As Shooting People closes after 27 years, remembering Jess & the time between the dotcom crash & Web 2.0
The death of Jess Search at 54 in 2023 left me stunned. Obituaries rightly focussed on her huge contribution to documentary and social impact filmmaking – but missed something key: Jess was a web pioneer.
With ShootingPeople – the digital community she co-founded with Cath LeCouteur – now closing after 27 years I’m revisiting a piece I wrote after her death that looked back not only at her impact, but the tender era of the web before smart phones or social media addiction – and her impact on it all.
It was this Jess that I knew and worked with for several years as Shooting People’s first hire. I’d not written about that time before, but the lack of reference to it in her many obituaries, pushed me to start writing, and once I began, I fell down a rabbithole of memories from a short and special time in the web’s history: post-web, but pre-smart-phone.
The decisions Jess and Cath made over two decades ago, seem more relevant than ever, as the web looks again towards small and human-run communities across the fediverse, grappling with questions of moderation and sustainability, while trying to chart a different course to the web monopolies. This post-crash and pre-2.0 era that Shooting People exploded in, wasn’t so much about a business model, it was a period of post-web/pre-tech-dystopia, open, queer-punk peer-to-peer culture I’d largely forgotten, until I started writing this…
