Does he really think scarcity is a minor obstacle on the road to techno-Utopia? (And would he please stop talking about race and gender?
George Gilder's wife prohibits anything stronger than Lipton tea at home, so when his connecting flight from Chicago O'Hare to Vancouver, British Columbia, is delayed, he takes advantage of her absence to hit the Starbucks for a bolt of caffeine or two. Or four. Four cappuccinos! Gilder is on turbodrive all the way west, taking notes on issue after issue of IEEE Journal. But when he tries to sleep that night in his Vancouver hotel room, all he can think about is the speech he's supposed to give the next morning to an association of Canadian phone companies. Figuring exercise might burn the caffeine out of his system, Gilder goes down to the health club and jumps on the treadmill, selecting the Pikes Peak option, which means the front of the treadmill rises a foot off the ground and Gilder runs straight uphill for 20 minutes. Sweaty and tired but not sleepy, Gilder goes back to bed and waits out the night. In the morning, he's groggy and figures the only thing that will resuscitate him is a brisk run in beautiful Stanley Park. He starts out from the hotel at a fast pace, but something's wrong with his left knee - a dull, bloated stiffness caused by the treadmill. Frustrated and saddened, Gilder turns around and limps back to his hotel.
His speech goes badly. Uninspired. Scattered.
The next morning he's in San Francisco, and he's worried today's speech to The Millennium Conference will be another clunker. He's being paid almost US$20,000 to speak, so he has to be on. These people are expecting a glimpse of the near future from him, but right now Gilder has a hard time thinking past breakfast. He looks sadly into his cereal and can't find verbs to go with his nouns.
"I gotta ..." he starts out. Then he pauses, searches for his next word, gives up on that sentence, and starts another. "Sometimes if you do badly...." This one, too, stalls. Finally, he raises his finger at the waiter, signaling for more tea.
The Millennium Conference is a block away in Yerba Buena Gardens's Center for the Arts Theater. The men in the crowd are wearing gray suits and polished shoes, which suggests they're not techies - they're just ordinary businesspeople who walked here from Montgomery Street. They've all forked over $375 to get in; they've paid that much to hear Andy Grove and Peter Drucker. Gilder is just the warm-up act. The crowd is particularly restless when the moderator tells them that Drucker - the godfather of all management theory - has been scratched from the card and replaced by Lester Thurow, a mere economist.
The audience probably doesn't realize it, but the event organizers have picked speakers from the full political spectrum. Thurow is the most liberal, if you can ever call an economist liberal. A liberal economist is one who thinks the government had better do something about American illiteracy. Andy Grove, as a businessperson, 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 of the other speakers. 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. He believes government-run education is to blame for declining American literacy. Compared with the other speakers, George Gilder will probably come across as shrill, as an extremist. In a way, he's been set up to fail.
The lights dim. Gilder is to speak first. A blue spotlight focuses on center 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 (fiber), and air (wireless). The millennium promises a billion transistors on a single sliver of silicon, 700 bitstreams in a single thread of fiber, and a cellular infrastructure a thousand times cheaper than today's. Taken together, these phenomenal advances will topple all centralized institutions. His sentences flow easily, his voice starts to boom, and his body language becomes animated - his arms thrust forward and back, pumping chugga-chugga like he's doing the Locomotion dance on Soul Train. People in the audience sit up in their seats. Some reach for their pocket pens, trying to scribble down the telling statistics Gilder delivers. Others glance at their programs, checking Gilder's profile, wondering to themselves why they haven't heard of this guy before. The bio of Gilder is a full page long, but it lacks telling detail; it's all mumbo jumbo 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, which is being made obsolete by DirecTV satellite. 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.
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 a thinker's kind of man. Well, let's just say he's a man, and he thinks a lot.
Alvin Toffler - another guy who thinks a lot - takes the stage a few speakers after Gilder. On stage Toffler looks like a scarecrow: he's about 7 feet tall and no thicker than a broomstick; his white shirt cuffs hang far down out of his coat 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 categorized with Toffler (they both get described in the press as advisers to Newt Gingrich, though Gilder is actually more interested in presidential candidate Steve Forbes). 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 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 percent efficiency, these thin-film solar collectors would generate 10 megawatts of power."
Late in the day at The Millennium Conference, all the speakers gather on the stage to be cross-examined by Andy Grove, who has adopted the role of godfather in Drucker's absence. It couldn't be by accident that the stagehands point Thurow to the chair far- thest 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 Gilder.
He says sharply: "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 subsidized 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 fervor. 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, though, scoffs. "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 and women in suits, hissing! Gilder doesn't mind. Hell, they're on the edge of their seats. They've been sitting for about five hours straight, but not one of them wants to go home. They haven't had this much fun at a conference in years. Most important, they've all got their 375 dollars' worth. Like all writers, there is a little bit of the performer in Gilder (he got his start in speechwriting, so he knows the value of a good line), and if it takes hyperbole to stir some excitement - well, so be it.
Afterward, the crowd retires to a banquet of extravagant hors d'oeuvres and microbrews. Most people still have their name tags on. I remove mine and go incognito, sliding up alongside a small circle of people from Pacific Bell who are, pitifully, talking about their work. They glom on to my foreign presence and pretty quickly ask me what I do for a living, hoping for an answer that might provide some conversational stimulation. But I don't want to talk about myself, so I tell them I'm an accountant. That usually does the trick. I ask them 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 the 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. "I mean, does he really think he knows better than Andy Grove?"
Perhaps, perhaps not. What the audience didn't know, and what this small circle of people didn't know, is that George Gilder is actually a huge fan of Andy Grove - so much so that Gilder devoted a huge chunk of his book Microcosm: The Quantum Revolution in Economics and Technology to the story of the early days of Grove at Intel. Gilder is also, ironically, an old friend of Lester Thurow; in fact, the two planned to take a limousine to the airport together after the conference. So the day's all been a bit of an act, it seems: George's hyperbole, the speakers' mock squabbling, et cetera. Ha ha. No harm done, old boy. All in a day's work.
There's only one problem with that explanation. When George gets back to his hotel, he goes looking for his black limo, but it turns out Lester Thurow has left for the airport without him. Ditched! With old friends like Lester, George has no need for old enemies. But, alas, have them he certainly does. Oh, yes. And there are quite a few things that his enemies would like George Gilder's audience to know about the man.
__ Deliverance __
Meanwhile, the day after his speech, Gilder is back in San Francisco, and from the airport we drive into the East Bay nether world. Gilder is under pressure to come up with his next grand theme. His last 9,000-word article for Forbes ASAP (for which George is the headliner) was all about emerging Internet software. Now he's promised his editor another 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, but he's held off writing anything until he gets hit with a way to tell the story - either a big theme or a personality to hang it all on.
Gilder's articles will make up a book called Telecosm, which will be out sometime in the future from Simon & Schuster. Telecosm is the ultimate vaporbook; every year since 1993, the byline on Gilder's Forbes articles has promised the book "later this year," but now it's looking like a fall 1996 publication. It's just very hard to write a book about emerging technologies, since by the time the book gets copy-edited, typeset, printed, and shipped, the subject matter isn't so emerging anymore. Gilder swears this piece on Internet hardware will be his last to include in the book. Except maybe just one more on the physics of the electromagnetic spectrum. Nevertheless, it will be worth the wait; there are dozens of books on the potential consequences of all these new technologies, but Gilder's is the most grounded in the specifics of the technology. Like other firebrands such as Camille Paglia and Lewis Lapham, Gilder has that knack for supporting his forecasts in such a way that even if you disagree with him, merely by reading his work you come to know your own opinion better. For instance, his Internet-software piece landed on subscribers' desks the same week as the 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 Win 95 was a worthwhile operating system, Gilder's piece raised the question whether operating systems en masse might be made obsolete by "dynamically portable" software - programs that compile line by line in real time.
Gilder drives into Contra Costa County, a maze of look-alike office parks and anonymous brown foothills. He gets lost for a while and has to call ahead to get directions. Eventually he pulls into the parking lot of Livingston Enterprises Inc., a little 90-person company that has gained a huge share of the market for Internet servers and routers. Importantly to George, these guys have grabbed that market merely 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. Gilder doesn't normally care to hobnob with CEOs, since they're usually too high up in a company to really know what's going on, but Livingston's CEO, Steve Willens, still has a hand in product development.
Steve greets George in the lobby and takes him into a conference room.
Every time Gilder meets an engineer, they go through this sort of cascade of language syntax, negotiating like two modems, trying to find the most efficient level of conversation they can hold. It ends up sounding like the dueling 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: "00101101100010111001001 110110000101010100011111001."
Steve: ". .. . .. . .. ... ... . ..... .. .. .... .. .. . .. . .. ... ... . ..... .."
George: "Really? Wait, you lost me there."
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, and several times he has to stop himself before he reveals confidential information. 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 realizes 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. "I can't...." He tries again. "It's hard for me to write, even to think, on days I'm giving speeches." I get the feeling he wishes his public life would disappear for nine days, but George Gilder has nobody to blame but himself: he makes his own schedule. Unlike other prominent consultants, George has no publicist and no assistants - nobody speaks for George Gilder but George Gilder. This is an admirable attempt to keep his life his, and it suggests Gilder is not just an act - which goes back to the really question: maybe he really does believe the Internet will increase the power of a person at a computer by "a factor of millions."
Daunted by the coming weekend in Aspen, George 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 & Poverty made it to position four on The New York Times Best Sellers list and 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 a 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. He was trotted out on all the talk shows and asked to express his views in crisp sound bites, which he did somewhat reluctantly. What nobody knew was that George was already hot on a new topic and had a secret ambition.
He'd read Tracy Kidder's The Soul of a New Machine, and 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 Electronics Letter, found a list of semiconductor companies, and picked the one at the bottom of the list, Micron Technology Inc. George wrote an article on Micron for Forbes, and he was hooked. Then he called Ben Rosen to ask for a free subscription to Ben's newsletter.
By chance Ben had read George's piece in Forbes, and Ben had gotten the misimpression that George knew a heck of a lot about semiconductors. So Ben said, "No, you can't have a free subscription, but how about you report on semiconductors for the newsletter?" 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.
What emerged from those years was Microcosm, a detailed history of the semiconductor industry. The book stands up as well today as it did when it was published in 1989, partly because Gilder devoted a major portion to Andy Grove and Intel, who have since emerged as real giants. Ironically, George had been intending to write the book about Robert Noyce and Intel, but George got scooped by Tom Wolfe, who wrote a sensational profile of Noyce for Esquire. Gilder wasn't going to compete with one of his favorite writers. Andy Grove was his second choice.
Even that profile of Micron - a company he picked nearly randomly - looks prescient today. Stock analysts have written off Micron many times in the last decade, but the firm keeps fighting back. George has repeatedly stood by its side. Now Micron is one of the few major American RAM manufacturers left, at a time when demand for RAM far outstrips supply and prices per megabyte are falling much slower than prices for other hardware.
After 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, George 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, ASAP was started from scratch. A sympathetic editor, Rich Karlgaard, was hired away from Upside, and George Gilder was given the room to write.
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." Because there are so many journalists covering high technology these days, many are new to their beats and haven't developed their own sources. They read Gilder's pieces for guidance, and they even call Gilder for quotes. (A Nexis search on Gilder turned up more than 400 quotes in just the last two years. One thing George certainly learned from the Reagan era was how to give a good sound bite.) This way, Gilder drives the debate. In the PR business, it's called "leverage." The danger is that many people hear George's hyperbolic sound bites without ever reading his books or Forbes articles, so he sounds to them like the boy who cries wolf - willing to say anything to get some attention. Among more cynical high-tech insiders, the word Gilder verges on being used as an adjective, such as "How Gilder of you to believe the quality of life is improving." There is even some debate as to which form of the adjective will prevail. If everybody working for the government is Orwellian, then Gilderian would be nobody working for the government. If waking up as a cockroach is Kafkaesque, then Gilderesque would be waking up as George Jetson's boy, Elroy.
__ 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 protocol standard, or will a better one emerge tomorrow? If we extend fiber-optic pipe into the home, will interactive entertainment emerge to take advantage of it? George Gilder has that faith in the unknown. 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 nothing more than 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 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 what Gilder loves to write about, engineers like Steve Willens who have the focus and drive to be making front-page news 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, such as "I have to choose which animations to drop from this CD-ROM since disk space is scarce." 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." In the long term, Gilder is always eventually right - engineering ingenuity unfailingly comes to the rescue. George Gilder's advice can be invaluable to the strategic planning committee that has to formulate a five-year plan, but it's usually no help to the product team that has to ship in time for peak Christmas sales.
As a writer, Gilder likes to boil down technological advances to loosefitting "laws" for his readers to keep in mind. Inspired by Moore's Law - that the density of transistors on a chip doubles every 18 months - Gilder came 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. He doesn't intend for these principles to be mathematically strict; they just help make the point that the rate of social change is occurring exponentially, not algebraically. So if you want to be as successful tomorrow as you are today, you'd better get back to work.
If any of this has lost you, I've made up a simple mantra that combines Gilder's affinity for exponential theorems with his conviction that the future will provide answers to today's problems. Let's call it Gilder's Axiom: Assume Utopia is some time away. In one year, if we get n closer to Utopia, in the next year we will get n2 closer to Utopia. This way, we keep getting closer and closer, without ever having to actually get there. Which is probably for the best. I mean, Utopia would be great, but only if we can turn it off now and then.
__ Seinfeld __
Another day, another speech. This time Gilder's addressing a breakfast club of entertainment heavyweights at the Radisson Hotel in Beverly Hills. The event has been organized by David Horowitz, a onetime leftist organizer turned conservative critic who, along with his Second Thoughts Books, brings attention to the destruction caused by 1960s radicalism. 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 - copies are being sold on the way in, and the book stands upright in the center of each breakfast table. Visible Man is a biography of one 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 behavior 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's one book Gilder's old 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.
A revealing moment happens shortly after Gilder takes the podium and begins his speech. "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 percent of the wages of white women. If you adjust for age, IQ, and gender, black full-time workers earn 101 percent 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; compared to The Millennium Conference, he looks bored. So 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. He then segues into the "Sand, Glass, and Air" speech he gave at Millennium.
He switched subjects!
Even though he's supposed to talk about Visible Man, George would much rather talk about how new technology is going to change the power structure of Hollywood. 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 expensive economics 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-13 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 short hemlines.
It's this last part where Gilder loses his audience. These men have built empires by manufacturing name brand 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 as a test of their compatibility 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. Because amid all the people who hold libertarian views on technology, there are still deep chasms under the surface that yawn open the minute the topic of conversation switches away from technology.
"I'm not trying to avoid my sociological work of the '70s," George says to me later. "I stand by those views. It's just not ... Well, I'm focused on something else these days." Still, it's hard not to connect the dots:
- George is so media-savvy that it would be fair to say he's an expert on being an expert.
- Some portion of his current fan base would take exception to his sociological views, were they better known.
- George switched subjects.
It would seem Gilder has a plan for who gets to know what. There's only one problem with jumping to that conclusion. A few days after this 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. If George Gilder were trying to divert attention from his controversial opinions, he certainly wouldn't have revealed them to several million readers.
__ Star Struck __
After the breakfast in Beverly Hills, when the room clears out, 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, the boys 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 the kind of grand theme that will separate his Internet-hardware article from just another buyer's guide to servers and firewalls. But he knows the merest intimation that the phone companies are vulnerable is sure to be dismissed as just more hyperbole unless he can argue his case persuasively.
When Gilder tells me this - we're on Highway 405 headed south, the two of us in the back seat - it's a defining moment. I've caught George Gilder on the cusp of formulating his next prediction - the kind of prediction that will make people wonder if he really believes it - and even he doesn't know whether he believes it or not.
Gilder carries this idea with him for a few more days as he travels around. Five days before his deadline, he shows up at the offices of Forbes ASAP in Redwood City. He's cleared a hole in his manic schedule and 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 supersmart guy. So George runs his grand theme by Andy - about how the Internet service providers may hollow out the phone companies.
To George's dismay, Andy thinks that just isn't going to happen. No way. The phone companies are 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. Andy points out that the phone companies already have all the technological and billing systems to offer Internet dial-up. And if for any reason they can't squash the Internet providers, then by god they'll buy them.
The conversation puts George in a funk. It's partly because he now needs a new theme to write about Internet hardware, and partly because it's agonizing 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 there, the October issue of Forbes ASAP arrives from the printer. I flip through the glossy pages. Ten of them are devoted to letters from industry notables, all responding to Gilder's previous Internet-software article. Scott McNealy, Andy Grove, Scott Cook, Larry Ellison - they all wrote a response. 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. In particular, they take offense at his prediction that the network will "hollow out" the personal computer. Andy Grove starts his letter, "George, George, George - you haven't met a new technology you didn't like." Letter after letter, they keep coming. 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 can't seem to actually write any of his article; he just can't get it going. The dream fails to take him. Instead, he doodles out notes to himself and random thoughts and arguments countering his critics. He doesn't walk back to the hotel until 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 fervor. 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 that book, 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. Wealth & Poverty introduced the way business was compatible with religion. George pointed out that businesses succeed by serving their customers' needs, and he noted how similar that is to 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, at the Ford Hall Forum, to denouncing Gilder, and among Ayn Rand libertarians he became an outcast.
So for every Reagan trumpeting Gilder, there is an equal and opposite Ayn Rand condemning him. For every book of his that's made the bestseller lists, there's another one that has sold only 800 copies. In 1974, the National Organization 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 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.
I don't know how he does it. He is so thick-skinned he should have a cattle brand on his shoulder.
The next morning, George looks out the window of the Sofitel at San Carlos Ridge, which divides Highway 101 from Interstate 280. He puts on his running gear and we drive about a mile west, to the base of the ridge. He doesn't need to stretch. He was a runner in college, so he has perfect elbow-pumping form. Gilder is one of those rare guys who could still wear the khakis he wore in college, and maybe he does. George explains that he can't run very fast on flat land anymore because his knees are too arthritic, but he loves to run up hills - there's no pounding running uphill. Then the street we're climbing gets very steep, so George stops talking to focus on his breathing. I start to fear I'm going to get left behind. After about 10 minutes, I'm relieved to see the road ahead levels off. I give it one last burst to catch up with George before the intersection, but when we get there I see we're not at the top after all - if we take a left turn, there's another half mile to go. George Gilder, of course, takes a left.
He has a favorite running route in every major city, but rarely a running partner. Most of the time, George Gilder runs alone.
__ Dallas __
After the run, George Gilder takes a two-minute shower and heads down the valley to Netcom On-Line Communication Services Inc., an Internet service provider that is outgrowing its office space exponentially. George has set up several appointments with key people from throughout the company. He arrives a few minutes early, so he ducks into the cafeteria to get a Snapple.
"I want to be pumped up for this," he says, downing the tea. When he puts the empty bottle down on a strewn copy of that morning's San Jose Mercury News, a news item catches his eye - apparently, 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 - what does he think this means? Zeisler only laughs. He laughs! Zeisler explains 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.
In his next appointment, this one with Netcom CEO Dave Garrison, Gilder gets more good news. Of the approximately $20 users pay as a flat fee for their Internet account, only $1 goes to cover the phone connection. It's too small a slice for phone companies to get a price advantage. Then Garrison details where the rest of the $20 goes, and 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 Larry Hagman playing J. R. Ewing on Dallas.
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're not afraid of AT&T! 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.
Hell yes, 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 are not a contradiction - they are in line. The dream and the reality are 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 physical 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 amid some wires where he sees an engineer tinkering away.
"Livingston routers, huh?" George says, beginning his cascade of syntax. "Hey, an RJ-45 connector!"
