The Anti-Jobs with a million young.

On the way to the Wikipedia party a coupla weeks ago, Magnus and I worked out how to MAKE A MILLION DOLLARS ON THE INTERNET. GeoCities offered people something they couldn't easily get anywhere else: a really easy way to make the most eyegougingly awful web pages in existence. MySpace offered the same. So what we'll do is make a website that lets people make truly horrible websites for themselves, using modern technology. SVG graphics! OpenGL! 3-D! You'll need the latest NVidia card just to look at the site! We'll also make it use lots of JavaScript, to give all four cores of your PC a proper workout! I can't see how this idea could possibly fail.

This led me to wonder what drives the human urge to comprehensive aesthetic failure. When the Macintosh first came out in 1984, what did people do? Produce documents with every single font. When I was editing a student newspaper in 1995, we were removing fonts from the Macs to keep people from using the really horrible ones. (And this was without Internet on those machines.) And, of course, Word art.

Facebook has myriad problems, but encouraging its users to make its other users gouge their eyes out before they've even read the text is not one of them.

WHAT MAKES PEOPLE DO THIS? Are there studies or anything?

There's good reason graphic designers are paid money.