Next: The Future Just Happened
By Michael Lewis
Norton, 236 pages, $23.95
When the British soldiers marched out to surrender to George Washington at Yorktown on Oct. 19, 1781, their band played “The World Turned Upside Down.” At that very moment, the prescient should have known that the upstart young republic on the colonial periphery would soon dominate the established power centers of old Europe.
Almost 2 1/4 centuries later, Michael Lewis, in “Next: The Future Just Happened,” makes the same argument about the Internet. This time, however, it is the embattled teenage computer hacker, not thenot the Minuteman, who is firing the shot heard ’round the world
Lewis (“The New New Thing”) insists that the most profound impact (and there are many of them) of the Internet revolution is a one-two punch. The left jab is what he calls the shift of power from the entrenched old center (the hierarchical corporate business structure) to the previously marginalized new edge (thousands of youthful software whizes disenfranchised by the above-noted hierarchy). And the right hook is the growing ascendancy of youth in driving technological change (which he asserts is the life force of the new economy and social order). If you haven’t heard it already, you likely soon will: “Sorry, Dad, but times are tough and I’m cutting your allowance.”
In the course of making his case, Lewis, almost in passing, comes to closure on a number of the other megaissues spawned by the Internet, all delivered with lordly self-assurance and almost frightening insouciance. He disposes of the future of advertising, mass marketing, consumer behavior, intellectual property rights, financial services, populist politics and the extinction of the gentleman as a subspecies as quickly as a judge in traffic court disposes of parking tickets.
But there is no denying that Lewis presents his thesis with style, wit and admirable compression of language. He is provocative, entertaining and literate (that is, he is well-educated and writes beautifully). He forces the reader to think about disquieting and uncomfortable subjects (his audience is essentially those who won’t be relevant after the deluge he posits). It’s no mean feat to get people older than 30 to read their own obituaries and pay for it when they may even think they’re still alive and trucking.
Despite these attractive virtues, “Next” is only a partial success. My most serious objection is that Lewis takes a considerable amount of anecdotal evidence (some of it quite fanciful) and smoothly presents it as a cosmic fait accompli. Unflappable panache and intellectual charm may be just the right ingredients for an international best seller, but they are not a valid substitute for argument based on painstakingly accumulated and rigorously evaluated data.
For example, Lewis talks enthusiastically about TiVo and Replay, two startup companies that are placing electronic black boxes on subscribers’ TV sets to enable viewers to create their own private TV channel from all available programming. Importantly, they have a feature enabling subscribers to block out commercials. The boxes also create for TiVo and Replay a detailed log of each subscriber’s TV habits and preferences. Based on the fact that 88 percent of the 300,000 subscribers (as of June 2001) skipped the commercials, Lewis pronounces a sentence of death on mass network advertising as we know it. But he may be premature.
While a randomly selected sample of 300,000 may be an accurate proxy for the TV habits of 100 million households, if a significant number of the 300,000 subscribers are self-selected because, in advance, they desired the commercial-blocking feature, then his data is tainted and of questionable predictive value. While Lewis’ dicta about network advertising may yet prove correct, as of today they are still intuitive predictions, not incontrovertible statements of fact.
Lewis also devotes considerable attention to the case of Jonathan Lebed, the 15-year-old wunderkind of Internet stock-market trading. Lebed apparently drew the ire of the Securities and Exchange Commission because he discovered at a too-precocious age that God had put pigeons on Earth for a special reason: to be plucked. The SEC said Lebed and some of his high-school pals had bought stocks and illegally promoted them on the Internet. In Lewis’ description of the contretemps, Arthur Levitt, then chairman of the SEC, is painted as an elderly fuddy-duddy, hopelessly out of touch with the new reality (read brilliant and nervy juvenile stock traders).
But as Lewis tells the story, Levitt didn’t strike me as clueless. He was just lamenting his loss of innocence as to what young people should be up to — and it isn’t trading stocks on the Internet. Despite Levitt’s regrets, I doubt whether Lebed and his friends ever had much innocence to lose. They remind me of Jesse Livermore, the great stock-market speculator of the 1920s who was never a child in the sense of baiting a hook with worms and playing capture the flag.
Still, the more things change, the more they stay the same. Perhaps there will still be kids as we remember them, and perhaps the future won’t be quite so different from the past as Lewis would lead us to expect. While my opinion is only intuitive and anecdotal, I prefer to be an optimist.
Nevertheless, “Next” is worthwhile reading. Lewis, as usual, is on the cutting edge of important issues. He is amusing, persuasive and well-informed. He may indeed see the future clearly and not through a glass darkly. Read his book carefully, but make up your own mind. The jury is still out on the future.
