Most important, young people–the ones who grew up with the Internet–are not rebels and free agents. On the contrary, they are incredibly–even disconcertingly–comfortable with authority. Public-opinion surveys show they respect and defer to their parents more than previous generations did. They don’t rebel against their teachers. Instead, they work hard and are eager to please them.
Still, old ideas have enormous power. Since Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Western intellectuals have been in love with the idea that people are born free but kept in chains by crusty old institutions. It’s cool to be a rebel and awful to be a pillar of the establishment. This powerful set of prejudices has shaped the way we perceive the Information Age. Almost every piece of writing about Silicon Valley or information technology conforms to this central story line.
Michael Lewis, who is the best chronicler of the high-technological culture, is no exception. The author of “Liar’s Poker,” one of the definitive books on Wall Street in the 1980s, and “The New New Thing,” one of the definitive books on Silicon Valley in the 1990s, Lewis has now produced “Next: The Future Just Happened.” It is a series of vignettes all with the same message: the Internet topples hierarchies. Children and outsiders rule.
The first and most brilliant vignette is about Jonathan Lebed, a teenager in New Jersey who made a fortune by buying a stock, jacking up its price by touting it promiscuously in various financial chat rooms and then selling it for a large profit. Another chapter is about Marcus Arnold, a kid in Perris, California, who learned a thing or two about the American legal system by watching Court TV, and then went on the Internet posing as an adult offering free legal advice.
The morals of these stories are the same. The old elite structures, like Wall Street and the American legal system, are rotting. The Internet allows kids like Lebed and Arnold to bring them down. “A general collapse in the importance of formal training was a symptom of post-Internet life; knowledge, like the clothing that went with it, was being informalized. Casual thought went well with casual dress,” Lewis writes. It’s weird to see a writer celebrating, even with qualms, casual thought, but the kids are the heroes of Lewis’s vignettes, and the adults who try to police them are portrayed as venal and out of touch.
Lewis is a splendid portraitist. He went into the homes of normal families who suddenly found that their gawky teenager is actually some sort of Internet genius, able to do things that the parents can’t even fathom. Lewis subtly captures the shifting moods of the parents: pride, frustration, anger, a sense of total powerlessness. His portraits of the kids are unforgettable. They are brilliant, monomaniacal creatures: one of them has to take the shell off his computer; he uses it so much it would overheat if he didn’t.
Lewis’s mistake is to take these fantastic psychological sketches and try to hold them up as representative sociological nuggets. When he is analyzing personalities, he is fresh and original; when he is practicing sociology, he is the victim of dead philosophers. He shoehorns every tale into the stereotypical conflict between the noble child and the corrupt adult civilization.
Lewis, a contributing writer at The New York Times Magazine, researched this book while working on a project for the BBC and published it in the United States with the prestigious old house W.W. Norton & Co. In many ways, he is more typical than his teenage subjects. He is a talented writer who has gravitated to prestigious, old-line institutions. It’s natural that Lewis–like so many people–got carried away during the first burst of Internet enthusiasm. Investors did, so why shouldn’t writers? But now that the mania is over, it’s probably time to think afresh about the technological revolution, to toss out those wishful fantasies left over from the Romantic era, or the 1960s, and see how these gizmos are really going to change our lives.
