Yesterday in Vancouver, the speech went badly. Uninspired. Scattered. And on top of that he hurt his knee.
This morning George Gilder is down in San Francisco. He's being paid almost US$20,000 (£12,500) to speak to the Millennium Conference - and he's worried about delivering another clunker. The men in the crowd are wearing gray suits and polished shoes, which suggests they're not techies - they're just ordinary businessmen and women who walked here from Montgomery Street. They've all forked over $375 (£234) to hear Andy Grove and Lester Thurow. Gilder is just the warmup act. The speakers make up a spectrum. Thurow is the most liberal, if you can ever call an economist liberal. Andy Grove, as a businessman, is the 'practical' speaker - he gets the middle ground and is therefore guaranteed to come across as reasonable. He gets to make irrefutable remarks like "government should do more good than harm."
George Gilder, by contrast, is way off to the right. If you were to plot them all on a chart, when you came to plotting Gilder's coordinates you'd have to get another piece of paper. Compared to the other speakers, George Gilder will probably come across as an extremist. In a way, he's been set up.
The lights dim. A blue spotlight focuses on centre stage. The podium is a big, brushed steel cone, narrow at the base and flaring out as it goes up. When George Gilder strides in from the right and stands behind the cone in the blue light, he looks like a scoop of blueberry ice cream, and the ball microphone dangles in the air like a maraschino cherry on top of his head.
Gilder starts to speak about the coming revolution in sand (silicon), glass (fibre) and air (wireless). The millennium promises a billion transistors on a single sliver of silicon, 700 bitstreams in a single thread of fibre and a cellular infrastructure a thousand times cheaper than today's. Taken together, this phenomenal advance will topple all centralised institutions. His sentences flow easily, his voice starts to boom. His arms thrust forward and back, pumping chugga-chugga like he's doing the Locomotion. People in the audience sit up in their seats. Some reach for their pocket pens. Others glance at their conference programs, checking Gilder's profile. It's a full page, but it lacks telling detail; it's all about places he's taught and titles of books he's written. Gilder doesn't pause for them - he's electrified, practically speaking in tongues, testifying to the coming doomsday for cable television programming at the hands of the DirecTV satellite. One of the few technology writers to really do his homework, George Gilder is a real thinking man's thinking man. Wait, that's not quite right - he's a real man's kind of thinker. Or something. Forty minutes later, when the monitors in front of Gilder flash "Your time is up," he's still going strong, and the audience is in a state of frightened shock. He's convinced them that the future will be a very different place, but they can't think what to do about it other than to call their travel agents and cancel their vacation plans.
After the ice cream cone, the scarecrow. Alvin Toffler is about 7 feet tall and no thicker than a broomstick; as he stands on the stage his white shirt cuffs hang far down out of his jacket sleeves and his bony hands hang far down from his shirt cuffs. Toffler is perhaps the most famous futurist of them all; Gilder is often talked of as Toffler-like. But when Toffler starts to talk, the difference between him and Gilder becomes clear - Gilder is just, well, more specific. Toffler seems to lump all technology together as just this 'force' altering politics and business. His sentences are strung together with words like nation-state, NGO and subnation. Gilder bothers to delineate which technologies will disappear and which will prevail; his sentences are peppered with snappy clauses like "working at 4 per cent efficiency, these thin-film solar collectors would generate 10 megawatts of power."
Late in the day, all the Millennial speakers gather on the stage to be cross-examined by Andy Grove, who has adopted the role of godfather. It couldn't be by accident that the stagehands point Thurow to the chair farthest on the left and Gilder to the chair farthest on the right. To get the conversation off to a fast start, the huge screen behind them flashes a critical article titled "Futurist Schlock" from a recent Wall Street Journal, which shows futurists making the same rosy predictions about the Internet today that were made about the telephone 100 years ago. Starting with Lester Thurow and going around the circle, all of the speakers chip in to confess that yes, the Internet is overhyped and has its share of problems. All of the speakers, that is, except George. He keeps the faith. "Unknown entrepreneurs will invent new technologies to solve the current problems that hex Internet commerce - including encryptions, viruses and nanobuck transactions. The Internet will multiply by a factor of millions the power of one person at a computer."
A factor of millions? The crowd gets a little uncomfortable. It seems as if Gilder is not going by the rules here. I mean, he had his 40 minutes alone to make wild predictions - now's his chance to cool down a little bit, to pull back on the reins. And then we can all go home. Doesn't he get it?
Andy Grove, sensing the tension, makes a move to rope Gilder in. Knowing that Gilder hates government tampering with high tech, Grove asks Gilder to concede that the military was the primary market for early transistors and that the Internet was also subsidised by the government.
Well, that seems reasonable doesn't it?
But Gilder holds firm. "The Internet and the microchip only took off after the government withdrew from those markets and let private companies in." This makes the crowd laugh nervously - Gilder is taking on the godfather! He's challenging Andy Grove of all people, the very guy to whom just about everybody in computers owes their job! Suddenly they all hate Gilder with a fervour. Somewhere, the air-conditioning system clicks on.
Lester Thurow sees his opportunity to defend Grove. "It may surprise you, George, but America doesn't lead in everything." It's not much of a zinger, but the crowd claps and laughs. It's the spirit of the comment that counts - be reasonable, be worldly and above all be tolerant of others' ways. Thurow adds that it would be smart for all of us to learn some Spanish, and maybe some Japanese and even - god forbid - learn to play soccer.
Well, that seems reasonable doesn't it?
Gilder wants none of it. "My kids aren't learning Spanish. They're learning C++." That does it. This is a liberal town, a multicultural mecca - even the name of the city is Spanish! The crowd snickers; there are even some hisses. Forty-year-old men in suits, hissing! Gilder doesn't mind. Hell, they're on the edge of their seats. They haven't had this much fun at a conference in years. Most important, they've all got their 375 bucks' worth.
Afterward, the crowd retires to a banquet of extravagant hors d'oeuvres and microbrews. I slide up alongside a small circle of people from Pacific Bell who are, pitifully, talking about their work. Prodded, they tell me what they thought of George Gilder.
"Smart," one says.
"Really smart," says a woman.
A third adds, "But I'd never trust my business to him." This comment provokes a chorus of nods.
"I tell you what I really want to know," says the woman who seems to like that word, really. "I want to know, does he really believe all that stuff he says? I mean, does he really believe the CMOS chip will not survive the century? Does he really believe that five years from now the poorest schoolchildren will be getting a better education via computer than today's richest schoolchildren?"
Heads start nodding again. "Right. We're techies. So when he says 'a factor of millions' or 'five' years, well ... you just don't use numbers that way. Well, we don't, anyway."
The woman pipes in again. "I mean, does he really think he knows better than Andy Grove?"
Deliverance Does he really? Perhaps, perhaps not. As it happens, George Gilder is a huge fan of Andy Grove's - he devoted a huge chunk of Microcosm: The Quantum Revolution in Economics and Technology to Grove's early days at Intel. That book marked Gilder's first fruition as a technology writer, a trade he now plies in the pages of Forbes ASAP, a magazine quite literally made for him. Which brings us to the next challenge. He's promised his editor there 9,000 words on Internet hardware - who's inventing it, who's hot and who's barking up the wrong tree. The article is due in just 10 days. George has done a lot of the technical research - going through issues of IEEE Journal on turbo drive - but he's held off writing anything. He needs a personality or a big theme to hang it all on.
The ASAP articles will make up a book called Telecosm. It's the ultimate vapour book; every year since 1993, the byline to Gilder's Forbes articles has promised the book "later this year". It's just very hard to let go of a book about emerging technologies, since by the time the book gets copy edited, typeset, printed and shipped, the subject matter has either emerged or not. Now it's looking like an autumn1996 publication; Gilder swears this piece on Internet hardware will finish it - unless he adds a piece on the electromagnetic spectrum.
It will be worth the wait. There are dozens of books on all these new technologies, but Gilder's is the most grounded in the specifics of how it works. And he seeks out the big picture. His Internet-software piece, to which the Internet-hardware piece is a follow up, landed on subscribers' desks the same week as the trumped-up launch of Windows 95 - launch, as if it were an Apollo mission. While pundits around the country were weighing in with their opinions about whether Win95 was a worth-while operating system, Gilder's piece raised the question of whether all operating systems might be made obsolete by 'dynamically portable' software - programs that compile line by line in real time.
The day after the Millennium conference, Gilder drives into the East Bay netherworld of Contra Costa County, a maze of look-alike office parks and equally anonymous brown foothills. Eventually he pulls into the parking lot of Livingston Enterprises Inc., a 90-person company that has won a huge share of the market for Internet servers and routers simply by having the best products - they have no well-known figurehead, they haven't accepted any outside investment and they don't even have a public relations department. George likes that sort of success. Steve Willens, the CEO, is there to greet him, and though George doesn't normally hobnob with CEOs - they're usually too high up in a company to really know what's going on - Willens, who still has a hand in product development, is probably OK.
Every time Gilder meets an engineer, they go through this sort of cascade of language, negotiating like two modems, trying to find the most efficient level of conversation they can hold. It ends up sounding like the duel- ling banjo scene from Deliverance: George: "Hi, nice to meet you. Hey, that's a sweet access router over there. Wow, both Ethernet and asynchronous ports?"
Steve: "Yeah, check this baby out - the Ethernet port has AUI, BNC and RJ-45 connectors."
George: "So for packet filtering you went with TCP, UDP and ICMP."
Steve: "Of course. To support dial-up SLIP and PPP."
George: "Set user User_Name ifilter Filter _Name."
Steve: "Set filter s1.out 8 permit 192.9.200 .2/32 0.0.0.0/0 tcp src eq 20."
George: "0010110110001011100100"
Steve: ". .. . .. . .. ... ... . ..... .. .. .. ... ... . .. .."
George: "Really? Wait, you lost me."
Steve Willens has never had a writer ask about his machines in this much detail before. Pretty soon he's spilling his guts about the history of the company. The two men talk for about three hours, until just about every Livingston employee has gone home for the night and Steve Willens begins to yawn. George is still pumped up. He loves to learn. Reluctantly, he gets steered toward the door.
When he reaches the car, Gilder looks worried. He has only nine days left, and he realises he still has a ton to learn. At one point in the interview, Willens told him that he believes there are technological problems with piping the Internet into the home via coaxial cable. Until that time, George had been of the opinion that cable is the natural and obvious hookup, and he had been going to predict that cable-modem manufacturers will be hot. But George respects Steve - Steve clearly has the right stuff - and if Steve says there are problems, then, well....
"I'm really going to have to bear down on the science," George says while looking at his electronic day calendar, hoping to find some free time in the days ahead.
Unfortunately, he has to give a speech in Hollywood the next day, and from there fly on to Aspen for yet another conference. He looks exasperated, then focuses on a few bright spots. "There's a digital satellite company near Aspen ... maybe I'll stop in for a visit. And there's Ajax -" Ajax is the ski mountain looming above Aspen Village, which at this time of year makes a great hike. "I wonder if my knee will be better by Friday."
The Jetsons
Back in the early summer of 1981, George Gilder's supply-side treatise Wealth and Poverty was being called "the bible of the Reagan revolution." Reagan kept telling the public that government could raise revenues by cutting taxes, and as this seemed an inherent contradiction, everybody bought George's book to have the riddle explained - cutting taxes would stimulate entrepreneurship, increasing the taxable base of the economy. (For point of reference, Reagan also insisted that federal mental hospitals were merely group homes for idle bums, predicting that if we closed the hospitals it would stimulate the lazies to get jobs.) The sudden attention was more than a bit of a surprise for George, since the book's first printing had been a mere 5,000 copies. While everyone else was excited about Wealth and Poverty, George was excited about Tracy Kidder's The Soul of a New Machine. Boy - that was really 'it,' that was the stuff. What a book! Then George found himself talking with a friend, Peter Sprague, who back then was chair of National Semiconductor Inc. Peter told him that not only could they put scores of transistors on the head of a pin, but that they could put scores of transistors on the tip of a pin.The tip of a pin! That did it. George looked up the Rosen Electronic Newsletter, found a list of semiconductor companies and picked the one at the bottom of the list, Micron Technologies Inc. George wrote an article on Micron for Forbes and he was hooked. He called Ben Rosen to ask for a free subscription to Ben's newsletter. Ben countered by offering him the semiconductor beat.
George jumped at the chance. He wrote nine pages every three weeks for about a year and a half. He attended classes at Caltech from Carver Mead, who became his sage. He got neck deep in the science. At the end of it all he wrote Microcosm.
George got a gig as a featured writer for Forbes. His cover stories garnered a lot of attention and a wide readership, but George wasn't proud of his work. His pieces were being rewritten by his editors behind his back. Frustrated, he went to Steve Forbes and asked for a new outlet, something more like his old arrangement with Ben Rosen.
Steve Forbes tried to purchase the business and technology magazine Upside for him; when the deal failed, Forbes ASAP was started from scratch. When bandwidth became a front-page topic, George Gilder was already an expert. He's never really managed a business, and he's never really coded a program, but - as they say at Microsoft about Lotus 1-2-3 - "he got there first." The fresh journalists who piled on to the technology beat read Gilder's pieces for guidance; they even call Gilder for quotes. Gilder drives the debate.
The danger is that many people hear George's hyperbolic sound bites without ever reading his books or articles, so he sounds willing to say anything to get some attention. Among more cynical high-tech insiders, the word Gilder verges on the adjec-tival, as in "How Gilder of you to believe the quality of life is improving." There are other possible adjectives to conjure with. If everybody working for the government is Orwellian, then nobody working for the government would be Gilderian. If waking up as a cockroach is Kafkaesque, waking up as George Jetson's boy, Elroy, is Gilderesque.
Let's Make a Deal
Building the hardware revolution in sand, glass and air often seems to require tremendous faith. If we put a hundred satellites in the sky over Asia, will Asians buy phones to use them? Should we adopt this proto- col, or will a better one emerge tomorrow? If we extend fibre-optic pipe into the home, will interactive entertainment emerge to take advantage of it? George Gilder has that faith. If he ever got on the television show Let's Make a Deal, no matter how many times Monty Hall offered him the Cadillac Seville or whatever's behind the curtain, Gilder would always choose the curtain.Hall: "I'll give you the Seville and $10,000 cash...."
Gilder: "I'll take the curtain."
Hall: "I'll give you a Senate seat and $3 million cash...."
Gilder: "I'll take the curtain."
What's behind the curtain, Gilder knows, is just a rather ordinary geek - an unfashionably dressed electrical engineer, preferably an immigrant with a PhD who's hungry for success. All the better if he's god-fearing and has a family to provide for. Give enough such engineers a problem, even a really big problem such as "find a way around operating systems," and one of them will have the right stuff to eventually figure it out. That's why Gilder seeks out the curtains behind which these people lurk. He wants to find engineers like Steve Willens who have the focus and drive to be making front-page news and serious money a few years from now.
A few years out is where supply-siders like Gilder are most at home. The classical definition of economics is the study of choice under scarcity. But in Gilder's world, scarcity is only a temporary problem - things we normally consider to be scarce, such as bandwidth, will soon be plentiful. RAM will not be scarce, the electromagnetic spectrum will not be scarce, solutions to our problems will not be scarce. All those things will be 'supplied.'
Inspired by Moore's Law - that the density of transistors on a chip doubles every 18 months - Gilder has come up with his own Law of the Microcosm: Every increase n in the number of transistors on a chip results in an n2 increase in the chip's price-performance value. Recently he added to this a corollary for the wired Web (based on Bob Metcalfe's similar hypothesis), the Law of the Telecosm: Every increase n in the number and power of computers on a network results in an n2 increase in the network's performance value. These aren't intended as mathematically rigorous. They just help make the point that the rate of change is increasing geometrically - that everything gets supplied in the long term. Comforting, but no help to the product team that has to ship in time for peak Christmas sales.
Seinfeld
Another day, another speech. This time Gilder's addressing Hollywood heavyweights at the Radisson Hotel in Beverly Hills. The event has been organised by David Horowitz, a one-time leftist organiser turned conservative critic. The ostensible theme of this morning's breakfast is to celebrate the reissue of George Gilder's book Visible Man: A True Story of Post-Racist America. It's the biography of a young black man living in Albany, New York, who, despite his charm and intelligence, continually gets in trouble with the law. His story conveys a political message: the cause of his criminal behaviour is the pandering welfare system that creates and corrupts the underclass.Gilder blames the very people who try to help. The book was first published in 1978, and if there is one book that Gilder's enemies would have the world read, this is it. Unfortunately for them, not many people have: it sold only 800 copies in the first year. When he reaches the podium, it is soon clear that Gilder has not changed his mind. "Among people of influence in America, racism is dead. Racism has virtually nothing to do with the plight of black America," he says. "If you adjust for age and credentials, black women earn 106 per cent of the wages of white women. If you adjust for age, IQ and gender, black full-time workers earn 101 per cent the wages of white workers." The audience is politically conservative, so George could go on like this for an hour without raising any eyebrows. But George's tone is flat and unenthused; he starts to wrap it up, after just five minutes. He suggests that people buy the book and consider its ideas carefully. He pauses. The silence is uncomfortable.
George starts talking about the coming death of television, about how new technology is going to change the power structure of Hollywood, about "sand, glass and air". These are pretty heady days in Tinseltown - Disney and Seagram just bought half the town on a shopping spree, and the locals are being reminded that "content is king" every time they open their morning paper. But George has a contrary opinion, and he'd like to voice it.
Slowly and painstakingly, he makes the case that the cost of television and movies is primarily a function of the technology used to produce and distribute them; as the technology changes, the costs will come down dramatically, shattering the business's biggest and oldest barrier to entry - that it takes money to make money. The market will be flooded with the high-quality work of low-budget auteurs. And someday - sooner than you think - consumers who want to watch something other than PG flesh and blood will be able to. We will move from a society of lowest common denominators to a first-choice society, and Gilder has the faith that everybody's first choice won't be Heather Locklear's hemlines.
It's this last part where Gilder loses his audience. These men have built empires by manufacturing stars. The conventional wisdom in Hollywood is that when the market fractures into a gazillion digital channels, consumers will be so disoriented by the huge selection that they will cling desperately to familiar faces. Several audience members raise their hands and express this opinion. But Gilder scolds them, "Don't underestimate the intelligence of the public. Those who do will go broke."
One minute George is defending the intelligence of the American public, and I want to cheer him. But then I recall that he just denied the existence of racism. Remember that Seinfeld episode where Elaine falls in love with the guy who moves her couch but then asks him what he thinks about a woman's right to choose, and he turns out to be a pro-life fanatic? Despite her love, she had to break up with him.
George Gilder's past presents just this sort of problem to the many fans of his technological prophecies. "I'm not trying to avoid my sociological work of the '70s," George says. "I stand by those views. It's just not ... Well, I'm focused on something else these days." But the old views are hardly hidden. A few days after the Beverley Hills speech, in response to the Million Man March on Washington, George writes a long Op-Ed piece for The Wall Street Journal that repeats the conclusions of Visible Man: the welfare state renders husbands superfluous, and young black men - their role as providers undermined - become predators on the streets.
Star Struck
After the breakfasters leave George goes table to table, downing all the untouched glasses of orange juice. On the way to the airport, he eats a package of dried fruit and contemplates his article. Over the week, he's seen the Canadian phone companies in Vancouver, the networkers at Livingston and now some honchos from Hollywood. And there was such a difference. At Livingston they were actually doing something, while the other two, well - they were still just talking about it."I've got an idea for the article," George tells me. It goes something like this: If the phone companies were smart, they'd be offering flat-rate Internet service to every one of their customers. But the phone companies are distracted by the rush to own a piece of Hollywood. They're star struck. Meanwhile, hundreds of Internet service providers are busy capturing this lucrative, booming market. In addition, if Internet telephony becomes popular (long-distance calls for the cost of local), then the Internet service providers will 'hollow out' the regional phone companies. This is vintage Gilder - little guys against the big guys. It's just the kind of grand theme that will separate his Internet-hardware article from just another buyer's guide. But he knows the merest intimation that the phone companies are vulnerable is going to be hard to make. When Gilder tells me this - we're on Highway 405 headed south - it's a defining moment. I've caught George Gilder on the cusp of formulating his next prediction. When it gets published, the "really" questions will start up: does he really believe it? At this point, even he doesn't know.
Three days later, five days before his deadline, George shows up at the offices of Forbes ASAP in Redwood City. He's booked a room at the very chichi Hotel Sofitel down the street. He intends to work round the clock until he gets the article done. Forbes lends him an office and a computer. By chance, another columnist, Andy Kessler, happens to be around. He is a partner at the investment banking firm Unterberg Harris and, in George's estimation, a super-smart guy. So George runs his grand theme by Andy - about how the Internet service providers may hollow out the phone companies.
Andy thinks it just isn't going to happen. No way. The phone companies are just too big to roll over and die. If anybody ever starts making big money in connecting users to the Internet, the phone companies will just jump into the market and squash them. And if for any reason they can't squash the Internet providers, then by god they'll just buy them.
The conversation puts George in a funk. It's partly because he now needs a new theme and partly because it's agonising that the Internet revolution is still dependent on the bureaucratic phone companies. It just doesn't seem like much of a revolution if the Baby Bells profit from it.
While we're in the office, the October issue of ASAP arrives from the printer. There are ten pages of responses to Gilder's Internet-software article. Scott McNealy, Andy Grove, Scott Cook, Larry Ellison - they all wrote a response. Andy Grove starts his letter, "George, George, George - you haven't met a new technology you didn't like." Most of them agree with the gist of his piece - that the network is becoming more and more important - but most also take exception to the language Gilder uses. On the ninth page, George finally gets to respond: "I will concede ... that the use of the term 'hollowing out of the computer' ... is hyperbolic, even misleading in an absolute sense. But they should acknowledge that in relative terms, the balance between desktop and network is shifting sharply." As I read this, I'm thinking: if they didn't like "hollowing out the computer," they sure won't like "hollowing out the phone company."
George closes the door to his office. When everybody else at ASAP is gone for the day, George is still in there, reading and thinking. To get inspired to write, he rereads passages of Tom Wolfe's The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, which to him is "all about religion, all about transcendence." George says his best writing comes to him only after he's been sitting at the terminal for four or five hours straight - only then do all life's distractions fade away. But tonight he just can't get it going. He doodles out notes to himself and random thoughts and arguments countering his critics. He walks back to the hotel at 3 a.m.
Religion and transcendence infuse both George's style and his substance. He has a missionary's drive to teach others what he knows, and he speaks with a preacher's fervour. He believes that moral values translate into entrepreneurship and technological development. When George and I talk about religion, he says that someday he would like to write a book about how technology has its roots in the mystical, the spiritual, but that 1) he hasn't figured out how to write it and 2) if he attempted it and it was anything less than "just right, or right on target," then it would get discounted or brushed aside, and maybe even people would laugh at him.
George Gilder has a valid reason for being careful about writing a book connecting religion and science. In Wealth and Poverty he pointed out how business was compatible with religion; businesses succeed by serving their customers' needs, and Gilder noted how that fits with the Christian ethic of living your life in service to others. Give and you shall receive. Invest and you shall prosper. Reagan loved it, but Ayn Rand - whose work Gilder had read and admired - was enraged. Here was this Gilder wonk being touted as a libertarian, and he was telling people to serve others! It was an outrage! Life should be spent serving your own vision, not the needs of others. She devoted the last public speech of her life to denouncing Gilder. Among Ayn Rand libertarians he became an outcast.
There have been other denunciations. In 1974, the National Organisation for Women named Gilder its "Male Chauvinist Pig of the Year" for his book Men and Marriage. In 1981, he was giving a commencement address at American University when 50 students wearing white armbands turned their backs to protest his writings on race. In 1991, Susan Faludi allocated a section of her bestseller Backlash to portraying Gilder as a guy who despises feminists because he couldn't get a date, and then, perhaps even more bitingly, she accused Gilder of spouting anti-feminist polemic just to get on TV. He keeps going. He is so thick-skinned he should have a cattle brand on his shoulder.
Dallas
George Gilder runs alone. After a two minute shower, he heads down the valley to Netcom On-Line Communication Services Inc., an Internet service provider that is out- growing its office space exponentially. He arrives a few minutes early, and as he waits, swigging Snapple, a headline in the San Jose Mercury News catches his eye - AT&T has just announced that it will offer Internet service within six months, and it intends to own half the market within two years.George can't believe it - Andy Kessler's prediction is coming true! The phone companies are jumping in with every intention of squashing the little guys! George meets first with Netcom's marketing gun, John Zeisler. With some resignation, George asks him about AT&T's entry into the market. Zeisler laughs. He explains to Gilder the difference between Internet years and human years: a human year is about five Internet years. So if AT&T expects to offer service in six human months, that's two and a half Internet years! A lot will happen in two and a half Internet years. AT&T will never catch up.
Netcom CEO Dave Garrison gives Gilder more good news. Of the $20 (£13) or so that users pay for their Internet account, only $1 (63p) goes to cover the phone connection. It's too small a slice for phone companies to get a price advantage. It turns out that one of the biggest chunks is for 24-hour person-to-person customer service - not just some infinitely branching voicemail system, but a live techie on the line. Garrison points out that it's just too much of a stretch to imagine a Pacific Bell operator editing your config.sys file. When he says this he grins wickedly, knowing he's proved his point, and suddenly he looks exactly like J. R. Ewing.
Gilder is getting jazzed. Andy Kessler's got it wrong after all! These guys at Netcom have hunger, they have focus, they have drive. They give their customers exactly what they want, nothing more and nothing less. Well, if that's not a formula for success, then what is?
George begins to size up all the people at Netcom he meets; I can sense what he's doing - he's looking for one personality to hang the story on. He's looking for one guy who can demonstrate the difference in culture between AT&T and Netcom. He's looking for his protagonist. The obvious possibility is Netcom's founder, Bob Rieger, except Rieger recently retired from involvement in day-to-day operations. It's hard to say a guy has focus and drive when he's retired. Then George hears about one of the chief engineers, Bob Tomasi. Tomasi used to work for Timenet, then for MCI and now for Netcom - Tomasi has lived Gilder's grand theme: he's moved from the bureaucracy to the rocket ship.
"I gotta meet this guy," Gilder says.
George Gilder believes. Really. When he looks hard enough, and when he looks long enough, he finds a place where his affinity for hyperbole and his passion for the nuts and bolts of engineering become as one. And when he gets there, when he finds that unique place, he is finally ready to write.
Before he leaves, George wants to spend some time in the control room, the physi- cal place that all the Netcom customers connect to. It's on the second floor, in an air-conditioned room stuffed with rack after rack of US Robotics modems, Cisco servers, Sun SPARCstations and Livingston routers. George dives in amidst some wires where he sees an engineer tinkering away.
"Livingston routers, huh?" George says, beginning his cascade of syntax. "Hey, an RJ-45 connector!"
George Gilder's article "Angst and Awe on the Internet" appeared in the December issue of Forbes ASAP and is available at http://www.discovery.org/.
Po Bronson (pobronson@aol.com) is the author of the international bestseller Bombardiers, out June 1996 in paperback from Minerva. An archive of his humour writing is located at http://users.aol.com/pobronson/humor1.htm..
Wealth & Poverty (1981)
Gilder argues economics with Schumpeter and Keynes, two guys who have both been dead for a while, so it's little surprise that Gilder gets the better of them. In the early chapters, Gilder firmly establishes that "poverty" is merely a lack of wealth. "Eliminating poverty" is therefore a double negative breaking several rules of grammar, and government policy should instead strive to "enrich the underclass." True richness, of course, can only come from the combination of hard work and stock options. In the last few chapters, a brief cameo appearance is made by God, a supreme being who rules the Christians. God, apparently, is the source of all ingenuity and creativity, and therefore to develop new technologies and go public within three years is to do God's good work. Gilder does not explain why God can't do his own work - perhaps he's on paternity leave. It turns out that Ronald Reagan read these last chapters in manuscript form and wrote to Gilder enthusiastically, maybe to note some dangling participles and sentence fragments. Gilder took his advice, and the rest is history.
Microcosm (1989)
Sort of an Aesop's Fables for gearheads. Gilder traces the technological develop- ment of the semiconductor in minute detail, extracting new economic principles along the way. Anders Graf, aka "Andy Grove," appears often in the role of the fox, outsmarting rubes like Sporck (the raven) and Fairchild (the snake). Chips are made from some of the most plentiful raw materials on earth, but nations that know how to make chips can be richer than a producer of rice, gold, or oil. Gilder concludes that the microchip has veritably overthrown all physical matter, except maybe pizza. Not stopping there, the chip will liberate us from imprisonment by fat corporate pigs and corrupt government bureaucracies. When that's done, we will all abandon cities and move to the country, where the chip has a hideout. (This book was made into an early episode of The X-Files, guest-starring Victoria Principal as The Chip.) A must-read from a brilliant new voice in American letters.
Life After Television (1990)
Excellent airplane reading. By popular demand, our hero the Microchip returns in this action-packed sequel to Microcosm. It rooted out bureaucracy, obliterated physical matter and made the world safe for chat rooms, but the Microchip apparently forgot to destroy the evil television set. In Act One, the television lays waste to our attention spans and incites violence in children. People are lonely a lot, since they can only watch four channels (and reruns half the year). In Act Two, the Microchip invades the television through a fibre-optic cable line laid to the curb outside the television's house. For a while, the television still thinks it's the evil old boob tube, but secretly the Microchip inside is reprogramming the TV's brain so that it can no longer block out hundreds of channels of interactive game shows. The Microchip is just about to flip the conversion switch when - surprise! - Bureaucratic Government rises from the dead intent on regu- lation. In a gripping sequence, the Microchip has to re-kill Government and flip the switch. The TV wakes up to find that it's now trapped inside the body of a computer running Windows 95, and can't get out. In a somewhat sappy final scene, we are led to believe a cultural renaissance is flourishing, evidenced by people visiting foreign countries through high-resolution screens in their living rooms. I cried anyway. Couldn't help it.
Men and Marriage (1973, revised 1986)
A few pages into this and it becomes clear to the reader that not all forms of technology are good after all. The microchip is, of course, good. The pill is bad. Destroying hierarchies is also good, except when you're destroying that last bastion of hierarchy, the Judeo-Christian "who wears the pants around here anyway?" family. The pill caused the sexual revolution, which overthrew the family and replaced it with the welfare state and flared trousers. Also, Gilder reasons, just because Man is inherently free and entrepreneurial is no reason that women should be. I'll stop there. If you like George Gilder, and you want to still like him, then don't read this one without warning. You may find yourself saying, "Just because he makes perfect sense doesn't mean I agree with him." As with all Gilder, the survival of civilisation is again at stake. But this treatise expresses a whining sensibility that is the polar opposite of his other optimistic work. Men come off as being mere lab rats subject to the shocks and cheeseballs that society gives them. Women are profoundly unhappy, particularly because the men they date are lab rats. Woody Allen has Shadows and Fog; George Gilder has Men and Marriage. Not his best work, though a couple of these books stacked on top of each other would make a nifty coffee table.
- Po Bronson
Since George Gilder's recent work is available at http://www.discovery.org/, you can form your own opinion of it online. However, many of his major works have not yet been emancipated from the confines of ink and paper; the following ultra-abridged editions of his major texts are sure to make you an instant Gilder expert.