<nettime> TechnoGenerationalism - On Michael Lewis The Future Just Happened

["geert lovink" <geert@xs4all.nl>]

TechnoGenerationalism, the Latest Escape
Review of Michael Lewis - The Future Just Happened
By Geert Lovink

The Future Just Happened is Michael Lewis' next publication after his model
hype story on Jim Clark and the Netscape IPO, The New New Thing. Lewis
wisely keeps his mouth about the whereabouts of his New Thing heroes and the
tragic marginalization of the web browser company Netscape after its sellout
to AOL. For Lewis Dotcommania has not been a process shaped by
technologists, but a scheme, ran by financial professionals. In an
opportunistic manner Lewis states: "In pursuit of banking fees the idea that
there was such a thing as the truth had been lost." The active role that his
own, immensely popular, dotcom book might have played in talking up stocks
remains undiscussed. Suffering from short memory, Lewis sets out to map the
social impacts of the Internet. The Future Just Happened is the book
accompanying a television series with the same title Lewis wrote for the
BBC. For this occasion Lewis develops a wildly uncritical crackpot
sociology. In order not to have to talk about the flaws of dotcom business
models, the Microsoft monopoly, the corporate and state crackdown on privacy
and other urgent issues, the "amateur social theorist" Michael Lewis
discovers the teenagers, innocent pioneers not corrupted by Wall St. money
and corporate greed.

For Lewis technology has no agenda. It has only got heroes who are driving a
wild and unspecified process. "The only thing capitalism cannot survive is
stability. Stability-true stability-is an absence of progress, and a dearth
of new wealth." Instead of looking into marketing, the production of new
consumer groups and the role of early adopters, Lewis reverses the process.
He mistakenly presumes that the first users of technology are actually
driving the process. Sadly enough for the early adaptors, this is not the
case. If any identifiable agency is driving technology it would arguably be
the military, followed by university research centers, in conjunction with
large corporations and an occasional start-up.

In The Future Just Happened Lewis' heroes are no longer dotcom CEOs but
ordinary people, in particular adolescents. Finland is used here an example.
The Fins were successful because they were especially good at guessing what
others would want from their mobile phone. Lewis follows the corporate
rhetoric of Nokia who presumably spent a lot of time studying children.
However, the assumption made here is a wrong one. Finnish school kidz did
not invent instant messaging. What they did was using existing features in a
perhaps unexpected way. An interesting detail is that SMS is a relative
low-tech feature. The Nokia anthropologists then picked up on this informal
mobile phone use in their marketing strategy. In short, the Finnish youth
neither invented nor further developed the SMS standard. It found new social
uses, in a close feedback with the corporate (research) sector. Loops
between marketers and the 'cool' rebels are short. Such dynamics are perhaps
too complex for Lewis. He sets out to portray them, celebrating his heroes
in an uncritical fashion, as he had done before with Wall Street financial
analysts and  Netscape entrepreneur Jim Clark.

The Future Just Happened tells the story of the fifteen-year-old Jonathan
Lebed, "the first child to manipulate the stock market." In September 2000
the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) settled its case of stock
market fraud against this computer wiz kid who had used the Internet to
promote stocks from his bedroom in Cedar Grove, New Jersey. "Armed only with
accounts at AOL and E-trade, the kid had bought stock, then, using "multiple
fictious names," posted hundreds of messages on Yahoo Finance message boards
recommending that stock to others." Lebed agreed to hand over his gains of
$285.000. Lewis' inability to frame events becomes clear here. He completely
fails to mention that these same young fellow day traders only a few months
after the Lebed case lost billions and billions of dollars. Of course Lewis
is not visiting losers. This obvious fact, known to Lewis, doesn't fit in
his success story about the "democratization of capital." Instead, the
impression of the reader has to be: clever kids can make a lot of money on
the Net and the establishment doesn't let them. How unfair.

In The Future Just Happened Michael Lewis features the Gnutella,
peer-to-peer (P2P) software, launched in March 2000 by the twenty-year-old
AOL employee Justin Frankel. The Gnutella case is a real challenge for the
capitalist Lewis' belief system. He interprets the post-Napster free
exchange movement in an interesting way. For Lewis P2P stands for the
post-1989 'capitalism without alternatives', which 'allows' peer-to-peer
networks to experiment. "Now that the system is no longer opposed [by
communism, GL] it could afford to take risks. Actually these risks were no
luxury. Just as people needed other people to tell them who they were, ideas
needed other ideas to tell them what they meant." Read: corporate technology
needs its own internal antagonists such as Linux, PGP and Gnutella. All the
virus does is test the system. "That's perhaps one reason that people so
explicitly hostile to capitalism were given a longer leash than usual: they
posed no fundamental risk." In Lewis' one-way street model the rebel has no
option but to integrate. Duped by a fatal cocktail of historical necessity
and the greedy human nature, the Internet rebel will ultimately change
sides. Sooner or later "some big company swoops in and buys them, or they
give birth to the big company themselves. Inside every alienated hacker
there is a tycoon struggling to get out. It's not the system he hates. His
gripe is with the price the system initially offers him to collaborate."
Hear deep throat of the capitalist doctrine talking here, speaking on behalf
of the 'speechless' hackers.

In order to explain real struggles between inside and outside, Lewis has to
recourse to the good-evil distinction. Capitalism in essence is pure and
good and cares for the Internet. However, it is the lawyers, CEOs and
financiers who are the evil elements. They are imperfect, greedy human
beings trying to frustrate "change" as practiced by the youngsters. Lewis
does not ask himself the obvious question why the Internet has not been able
to disassociate itself from the dotcoms in an early stage. Good capitalists
go to Sillicon Valley, bad ones to Wall Street. This simple 'Westcoast good,
Eastcoast bad' scheme is making waves these days, with cyber visionaries
having to explain what went so wrong.

Lewis then sets out to reinterpret 'socialist' intentions of youngsters as
"rebel ideas of outsiders" whose only wish, and legitimate right it seems to
be, to get incorporated. Here Lewis really shows his cynical nature,
overruling legitimate concerns of hackers in favor of his own conservative
political agenda. Lewis advises us not to take notice of anti-capitalist
sentiments. "Socialistic impulses will always linger in the air, because
they grow directly out of the human experience of capitalism," Lewis
reassures us. "The market has found a way not only to permit the people who
are most threatening to it their rebellious notions but to capitalize on
them." Daniel, a fourteen-year-old English Gnutella developer "didn't see
things this way, of course. He was still in the larval state of outsider
rebellion."

In reference to the debate sparked by SUN's senior technologist Bill Joy on
the ethical borders of the technological knowledge (published in Wired
Magazine, April 2000), Lewis states that such questioning is dangerous
because it could stop "change". In his puritian techno-libertarian worldview
progress is a blind process without direction of values, which cannot and
should not be given a direction. Obviously Lewis can't speak of class, race
and gender issues. What remains is friction between the generations. Lewis
calls for the Old to make way for the New. "The middle-aged technologist
knows that somewhere out there some kid in his bedroom is dreaming up
something that will make him obsolete. And when the dream comes true he'll
be dead wood. One of those people who need to be told to get out of the way.
Part of the process." But power doesn't exactly follow the logic as Lewis
describes it. Those in power, worldwide, are perhaps not interested in
"change". But they are perfectly aware how to own "change" once it has
reached the point of profitability. Giving up power is not "part of the
process." The babyboom elites are in no danger of being overruled because
the youngsters lack basic understanding how power is operating (and Lewis
would be the last one to tell them). It's pathetic to suggest the elderly
will voluntarily make way for the next generations in the disruptive affair,
often caused by (cultural) revolutions, (civil) wars and recessions.

Lewis avoids the looming conflicts over intellectual property rights,
censorship and ownership over the means of distribution. The a priori here
is one of technology, marching on, blindly. This is perhaps the most
outdated idea, that technologists are the only ones who shape the future. If
we follow the argument of the democratization of knowledge, everyone will
shape technology, in one way or another. This makes the premise of Lewis'
book, young hackers shaping history, abundant. Ageism is a bad escape route
if you prefer, like Lewis,  not to talk about real power issues in
information technology.

---

Michael Lewis, The Future Just Happened, London: Hodder & Stoughton, 2001.

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