The following is excerpted from Robert Stacy McCain's recent interview with Andrew Breitbart of Breitbart.com:
Question: You're how old?
Answer: 38.
Q: And how did you get into what you got into?
A: I graduated college in 1991 with no sense of my future whatsoever. The basic Generation X thesis totally applied to me -- sort of this wandering, "what's the future going to be like?" Remember when the book "Generation X" came out? Douglas Coupland's book? And simultaneously, the sort of Kurt Cobain anthem was like, what's our generation going to have to offer the world? Everything's been invented.
There was just a certain sort of hopelessness. And graduating into a bad economy in 1991 didn't help matters, and it's not as if academia -- I was sort of, you know, a typical of left-of-center college kid -- it's not as if the college's inculcating rah-rah, pro-American values.
So I came out [of college] a fairly cynical person. And I'd say my first four years out of college were spent mostly spinning my wheels, trying to figure out what I wanted to do. I did some writing for a free magazine, I was a music editor, I worked for production companies, waited tables at the very, very beginning -- never had any mission whatsoever. ...
I have a friend named Seth Jacobson who went to Harvard, is an astrophysics major, and he said, "I need to talk to you. I'm going to come to your apartment and let's one a walk." And this is in Santa Monica, and it was about 1992. He said, "The future is the Internet." And he gave me this long, impassioned talk about how my mind, which is manifestly ADD-addled, perfectly fits the way that the Internet works. And he started talking about hypertext markup language and, say, you could be reading an article -- I was always a newshound -- and you wanted to see something more on something, it could take you in, and you could end up hyperfocusing on something you want, which is what ADD people do.
And I just remember hearing what he had to say, and it felt kind of absurd. Like, "OK, well, I don't really understand what, precisely, you're saying, but I'll store it away." It was about a year-and-a-half later, that I was in Austin, Texas, for a bizarre one-year experiment --
Q: Doing what?
A: Writing. I was still doing the music editor thing for this magazine called Venice Magazine, but I wanted to see, I wanted to go to shows. I was just covering the national and international music scene. And I thought, having spent so many years in New Orleans, seeing great shows in great venues, that the Los Angeles music scene was just so depressing -- seeing bands that didn't seem too enthralled to be onstage at the Roxy, because they knew that they were performing for music execs with comp tickets, who were just sitting in the back with their arms folded. I was just young and excited, to rock out, sort of thing.
So I was down there and I started reading about the Internet. I had AOL at the time [about 1993]. ... But to be able to be given sports scores, and to be able to make an online reservation. ... It was neat, but it wasn't the Internet. It wasn't being able to ... be a participant in the media, AOL didn't give you that really strong experience. And I got, somehow, a seed sprouted in my head. I go, "I've got to get on this Internet thing."
It took me so long. I remember I went out to a place called Luminati.net -- they were kind of a well-known Internet service provider -- and I went up to, almost like a garage, and knocked on the side of a door, and there were a whole bunch of servers there. And I said, "I want to be a subscriber," and they handed me a disc and a manual on how to get online. I tried it for about a week and I couldn't get online. Finally, I said, "Look, I'm going to go to Central Market, I'm going to buy a six-pack of my favorite beer, and I'm going to pretend like this is a first date, and I'm just going to work this thing until I get her to bed." And I spent all night, and I finally logged on, and I had Mosaic, I had Gopher. ... I started clicking onto folders and seeing all this interesting stuff, and I felt like I was mischievously investigating a world that nobody else knew about.
I would say that was the day my life and my career began. Logging onto the Internet -- everything before seemed cloudy, and simply the pursuit of happiness was just, "Let's go to another band. Let's go to another movie." I was just a classic pop consumer.
The Internet was like an awakening for me. I sleepwalked and drove drunk through college. I mean, when I wasn't sleeping, I was drinking, and I was not remotely invigorated by the academic experience. Getting online and having access to all the information I want, all the newswires, all the historical information that I could possibly want, has made me, in hindsight, be very regretful of having treated college the way I did. I wish I'd had the Internet at the time.
I look at the Internet -- to me, it's as close to a panacea as one can get. There's something for everybody. ...
There's an ironic twist to the fact that Kurt Cobain killed himself in large part due to his cynicism as a human being, and he talked about how his generation really didn't have anything new to offer. It feels that, within that period of him dying, within a very soon period, the Internet became a prevalent part of our lives, that every single day has grown exponentially.
Generation X, which used to create nihilistic art, now is involved in the transformation of communications. When people would talk about the global community 15 years ago, it was a bizarre abstract. .... Even when I'd travel over to Europe, I'd pick up the International Herald Tribune and I'd get the sports scores from two days before. So I always felt there was a huge disconnect between here and there, here and everywhere. The Internet has created raw immediacy and raw connectedness to anything and everything.
It seems that if you've ever felt constrained by the bureaucracies of the world -- whether it be government or corporations -- it seems that now any individual can do anything that they set their mind to. A person can create a Web site that looks as if it's a multinational corporation. You can go to GM.com or you can go to MG's blog, and MG's blog is 10 times more compelling. You can pretty much do anything. You can start your own T-shirt company, you can cultivate an audience, you can create a business from scratch. ....
I think we take for granted how great it is. And I don't, I really don't. Every single day, I'm thankful for the opportunity to not have to work in an office building.
Q: You talk about ADD, and people may think you're joking. You were diagnosed?
A: In Austin, Texas. And this psychiatrist said to me, you don't have to come back for the follow-up test, because this is the biggest no-brainer I've ever seen.
I remember thinking at the time, I've really got a problem here and I need to figure it out, because I can't sit straight, I can't concentrate on anything. I was always like that. I couldn't believe that I made my way through prep school and college without really paying attention to anything. It was my wits and my sense of humor that really got me around it -- tools that allowed me to circumvent the system.
The Internet for me has been that answer. I realize that my entire brain was meant to be connected to the Internet. It is my Ritalin. ... I don't feel that I have a disease now. I really don't. I'm like, "Oh, finally the device has been invented." That's why I call it a panacea. The Internet is the greatest single invention, to me, ever.
Every technological innovation -- from instant messaging, to e-mail, to World Wide Web. ...
I'm a news addict, news aficionado who, instead of watching "Sesame Street" growing up, would watch the local news. And I'd watch the 4:30 news, then I'd watch the 5 o'clock news, then I'd watch the 6 o'clock news, then I'd watch the national news at 6:30. I'd usually see the same story conveyed, in the same manner, at least three or four times. I was such a voracious news consumer.
The idea now, on the Internet, that I can read everything that's being read inside the major newsrooms in the country -- I'd pay top dollar for that, back in the day. And now it's all there.
You know that you're seeing the same exact information that the Dan Rathers, the Peter Jennings, the Tom Brokaws of the world are seeing. You're like, "Wait a second. Why did you choose that to be the No. 1 story?" And you start gaining a level of confidence that there's a conventional wisdom out there, set by people with a very parochial sensibility. Given that anything's possible on the Internet, you kind of feel motivated to say, "Let me have my say on this. Let me try and counteract the effect of there being a machinery that creates conventional wisdom without taking into consideration alternative viewpoints." ...
