The Millennial SaaS-era Retrospective: Part 1
soundtrack: Green Day, "Boulevard of Broken Dreams"
When I entered the eighth grade in 2001, I don't know if I would have been able to tell you who Steve Jobs was, had you asked me. I could have immediately pointed out Sean Parker, though.
Eighth-grade me couldn't afford to buy an entire CD library in 2001. I couldn't even reliably get to the CD store in Jackson, Mississippi - it was a little too far away to bike and my mom didn't trust the traffic. If I wanted to listen to a Top 40 single at will, I'd listen to the radio for hours until my track came on, then scramble to hit "record" on the tape deck to capture the next four minutes.
Then Napster arrived. You downloaded it, searched for a song, waited a bit, then started playing. It was Spotify before Spotify. It is the default experience for listening to music nowadays. It was the first software-as-a-service that I remember. Record labels hated it for taking away their default business model, which I perceived as old corporate oligarchs blocking me from something I wanted. It was the same feeling I had about my parents blocking me from going to the CD store. I was restricted by adults who didn't understand. But Sean Parker - he was a kid just a few years older than me doing something about it.
I wouldn't be in eighth grade for long before class got stopped one day in September. A plane had hit a building in New York, and there were rumors that it was some kind of attack. Class was stopped for the day, and teachers kept students in their primary classroom with the news on. Something felt like this would be an event we should remember. Around lunchtime, our parents came to pick us up. I spent an hour watching the news with my mom before jumping onto the Internet from a beige clamshell Compaq PC, reading everything I could about the attacks that morning, trying to make sense of it all. I read about George W. Bush's plans for Afghanistan and Iraq and talked about a military draft with my friends at lunch, all of whom had World War II veteran grandparents. We were too young to really remember the 1990s when America wasn't heavily at war.
In 2004, one of my classes did a sort of "fantasy stock market" where the students selected a small portfolio of stocks at the start of the semester. We could buy and sell as much as we wanted, and we'd get bonus points if our portfolio had the highest value at the end of the semester. I was nearly all in Google. My parents thought that was silly and urged me to pursue a more balanced portfolio, which I did. I would lose the competition to the kid who picked 100% Google.
Software was in by 2004. I knew who Steve Jobs was by that point. I had an iPod. My journalism professor had scrounged up dollars for one new Mac, and I learned about desktop publishing on that magical device. I knew it was somehow important that Macs now had Intel processors inside. They were cool. It wasn't necessarily cool yet to know too much about computers, but there were certainly cool devices and uncool devices. Macs were suddenly cool.
So was Halo. On Friday nights in the football offseason, we'd gather together for LAN parties. Anyone could play Halo, but it took some actual technical know-how to string together a 16-person LAN party. The kids who could do it were the hosts. The high-school quarterbacks came over to their houses.
I was a tinkerer and configurer throughout this time. My parents didn't want me to "break the house computer," so I was cautious about what I changed. I knew how to update a Windows registry key, set up a router, and debug when the Internet went down. In the summer of 2005 I would become a participant for the first time. It barely even registered that my parents were starting to discuss the real estate market more.
I attended a three-week summer program for incoming high-school seniors at a nearby college. We took classes from college professors that were designed to be closer in spirit to an actual college course. I chose one on artificial intelligence. The professor coached us on BASIC and walked us through the ideas of David Dennett. What was a brain? What was the Turing test? Would computers ever outthink their makers?
And most importantly, I coded. For the first time, I bent the computer to my will.
Code hit me at the same time Facebook hit me. Shortly after my first experience bending a computer to my will, I received my college acceptance letter, and with it, the coveted .edu email. If you had one of those and a friend in college, Facebook was open to you. Here was another young company founder, doing something really cool with tech, something that my parents couldn't understand, or maybe just didn't want to.
Xanga, Blogger, and Livejournal all opened to me at the same time. It was a golden age of blogging. My angsty teenage thoughts could make their way out into the world, wrapped in moody fonts and CSS I copy-pasted from some forum. Internet culture taught me to hack my favorite video games of the day. And Warcraft III turned into World of Warcraft - an entire virtual world available online!
It didn't feel like the nerds had taken over the real world yet. But their world was becoming so rich and all-encompassing that someone like me didn't need that real world much. Their world had so much to offer.
Like most Millennials, I was getting comfortable with the idea that I might create something online for myself one day. I still thought I'd have a traditional corporate job out of college like my parents had always wanted. I'd go work at a desk. Build some experience. Fill out a resume.
Then 2008 happened.
And all those plans fell apart.
This post is part of a series. Part 2 can be found here.