I came here to say exactly the same thing. I still miss Max. Maybe I should start following this guy. Does he fight crime?
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I thought Rasputin was hired due to his ability to be Russia’s Greatest Love Machine. That sounds like a fun gig.
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Yes, I had no idea that the sketch was based on a specific person (rather than just spoofing techno-utopians in general), but the name is really too close to be a coincidence.
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The startup I worked for back in '00 hired a designer like that to do vaguely-defined designery things (we’re a company! we need a Look!). Wore funky clothes (compared to us nerds in our t-shirts and jeans) and a wide selection of check-patterned tennis shoes. Oh, and white-rimmed round glasses. He also went by a single name (forget what it was… something like “Zik” maybe?). Anyhow, one of my first and only interactions with him, I asked where he had worked before. He named some well-known company. Something like Apple or something.
Me: “Wow… why did you leave?”
Him: “I got into a bike accident. I always change jobs when I get into a bike accident.”
I suspect that’s how he got the job. “He’s so quirky! He must be a good designer!”
I don’t recall him lasting long. Perhaps he had really bad luck with bikes, or someone smelled the bullshit.
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Posted by mistake, moderators please delete my comment
i once freelanced at a package design firm. they had a person who was there as a “branding guru”. this person played with the same exact logo design, shifting it up a bit on the page, then back down, then left…etc, for the entire 3 weeks i was there. no other alterations except moving it around the page. nobody bothered this person or asked what was being accomplished, once! i said to myself, this person is a fucking genius.
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Oh man! What’s AoL going to do? It’s 2019 and thanks to Shingy, all of the kids are still talking about AoL and how cool they are. His metaphors and conference visits have made America Online the hippest, coolest, most awesomest uh, online thing ever!
When I worked at a web design firm, my boss excitedly announced that he’d brought on a trio of “internet experts” to evaluate all work going forward and make suggestions to make everything we do cooler and better. They worked in secret and we weren’t allowed to talk to them but their ideas were horrible (“add more drop shadows” and “add an animated buddy like Clippy”). We eventually discovered they were three retired kindergarten teachers who had sold themselves to him as “learning gurus” or something.
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This whole thing sounded vaguely familiar and I’d been racking my brains out why, when it finally hit me - Pattern Recognition by William Gibson. Same-ish premise - a person travels around the world, seeing patterns where others don’t.
Seeing how the book came out in 2003, I wonder is AOL got the idea from him, or the other way around.
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From the sound of it, AOL has a lot in common with my grandmother-- they both have an artificial hip.
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I can’t imagine that anyone under the age of 40 or so can appreciate how insane things went during the run-up of the tech bubble, say 1998 - 2000. The “Internet” was finally beginnning penetration of mass consumer culture and for a large portion of society, it was viewed as something like a foreign country. People like The Shingy made plausible arguments to be emmisaries from that land, bringing secrets back for those who were wise enough to listen. It was all a bunch of b.s. woo, but the fact that a large part of our culture viewed people who “worked with computers/on the internet” as worthy of an ambassador/spokesmodel like Shings was real. People were taken in by weird-looking con men spouting vague aphorisms about the digital future and the money flooded in. Ridiculous, reckless, absurd amounts of money; it was a sure thing. Until it wasn’t, that is. AOL merged with Time-Warner in January 2000 (a baffling move seemingly advanced by digital prophets and venture caps seeking an exit). 2 years later NASDAQ had lost like 75% of its value. But man, those few mad years.
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Anyone who wants a taste of that zeitgeist should look at back issues of this magazine.
The contributors were a weird mix of reputable commentators and Shingy-style woo peddlers and scenesters, reflecting the nature of the industry at the time.
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I’m going to have to politely ask you to refrain from using Shingy and Cayce Pollard in the same sentance.
Cayce Pollard was the creation of an artistic genius. Shingy is/was a human press release. The two have nothing in common.
Cayce would run screaming in horror from this
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It was kind of an extraordinary thing to experience. For a few years there, insane amounts of money were being thrown around without much concern about “monetization” or “profit”; the gurus and VCs were convinced that content growth, clicks, and ‘sticky eyeballs’ were primary. The result was a massive boom in bizarre industries (like Beenz), Flash animation of dubious quality (i.e., Queer Duck, Porkchops) and ads like this…
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Also, an IPO rush for a company the revenue model of which was based on delivering discounted 35-lb bags of dog food with no shipping charges that spent similarly crazy amounts on Superbowl ads. It was madness.
I’m not going to lie. Some of us made out very well, even though we weren’t all BS artists. It was pretty much the only shot at wealth that Gen Xers were ever going to see in their lifetimes.
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That, too. It was really nuts watching my Gen-X friends in Mountain View and San Jose become massively wealthy almost overnight. There were many gigantic televisions, expensive cars with expensive customizations (a hard-drive sound system?), RAZR phones, and Palm Pilots purchased.
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And 5 years later AOL hired Shingy!
The most bizarre thing about this whole thing is it happened after the bubble had burst and having a Shingy was no longer a thing. And that’s sort of the thing with AOL, they never really evolved past the original web bubble. Never really produced anything after the bubble burst. If they hadn’t merged with Time Warner, a company that still seems mystified by internets, they never would have survived this long. The death of dialup would have killed them. Shingy has always been a mystifying, desperately web 1.0 thing, done a decade late by a company that had already receded to “what the fuck do they even do” territory. Total “hello fellow teens” maneuver. Especially if you remember the before fore times.
You might want to track your age estimate. I’m 35, was 14 in 1998. The rise of internets is the entire cultural context in which I became cognizant of the world.
Those people in their 20’s need to get of my lawn though.
And do not forget the briefly world famous puppet voiced by Michael Ian Black.
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I have to admit, I always liked the puppet. It was about the only thing about petsdotcom I liked.
ETA:
The odd thing is that dialup kept them alive long after you would have thought it would. In 2015 the dialup business earned AOL more than half a billion in revenue – 8x the amount that the digital media business and brands (supposedly their focus) earned them.
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What you liked was Michael Ian Black.
It was actually a pretty good advertising Mascot, probably the best of the dot com bubble. But when they replaced Black it became hopelessly hokey.
ETA: oh and the entire ad concept was also clearly ripped off from Triumph the Insult Comic Dog, who had debuted just a year before Pets was founded. And Conan O’Brien’s show made fucking hay pointing that out.
In terms of AOL and dial up. I just don’t think they would have been able to hang onto the shrinking dial up. Dialup is still the only way for some significant chunks of this country to get internet, and you’ve apparently got a sizable chunk of older folks who just stuck with it. But if memory serves even with that AOL has still mostly lost money since the 00’s. And they’ve had some serious crises. I tend to think without Time Warner, who are experts at propping up failing subsidies, they probably wouldn’t have weathered the last decade or so.
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