed stadium, and we’ll just see what happens.
How is it going so far? It’s hard to say. You can’t rush the future. What I can say at this point is that the acoustics are just phenomenal.
I get it, it’s experimental and experimental can be wonderful. I thoroughly enjoyed, for example, the bizarre television experiment that was John from Cincinnati on HBO. It was a failed experiment, but no one died and we all learned a little something, maybe. Some experiments end up working out really well, like the accidental scientific experiment that gave the world Penicillin and the accidental cultural experiment that gave the world Drake.
But Ev (can I call you Ev?), just to be clear, some experiments end up bad for everyone. Like eugenics. And trickle down economics. And putting Jay Leno on at 10pm. These were ‘experiments’ from which we as a society have yet to fully recover.
Is Medium really the future of digital publishing, or will it devolve into an anti-Twitter for people who can’t constrain themselves to typing fewer than 500 words?
Who knows, but in the meantime I admit there is a bit of a thrill in being a part of this franken-platform, especially since it isn’t my 80 million dollars on the line.
