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Escalante

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Let me take this back to the Escalante and let me tell you how I first encountered it.

I’m a fan of the landscapes of the American Southwest anyhow. Arizona is beautiful. I went on a pilgrimage to Monument Valley and I was driving back with my friend George and we kept seeing these signs to the Grand Staircase. like, kept on seeing them. And we figured it was some big monument we could go and see like the Grand Canyon.

And after a day or two of driving over the most rugged, craziest, most breathtaking terrain you’ve seen – we kept on seeing these signs and not being able to find the Grand Staircase – we slowly realised there wasn’t anything we could visit, like the Grand Canyon or Bryce. It was something over which we’d been driving. It’s 200 miles long, and climbs 6,000 feet in a series of sheer cliffs and complex formations. The grand canyon itself is just the first stair.

It’s not the kind of thing you arrive at, it’s the kind of thing you can only travel through. The kind of thing you can only experience by experiencing, lifting the whole while.

We are at the culmination of staircases that happen so slow we didn’t know they were there. The loss of faith in the financial system is one.

But also the two great post-war projects: to put computers and creativity in the hands of everyone, and to rebuild the social connections previously lost to television and cars. These great projects are well underway.

And the Web, the Web is at the heart of both of them.

We know the benefits of being social. We know that users aren’t users but participants, citizens, creators. The Web is the first truly modern medium, and here we are, designing it. It hardly seems that I could accuse the Web community of not having enough hubris, but there it is, we deserve it.

The question is, what is the web at the beginning of?

These projects were started by men who are now old. I hate to say it but in the Child Garden they’re twice dead.

It’s up to us to decide on the next Grand Staircase.

For me, I’d like it to be fanufacture. If my future home is going to be full of bits of talking plastic, I’d prefer for them to be designed by people in this room than by some dude who prints out his email.

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October 08, 2009

Escalante opened Web Directions South in Sydney, October 2009, and hikes through fanufacture, science fiction, social capital, cybernetics, and Neptune.

There is a podcast available.
Read from the beginning.