(What) did 18th century philosopher Fichte know about JAMstack?

Nothing of course! But you already knew that, didn’t you?

Fichte could’t possibly imagine a thing like JavaScript, or cloud-based content delivery networks, let alone something like a „headless CMS“ with a Github-hosted JS frontend that delivers static HTML websites faster than you can blink (literally) – aka the newest tech trend in web development called JAMstack.

New Things

What he could imagine – and in fact did imagine – is how new things came to be. So even a cursory reader of Fichte wouldn’t be very surprised by this trend: We had static websites in the 90s. Then, when they grew to a size nobody could manage anymore, we developed dynamic websites and content management systems…until finally – now – they themselves became so big and bloated and slow, we started splitting content management and website delivery into two separate parts thus getting the best of both worlds: fast websites and easy content.

Synthesis

Fichte would call this movement thesis – antithesis – synthesis. While sometimes the synthesis is easily recognisable, as in the JAMstack example, other times the synthesis is something of an entirely different category.

Which brings me back to the headline of this post. You already knew no 18th century philosopher could know anything about modern web development. The conflict between the terribly old, and the terribly new made you click. So in a way you clicking became the synthesis of these two ideas – much more so, than my little text here.

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Since you are here…

… you could read my rant that it isn’t storytelling just because you call it Insta Stories or what it means to make music videos. But the easiest you can help me is by leaving a comment with your thoughts on the LinkedIn or Facebook Posts for this article. In any case: Thanks for your attention, I really appreciate it!