Megatrends

Technopoly. Technesis. Techgnosis. Telecosm. If nothing else, the Internet age has ushered in a host of neologisms. A Greek root here, a Greek root there and, presto, the English language expands to describe things that didn’t exist a decade ago.

The trouble with neologisms is that they suggest that more has changed than actually has. Recent years have witnessed an efflorescence not just of new words but of extraordinary claims that we are on the verge of revolutionary shifts, that the world as we know it is ending and that what lies ahead can barely be imagined. We are barraged with messages that the technologies of today are altering not just our material lives but our psyches and are transforming not just the tools we use to communicate and interact but the very nature of communication and interaction. This future, it is said, is only now coming into focus, and we are urged to prepare for it lest we be left behind.

This isn’t the first time that we have swooned over technology. The late 19th century rang with bold predictions that the onward march of science would end hunger, disease and poverty, and in the 1950s, household appliances were presented as the cutting edge of the coming utopia. Today, business magazines, TV ads and entrepreneurs have a tendency to invest technology with a totemic power over human affairs. The new technologies, we are told, will fundamentally alter our lives. Their promise extends beyond our material needs. The communications revolution and its cousin, the information revolution, are touted for their potential to improve our social relations, reinvigorate our communities and families, strengthen our identities and, in short, make us happy.

We’ve heard this before, this chant that the wonders of science will banish want, end human strife and bring universal harmony. They never have. They probably never will. On the one hand, this optimism is infectious and fun. You need a dose of utopianism to take a plunge into the future, to invest your time and money speculating on the technologies of tomorrow. On the other hand, you want to say, hey, wait a minute, we’re talking about silicon chips and fiber optics, not Eden and Utopia.

A columnist, author and senior fellow at Pepperdine’s Institute for Public Policy, Joel Kotkin sees a world “reshaped” by technology “in a manner not seen since the onset of the industrial revolution.” Because the Information Revolution frees people from the traditional workplace, he argues, they have greater latitude in choosing where to live, and because of the wealth generated by the New Economy, they have the means to live anywhere. The result is a demographic revolution.

Kotkin contends in “The New Geography” that the United States is changing from a suburban nation to a country whose living patterns are dictated by the Internet. Supplanting the older suburbs are “nerdistans,” urban concentrations of knowledge workers and like-minded souls who coalesce in places like Santa Monica, San Francisco’s Soma district, Boston’s South Station area, Silicon Alley in lower Manhattan and smaller cities such as Austin, Texas. There are also “Valhallas” such as Park City, Utah, which are beautiful remote places that can now be centers of work (albeit only for a wealthy few) because of the liberating effects of the New Economy. There are only a few Valhallas, but there are numerous nerdistans. “Successful nerdistans,” Kotkin writes, “seek to eliminate . . . [the] distractions--crime, traffic, commercial blight--that have commonly been endemic in cities.” They want the pulse and the creativity of the city, without the grime, without the crime, and without the poor.

Kotkin’s “new geography” is still an elite phenomenon, but at least he notes the disruptive effects on society as a whole. Yet where Kotkin worries, George Gilder unabashedly cheers. Twenty years ago, Gilder was a Reagan ideologue who made a name for himself with lacerating critiques of feminism and cheerleading speeches in favor of the free market. He then shifted gears and penned a book called “Microcosm” in 1989 in which he announced that the world was being revolutionized by the microchip. In the 1990s, as a columnist for Forbes ASAP, as the eponymous publisher of the Gilder Technology Report and as a prolific and highly paid corporate speaker, he moved beyond “Microcosm” and toward what he believes is the next new thing: the “telecosm,” which is both the title of his new book and an umbrella term for fiber optics, cellular telephony, lasers, photons and infinite bandwidth.

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Gilder is a one-man creator and destroyer. After years of touting the microchip revolution, he declares at the beginning of “Telecosm” that “the computer age is over.” Replacing it is a revolution in communications technology that will make the computer, television and traditional telephony obsolete. Gilder’s thesis is simple: We are reaching the physical limits of current communications technology because of two problems. There is a limited amount of bandwidth to carry messages, which creates traffic jams on the information highways. But even with increased bandwidth, the complexity of the networks that carry the signals limits the speed of transmissions. In order to meet the appetites of the future, the slow speeds associated with limited bandwidth will have to be solved, and the solution, says Gilder, lies with fiber optics and communications based on light.

To make the transition, communications networks, Gilder asserts, must become “dumb.” Currently, whenever you send an e-mail, it is broken down into discrete packets of information and routed through a series of switches before it reaches its destination. Companies like Cisco Systems have constructed an architecture for the Internet that depends on multiple levels and multiple steps, each of which must be “smart” enough to direct the information from sender to receiver. In order to optimize the speed of communication, networks must give way to passive conduits, the fiber optics and wireless systems that allow information to flow directly from sender to receiver at the speed of light.

As networks become dumb, and as fiber optics and then satellite wireless channels link the world, “the computer [will] hollow out.” Gilder describes this process as a softening of the hardware and a hardening of the software. One example: using languages like Java, developed by Sun Microsystems, programs will no longer reside on the hard drive of your computer. Instead, they will be stored on the Internet, to be activated by your cell-phone or your laptop. Another example is the wireless interface between your Palm Pilot and daily weather reports, sports scores and highway maps. Some of this is already happening, and Gilder forecasts that everything is moving in this direction.

The ideas are clear, but Gilder’s prose is not always easy to follow. The first section of the book is an arcane and only occasionally artful retelling of the development of laser technology, and the subsequent sections blend anecdotes of unique careers such as Marc Andreessen’s with Netscape and Bob Metcalfe’s with 3Com with bold statements about the future. Some of these statements result in head-scratching; to wit: “With terabits per second running over continents and under oceans through all optical lines, the numerator in the Kleinrock formula is rising by a factor of millions, rendering irrelevant the entire efficiency calculations.”

Other passages ring with an almost messianic fervor: “Governing the light is the law of resonance. . . . Through endless essays of trial and error, capitalism teaches every venturer the rules of resonance, the laws of right and light. It reveals what efforts reverberate in the minds and hearts and hands of other producers--what ventures enlighten and enrich them. . . . At the millennium, the incandescence is diffusing around the world, offering a promise of new freedom and prosperity from Santiago, Chile, to Shanghai, China.” Here and elsewhere the message is that we are on the cusp of a quantum leap in technology that will reshape daily life and raise up a new set of heroes to replace Bill Gates, Steve Jobs and the rest.

Gilder clearly takes some glee in technical minutia, either because he has a golly-gee-willickers enthusiasm or because he feels he needs to pad his techno-market utopianism. In addition, Gilder doesn’t just celebrate the evolution toward a wireless future; he also wants to help investors identify the market leaders of tomorrow. After concluding with a brief paean to the market and its creativity, he adds two appendixes to guide the investor to companies that he believes are poised to be the Cisco, Intel and Dell of the next decade, such as Qualcomm and JDS Uniphase.

The convoluted writing is at odds with Gilder’s reputation. By all accounts, he is an effective public speaker, but it’s hard to say the same for his writing. The reason doesn’t lie with his native talents as a communicator. Rather, Gilder has perfected the art of business writers and management consultants. He creates an impenetrable language as a way to convince audience members that they are clueless. Business people, who are the primary audience for Gilder, tend to be nervous that they are missing the next trend and can be susceptible to the suggestion that what they don’t understand might just ruin them.

Remove the techno-babble, unravel the prose and we’re left with a straightforward book about future trends and the world they promise to create. On this score, Gilder is more provocative than persuasive. He writes as if the telecosm is a done deal, that infinite bandwidth is the next thing, end of statement. He does mention that some people disagree with him, that established Internet businesses like Cisco and Metcalfe’s 3Com have a vested interest in “smart networks” and aren’t as enthusiastic about Gilder’s dumb networks. He dismisses their opposition as no different from AT&T;’s opposition to innovations in telephony in the 1970s. But if the telecosmic future is as obvious as Gilder suggests, why would anyone in his right mind argue about it? Gilder’s tone is excessively cocksure (as opposed to just cocksure enough to make potential detractors uneasy), and his breezy dismissal of those who disagree with him isn’t convincing. Too many people argue vehemently about these things for the answers to be as simple as Gilder makes them seem.

Even more, nothing that Gilder says seems particularly new. Partly, he is a victim of his own success. He’s been describing the telecosm for more than five years, and the idea (if not the word) has permeated discussions about the future of communications. Partly, he’s an example of how quickly new things become old hat in today’s world. It used to take a lot longer for an idea to take hold, but in an age saturated with information, new ideas have a brief shelf life. Gilder has the defense that what seems unoriginal in his book was originally voiced by him in earlier speeches and columns. But he is also a modern iteration of a familiar voice, a voice that says that tomorrow is just around the corner, with unimaginable wonders within our grasp. As ever, it is a seductive vision and, as ever, it promises more than it can deliver.

Kotkin, at least, is more skeptical of the emerging patterns. The desire of those who profit from the New Economy to refashion urban cores and settle in bucolic towns is not without costs to community, and Kotkin worries that the increasing geographic distance between the classes could lead to dangerous levels of alienation and even greater erosion of civil society. “The looming prospect of a society severely divided between rich and poor,” he warns, “is one that should haunt civic elites as they enjoy the rosy edges of this technological dawn.”

Reading Gilder, you would never know that, in the United States alone, there are tens of millions of people whose incomes barely allow them to eat at McDonald’s, let alone invest in companies laying underwater fiber optic cable. Gilder knows, of course, that economic gains and technological innovations are not evenly distributed, but as a staunch believer in the power of markets, he would say that the history of capitalism shows that innovation and, yes, wealth, starts out concentrated and then slowly spreads throughout society. In the 1980s, this was called “trickle-down” economics. Today, it is called the magic of the market.

Though the poor got poorer when Reagan heeded Gilder’s advice in the 1980s, one of the wonders of today’s economy is that it does seem to be, well, trickling down. That may vindicate Gilder’s vision of the market, but his belief in the power of technology is a theology. Some may worship at the same altar, but others might raise their eyebrows. Gilder (and to a lesser degree, Kotkin) doesn’t just say that the future will be the age of the telecosm. “When anyone can transmit any amount of information, any picture, any experience, any opportunity to anyone and everyone, anywhere, at any time, instantaneously . . . the resulting transformation becomes a transfiguration.”

Putting the brakes on the coming utopia doesn’t undermine the very real changes and the very real gains. Technology and science have improved the material conditions of life, and we are in the midst of yet another dramatic leap. But the future will almost surely be a messier place than Gilder allows, and society will be challenged by the trends that Kotkin identifies. The telecosm will not displace the human struggle. Wireless communication will not radically alter the nature of love, hate and confusion. That may be obvious, but in an age that glorifies Gilder’s techno-market utopianism, it’s increasingly less so. Light, no matter how mysterious and glorious it may be, is part of the material world. Light speed will make it easier to talk across great distances, but it will change not a wit the difficulties inherent in actually communicating with another human being. We might get rich from Gilder’s stock picks and move to Park City, but living happily after ever will remain a challenge and mystery.