Essay: Wilmington IT and the Coral Reef

Recently, Titan cement has ramped up its efforts to squelch debate and tar opponents with some expensive new marketing and technology. If you look carefully, you can see that they’ve entertained the services of local PR and IT firms like Talk, Inc., like Blu Zeus Interactive. Collectively, they build good-looking, disingenuous websites about “new jobs for Wilmington”, try to brand the giant, old-school polluter as an environmental steward and friend of Wilmington, use lots of earth tones and hipster fonts in their newsletters.

In a recent missive from the Titan organization “Coalition for Economic Advancement”, spokesman Bob Warwick calls the thousands of opponents — the majority opposition of residents, parents, doctors, teachers! — a “small band of misguided environmentalists,” and then wraps himself in the usual flags of community advancement, “growth”, “prosperity.”

The terrible environmental effects that Titan would have on this already maxed-out local ecology are, thankfully, better and better known. It’s hard to say the things that Titan does about low impacts and environmental sensitivity with a straight face, but Titan has lots of experience with this. And they’ve enlisted some of our community’s finest and most inventive to help them in this campaign of disinformation. And as an IT nerd this is where I really get despondent.

I wonder all the time about the state of local information technology. As a Silicon Valley transplant, as a professional technologist, as a dedicated, nerdy / hacker amateur (fr.) and English major, I’m constantly hunting around for tech projects, nerdy partnerships, signs of life, technical beauty, brethren (and sethren), IT things to get up to. Indeed, the Grove Project is just one example of me and friends and readers and people we’ve met having serious fun, which is what we call all those things that are worth doing intently and pro-bono. I am COMPLETELY SPOILED by the fact that I am employed to do a thing that I absolutely love, and that is to write software, to organize complex information, to hack stuff, to “do” IT in various ways. I have NO RIGHT TO TALK. But I get completely bummed when I see our local, young tech hipsters throwing their lot in with hoary, back-room big industry bores like Titan. You wear your print t-shirts and write tweets about what kind of coffee you’re drinking that moment, but you’re not moving it forward. I don’t care if you can sing every Flaming Lips lyric…This area needs some amateur IT love! Local IT should be the rowdy brain trust of this area. You should be having ecstatic visions of design patterns, building New Things, kicking the bums out!

I know I sound like some old weird-beard unix guy at this point (I kinda am), but WTF? You get to learn “the best that’s been thought and said” about computer science at UNCW or you teach yourself to make beautiful things in Flash and then you go work for Titan Cement?? Titan is your father’s Oldsmobile! With asbestos brake pads and flaking lead paint! I know that I am COMPLETELY SPOILED, COMPLETELY INSULATED (at least at this moment) from an employment environment that sucks bad. And I know you work where you do and at what you do because you love this area. But what is it that you love, exactly? The back room deals? A heavy industrial corridor running right up the river you wakeboard on?

This area needs high-tech. And everybody says that and some people even get together to discuss it formally — I am doing that myself with some of my colleagues, forming a council that thinks hard about how to encourage real growth — and nobody knows how to make it happen, really. But the frustrations I note here have helped me see what the problem is, if not the solution:

Places I’ve lived that had real high-tech had a massive surplus of the stuff, had it growin’ on trees. Kids quitting college to form start-ups, sleeping under their desks, user groups to which demonstrators would bring things-with-gas-powered-motors-and-CPUs, consortia, translations of Shakespeare to COBOL….Now, part of that was of course the money, venture capitalists stalking greasy-haired undergrads to their garages, 6M deals on cocktail napkins, & cetera. But tech is cheap! It’s much cheaper now than it was. With the widespread availability of processing power, unbreakable free software and toolkits, the fervent tech commons of the internet, what’s really missing is LOVE, is amateurs and hobbyists and people who think that code is poetry.

Where’s the useless local academic research on the subjects? Where’s the toaster with retinal scans? Local information technology is in my experience so relentlessly, doggedly about selling more or raising your search hits or doing “SEO”, so inseparable from business. But separating IT from business, at least to some extent, is precisely what’s needed if we’re to have a real environment for high-tech here. If such a thing is possible. And local businesses would win big time if they let IT grow in hobby-ish ways, if they fostered wide and marginal growth of high-tech and not simply IT pragmatics. It’s the lesson of the web itself: You don’t centralize, you build things “at the margin.”

Information technology is like a coral reef. It’s a living thing, with as much chaos as structure within it, and with lots of other animals that build homes there, hang out near it, draw sustenance. To make it grow you have to support the conditions for the growth or expression of all those little cells outward.

[where:Wilmington, NC]