One of my favourite books* documents a period in the 1940s and 50s when the communist dream was becoming a nightmare, and progressive thinkers all over the world were becoming disillusioned. One of the symptoms of this malaise was that it became impossible to tell the difference in communist literature between three groups: those essays and novels that were written with integrity by true believers of communism, toadies who were just churning out the party line in a conscious pastiche of what was expected of them, and those who were mocking the genre in bitter parody. At that dangerous time, given the grim evidence emerging from the USSR, true believers could only be incredibly naive, toadies were just covering their backs and playing the game, and those mocking the party were risking their sanity, such was the stress of the time (having just seen the excellent Good Night, And Good Luck last night, it’s fresh in my mind).

As a cultural phenomenon, it recurs every now and again, and it’s fascinating to see what it’s a symptom of. What new dream is fading, what shibboleths are surfacing, what cultural norms are being ridiculed? When it happens, a bubble has to burst somewhere.

I wandered into Nakatomi unaware, and was immediately impressed with its style and ambition, although I should have trusted my instinct on hating the logo as being too reminiscent of 9/11. I put it down to naiveté on their part, young dudes getting off on explosive phallic imagery, and put my name down to be kept informed anyway. Given that the guys behind it are in Dublin, I wanted to see what the best web heads were up to in my home town, given that I’m on the lookout for bright sparks to join me in my business.

It’s a parody, though, and David Barrett comes clean about it here, saying “what we were claiming made no sense, had no substance, and didn’t describe anything”, although butter wouldn’t melt in his and Des Traynor‘s mouths only last week, to read them here. Along the way, a few people have been taken in, and sure isn’t it gas. One look at the name Nakatomi should have been enough of a clue, but I was never a fan of Die Hard. There were plenty of other clues around if I had kept my eyes peeled.

The hype continues though, with the highly plausible skypod, and one wonders how it’s going to end, and how much more effort they’re going to put in to respond humouring other well-meaning eejits like me, out of the geek in-joke circuit, who get caught in their stylish web and find themselves effortlessly ending up looking like pompous asses.

As well as parodying the hype around new startups, (and PR hype is always worth sending up in any era, and in any medium, in this world where The Real Thing™ is a sugary brown fizzy liquid), they are also parodying some of the qualities that geeks may despise, but most people want: ease of use, simplicity of design, the pleasure that well-designed AJAX gives to the user. The user experience, low in priority for far too long in cyberspace, is now climbing up to the top of the pile, and long may it reign. Yes, an application or website has to work, yes, the ideas behind it have to be good and they have to meet a real need, and not just be cool. But no one is seriously suggesting that “blog posts are as important as code” (commented out in the code of nakatomiweb.com, a parody too far, even for them). Blogs and blog posts help build up an idea of someone’s character and world-view. They help build relationships and networks, inspire confidence and trust in the associated site/product/service. They are helping to personalize the internet, which to me can only be a good thing.

I’m not a coder, and I can understand that coders may be very cynical about the trend towards looking good, and suspect that style is threatening to overcome substance. But it was ever thus; the internet is only catching up with the rest of the world. And there will always be hype – but at web2ireland I learned just how serious business can be, how tough the competition is out there. The cleverness that the Nakatomi lads have shown in creating their nebulous world is something that they should capitalize on, in Hollywood or Madison Avenue or the valley. I understand the entire parody has a serious point, and I fully believe David Barrett when he says about web2.0 that the “focus should always, ALWAYS, be on creating a great product.” I wish him and Des well when they do come up with a great product – but I wonder, when he gets to marketing it, how he’s going to distance himself from the sour whiff of the stale piss-take of Nakatomi.