The Browser Company

Was this email forwarded to you? Sign up here!

For awhile, Apple made gawking at for-profit ethos easy by parading around its own intelligentsia in simple black tees and pure white backgrounds while telling us their version of Bill Clinton’s famous backhand return on the definition of “is”, and the pull was so strong in my 20s that I almost became an Espresso Guy because of this piece on Johnny Ive. But for the most part, corporate mission statements are underfelt and overthought for a pretty basic reason: there is very rarely anything important or interesting going on there. Here’s an example.

What began with ad agencies in the 50s conflating manufactured goods with Art has culminated in Internet browsers that are mirrors rather than windows. Google or Apple or Amazon don’t actually exist to astonish or awaken us, they exist to pave obvious highways to our most obvious intellectual, sexual, and emotional destinations and charge obvious brands to advertise along the routes. They exist to make us predictable so that they can make more money from our habits, and there is no overlap or relationship between them and the great artists of any of our generations. Every single one of their business models has either begun as, or morphed into, the following:

I don’t think it’s always going to be that way, though. For every Roman Empire, there have always been a tremendous number of northern tribes who seem incredibly well suited for flipping one ancient narrative after another. They seem to get off on it, actually. And as fragile as humanity is, we are almost impossible to squeeze into a comfy narrative that trends towards either of the extremes. Like Papillon, we are amazing at breaking out of the prisons we find, or place, ourselves in.

Take The Browser Company for instance. It’s been awhile since I’ve been astonished by a web page, but I’ve spent a good amount of time with their Values page over the last few weeks and I haven’t been able to stop thinking about it along the way. I don’t think I’ve ever read something so disarmingly true written by a brand or company’s leader, or read a more level-headed assessment of the state of the modern Internet. I don’t want to spoil anything for you, so I’ll leave you with this: a lot of the arguments that I or friends of mine have lobbed at the Internet over the last 5 or 10 years have generally been pretty escapist and reductive, and not unlike the sorts of opinions I’ve criticized in my parents or grandparents over the years about how younger generations ruin everything, or don’t know how to work, and so on. Those sorts of criticisms are documented all the way back (at least) to Plato’s dialogues, and they’re probably just as untrue now as they were then. And what I find so refreshing about this piece is its invitation to work hard at building something stranger, and more interesting, in place of the endless Vegas strip that we currently confront each time we take ourselves out for a digital spin. To learn to live here in a better way, rather than moving out or moving on. Staying isn’t always the answer, but oftentimes it is. The Internet is a stunning creation, after all, that has either wandered off its course or has started to approach the end of its first formative period. Either way, it could use some incredible weirdos to help us all get back into exploring it the long way.