Why Fail Fails.

Thank the Maker, The Onion is an amazing source of humour and prophecy. If there is anything on the Internet that has stood the test of the time, it has been their site. True, they started as a print publication and so they hit the Internet running, but they are still the "go-to" for humour that doesn't pander, point to its jokes, or simply rehash the same articles and lists over and over again. It has grown and added new features without sacrificing the quality of its original attraction. Yes, we miss Herbert Kornfeld, but we love ONN.

One great Onion article that we keep being reminded of these days is "'Peeing Calvin' Decals Now Recognized As Vital Channel Of National Discourse". You can go read it, but the headline pretty much explains it all: The image of Calvin from Calvin and Hobbes peeing on something (a logo, for example) is considered to be a fully formed argument.

At first we laughed. Now we look at it and wonder how The Onion could have known what reading the Internet is like today.

For a medium that is supposed to be about the free exchange of ideas and debate (the Internet, not The Onion), it has become progressively more and more about representing an issue so that it can fit in one screen, or a comment box, or even better in 140 characters (minus the ones needed for the link). It's the Twitterfication of Ideas. And the king of all of these, the One Ring that Rules them All, The Midnight Bomber What Bombs at Midnight is:

"FAIL"

We despair every time we see this term, as much as we used when we saw an emoticon, or an LOL placed at the end of a statement that wasn't even a joke. There is something so crass in it that it approaches insulting and borders on offensive.

Ideas are complex things. Crafting an idea, honing it, producing something tangible out of it is a lot of work. All the things that are self-evident to the creator of said idea take a lot of time to fully define and explain. Does that mean that all the ideas are good? Not by a long shot. Do a lot of them fail to execute properly and still make it to market? Far too many. Ideas are worth considering. That's how brainstorming and mind mapping work: just get it out there and then use those raw materials to focus. It's why writers and coders never really throw anything away.

That's why we find the use of FAIL to be so offensive: it reduces everything to a binary proposition, or what they would define as FAIL or WIN. There is nothing wrong with binary: when we set out goals, we like to set them as a binary proposition ("We will contribute 10% more to our savings account, and spend less on take out meals" is much easier to accomplish than "Save money"). These are goals, metrics, that lead to some end result ("We will retire much younger than our parents so that we actually can travel to Antarctica").

We see FAIL used a lot on blogs and reviews in the App Store and it has always bothered us there. Here was taking work that people had invested a great deal of their hearts and souls in and just dismissing it out of hand. The sense of entitlement was so strong that commenters saw no need to expand upon them to help improved to product. The battery life isn't long enough FAIL. I had a call that sounded not good FAIL. This app didn't do what I wanted it to do FAIL. Nowhere in there was any sense of a dialogue, debate, or discussion. FAIL and move on to the next thing FAIL. Could you please quantify your feedback so that we can make the product better? EPIC FAIL.

As bad as this was, it then moved into the mainstream. There it was at the congressional hearings into the financial sector bailout, FAIL (pictured above). We were very glad that many years of financial mismanagement could be reduced to one word. Who needs to worry about cause, effect, impact when you can just say FAIL. And we're sure that if the sign bearer were to be asked how to remedy the problem he'd just say WIN. And how should we win? FIX IT FTW LOL!

Are we exaggerating? Sadly, no we are not. There are sites like PunditKitchen that take pictures of political leaders and world events and add their own versions of FAIL and WIN. There's no real insight, no real discussion. Just various modifications of FAIL and WIN. Who needs context? Putin's looking at a flag FAIL!

As if that wasn't enough reason for us to despair, on top of it's there's Failblog and Once Upon a Win, which just seem to be exercises in not even having to pretend to have a context. It's a knee jerk society. FAIL move on WIN move on OH NOES LOL move on.

Perhaps we're taking all the fun out of something that's just that: some good fun. Perhaps this is just an exercises in escapement, a way to deal with a dramatically shifting world. But we barely squeaked through 8 years of everything being a binary proposition ("You're either with us or against us" is really FAIL/WIN) and look where that got us. We'd love to think that no matter what happens in the next couple of years that type of thinking has been discredited.

We're grumpy old men at The Times, and remember when we used to actually enjoy the forwards and humour on the Internet. We also loved things like The Interface Hall of Shame that actually discussed why certain things worked or didn't work. That site has not been updated in ages. We guess it's because it's just easier to say FAIL and move on.

For now, we'll be looking at The Onion for tomorrow's headlines.