Whatever happened to all the fun in the world?

I’ve just come back from one of the first meetings for what I hope will become a very important project. I’ll talk more about the project itself in a future blog post. It was a good meeting, trying to gather a bunch of people around an embryonic open-source VRM application.

But, I couldn’t help noticing that for a second time in as many weeks – the first time was at the Social Innovation Meetup – how much the language of the venture capitalist and MBA spivs has become common coin.

So, people were talking about ‘routes to market’, ‘how to drive adoption’, about ‘market share’ and ‘intellectual property’. Worried about cashflow and ‘lifestyle businesses’. It’s so different from the last projects like this I was involved in, where, wide-eyed and unflappable, we only talked about the code, and how to make stuff that we ourselves would use. Classic, open-source, scratch-an-itch concerns.

Those last projects were ten years ago, when the cost of, for example, web hosting was tens of times higher than now; when there was nowhere like the amount of free software out there to learn from and use; when all a respectable developer spent their pocket money on was technical books. What’s driving the spiv talk now?

I’m not sure what to think about it, but it just feels wrong. On the one hand, it’s boldly visionary to be thinking about every tool as something that could change the world. On the other, it’s casually dismissive of any moderate or non-monetary motives, forcing every web-app to be viewed through the ‘next google’ glasses.

At the meeting I was at tonight, the spiv-tallk was at least countered. But I sensed that for some people the make-believe narrative of the venture-funded start-up still held. I’ll admit I’m oversensitive about these things, but just because I’m paranoid it doesn’t mean that people aren’t out to get me, right?

Oh well, these days will pass. I keep telling myself. They will pass.