The web is Punk.

What is Punk – what is Punk rock?

Here’s a definition I shamelessly lifted from wikipedia:

Punk rock is a rock music genre that developed between 1974 and 1976 in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Australia. Rooted in garage rock, punk rock bands eschewed the perceived excesses of mainstream 1970s rock. They created fast, hard-edged music, typically with short songs, stripped-down instrumentation, and often political, anti establishment lyrics. Punk embraces a DIY (do it yourself) ethic, with many bands self-producing their recordings and distributing them through informal channels.

When I read the above definition – I loved it so much I decided to highlight the key words and talk about them in our new world of the web and why the punk ethic is what we are embracing.

Garage Rock – Many of us start in our garage, or spare room – we start our projects simply because we have a vision of doing it our way, or because it’s just worth doing. We are doing it for us. We start without any support. We pull together the minimum requirements to get started.

Eschewed the perceived excesses of mainstream – Large corporations have been taking advantage of us consumers, no – ‘people’ for far too long. Mainstream business has been churning out average stuff for average people and making large profits doing so. The excess has sickened us to the point where we have shown we can get our startups off the ground on a shoe string, with the software and tools we built for ourselves. We provide something better – and our fans prove it. Importantly success has not driven us to become corpulent pigs simultaneously. We beleive in egalitarianism and we are utilitarian.

Fast, hard-edged – We focus on speed. Before the large corporations have even turned around – we have a following a passionate fan group, and they wonder what happened.

Stripped-down instrumentation – We don’t need every tool in the business to make stuff happen. There is no research department, there is no prototype or an excess of departments involved – just us. We just make great stuff with a minimum of inputs. It’s made with passion so it just works.

Political, anti establishment –Yes, we want to do it different, we want to bust down the old paradigm, and have some fun doing it. The establishment does annoy us, and we want to show them we can do it better. We treat our customers like people, and engage on a personal level. We engage in conversation, and listen. We hate the arrogance of large corporations, so quite simply we don’t behave like them. We embrace the crowd and let things evolve.

Embraces a DIY –We don’t ask for permission. We don’t need to work within the existing infrastructure.  We don’t need authoritative figures lining our pockets to get started. They usually do that after they discover  the cool stuff we’ve already made.

Distributing them through informal channels – The channels didn’t even exist when we got started. So we made our own. The web is our channel, independent, large and evolving. No one owns it or controls it, it’s organic and we love it.

Web people and startups – thanks for starting Punk 2.0