The Filter Bubble - Eli Pariser [73]
But the engineering community can do more to strengthen the Internet’s civic space. And to get a sense of the path ahead, I talked to Scott Heiferman.
Heiferman, the founder of MeetUp.com, is soft-spoken in a Midwestern sort of way. That’s fitting, because he grew up in Homewood, Illinois, a small town on the outskirts of Chicago. “It was a stretch to call it suburban,” he says. His parents operated a paint store.
As a teenager, Heiferman devoured material about Steve Jobs, eating up the story about how Jobs wooed a senior executive from Pepsi by asking him if he wanted to change the world or sell sugar water. “Throughout my life,” he told me, “I’ve had a love-hate relationship with advertising.” At the University of Iowa in the early 1990s, Heiferman studied engineering and marketing but at night he ran a radio show called Advertorial Infotainment in which he would remix and cut advertisements together to create a kind of sound art. He put the finished shows online and encouraged people to send in ads to remix, and the attention got him his first job, managing the Web site at Sony .com.
After a few years as Sony’s “interactive-marketing frontiersman,” Heiferman founded i-traffic, one of the major early advertising companies of the Web. Soon i-traffic was the agency of record for clients like Disney and British Airways. But although the company was growing quickly, he was dissatisfied. The back of his business card had a mission statement about connecting people with brands they’d love, but he was increasingly uncertain that was a worthy endeavor—perhaps he was selling sugar water after all. He left the company in 2000.
For the remainder of the year and into 2001, Heiferman was in a funk. “I was exhibiting what you could call being depressed,” he says. When he heard the first word of the World Trade Center attacks on 9/11, he ran up to his lower-Manhattan rooftop and watched in horror. “I talked to more strangers in the next three days,” he says, “than in the previous five years of living in New York.”
Shortly after the attacks, Heiferman came across the blog post that changed his life. It argued that the attacks, as awful as they were, might bring Americans back together in their civic life, and referenced the bestselling book Bowling Alone. Heiferman bought a copy and read it cover to cover. “I became captivated,” he says, “by the question of whether we could use technology to rebuild and strengthen community.” MeetUp.com, a site that makes it easy for local groups to meet face-to-face, was his answer, and today, MeetUp serves over 79,000 local groups that do that. There’s the Martial Arts MeetUp in Orlando and the Urban Spirituality MeetUp in Barcelona and the Black Singles MeetUp in Houston. And Heiferman is a happier man.
“What I learned being in the ad business,” he says, “is that people can just go a long time without asking themselves what they should put their talent towards. You’re playing a game, and you know the point of the game is to win. But what game are you playing? What are you optimizing for? If you’re playing the game of trying to get the maximum downloads of your app, you’ll make the better farting app.”
“We don’t need more things,” he says. “People are more magical than iPads! Your relationships are not media. Your friendships are not media. Love is not media.” In his low-key way, Heiferman is getting worked up.
Evangelizing this view of technology—that it ought to do something meaningful to make our lives more fulfilling and to solve the big problems we face—isn’t as easy as it