If the 1990s had a baby, it might look something like the documentary Downloaded. For one, it’s about the rise and fall of Napster, complete with plaid-heavy video of the young Sean Parker and Shawn Fanning. For another, it’s directed by Alex Winter, aka Bill S. Preston, Esq. from the Bill & Ted movies. Combined they’re the bookends of the decade that launched web culture.
And yet everything about the documentary is so relevant to today’s tech industry it’s unnerving.
“The movie is trying to say, ‘We’ve come really far and we’ve really gone backwards at the same time,’” Winter said in an interview with Wired. “Napster is a really good way in to that kind of examination of the culture, because of when it existed but also because both of the guys stayed in the game and are still relevant in the tech world.”
Relevant for a reason. In a way that makes it feel like ancient history yet entirely prescient, Downloaded chronicles how Parker, Fanning, and their fellow coders met online and started a digital revolution — and then got decimated in the legal morass Napster created. Yet, as Winter notes, the documentary comes at a time when everything that Napster stood for and enabled — connecting like-minded people through the web, easy access to data, listening to music through computers — has all become part of our daily lives, even if it confused the newscasters interviewing Fanning and Parker at the time. WikiLeaks, iPods and Megaupload didn’t exist when they were building their file-sharing network, and in retrospect it’s clear to see just how far ahead of the curve they were.
Downloaded, which will be premiering at the South By Southwest Film Festival, also provides an amazing amount of insight into how they got ahead of the curve — by coding their fingers off. A seminal moment, previewed exclusively above, came when they were able to scale Napster up so that everyone could use it. “It was all about making small, incremental wins with the code and with the technology,” Ali Aydar, Napster’s one-time senior director of technology, says in the clip. Once they did that they reached 20 million users in almost no time.
“That little moment really sums up for me why I wanted to make the movie,” Winter said of the clip, adding that watching it feels like witnessing history. “[It's like] if you could be a fly on the wall watching Edison crack [the problem of] the incandescent bulb — that’s the closest me as a geek will ever get to watching the actual birth of the digital revolution.”
Downloaded will premiere at the South By Southwest Film Festival on March 10.
Exclusive Clip: Relive Napster's Big Break in the Documentary <em>Downloaded</em>
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Exclusive Clip: Relive Napster's Big Break in the Documentary <em>Downloaded</em>
