Re: 7/15/01 - NY Times: Faking It: The Internet Revolution Has Nothing to Do With the Nasdaq (Part 1 of 2)
JUL 15, 2001
Faking It: The Internet Revolution Has Nothing to Do With the Nasdaq
By MICHAEL LEWIS
When Internet stocks began their free fall in March 2000, the Internet was finally put in its proper place. It was nothing more than a fast delivery service for information -- that was what serious people who had either lost a lot of money in the late stages of the Internet boom or, more likely, failed to make money began to say now. The profit-making potential of the Internet had been overrated, and so the social effects of the Internet were presumed to be overrated. But they weren't. Speeding up information was not the only thing the Internet had done. The Internet had made it possible for people to thwart all sorts of rules and conventions. It wasn't just the commercial order that was in flux. Many forms of authority were secured by locks waiting to be picked. The technology and money-making potential of the Internet were far less interesting than the effects people were allowing it to have on their lives and what these, in turn, said about those lives.
What was happening on the Internet buttressed a school of thought in sociology known as role theory. The role theorists argue that we have no "self" as such. Our selves are merely the masks we wear in response to the social situations in which we find ourselves. The Internet had offered up a new set of social situations, to which people had responded by grabbing for a new set of masks. People take on the new tools they are ready for and make use of only what they need, how they need it. If they were using the Internet to experiment with their identities, it was probably because they found their old identities inadequate. If the Internet was giving the world a shove in a certain direction, it was probably because the world already felt inclined to move in that direction. The Internet was telling us what we wanted to become.
I have already written here about Jonathan Lebed, the 15-year-old boy in the New Jersey suburbs who used the Internet to transform himself into a stock market manipulator. Jonathan's story suggested that you couldn't really understand what was happening on the Internet unless you understood the conditions in the real world that led to what was happening on the Internet -- and you couldn't understand those unless you went there in person and looked around. Once you did that, you came to appreciate all sorts of new truths. For instance, the Internet was rock 'n' roll all over again. Not rock 'n' roll now, but rock 'n' roll in the 1950's and 1960's, when it actually terrified grown-ups. The Internet was enabling a great status upheaval and a subversion of all manner of social norms. And the people quickest to seize on its powers were the young.
A Finnish company, Nokia, figured this out before I did. Nokia has come to dominate the mobile-phone business to the point where pretty much everyone now agrees that the Finns will be the first to connect mobile phones to the Internet in a way that the rest of us will find necessary. The Finns were successful because they were especially good at guessing what others would want from their mobile phones. One big reason for this -- or so the people at Nokia believe -- was that they spent a lot of time studying children. The kids came to each new technology fresh, without preconceptions, and they picked it up more quickly. They dreamed up uses for their phones that, for reasons no one fully understood, never occurred to grown-ups. The instant text message, for instance.
To create an instant message, you punched it by hand into your telephone, using the keypad as a typewriter. On the face of it, this is not an obvious use of a telephone keypad. The difference between the number of letters in the alphabet and the number of keys on the pad meant you wound up having to type a kind of Morse code. The technique had been popularized by Finnish schoolboys who were nervous about asking girls out on dates to their faces and Finnish schoolgirls who wanted to tell one another what had happened on those dates as soon as it happened. They had proved that if the need to communicate indirectly is sufficiently urgent, words can be typed into a telephone keypad with amazing speed. Five and a half million Finns sent one another more than a billion instant messages in the year 2000.
The instant message has fast become a staple of European corporate communication. The technique spread from Finnish children to businessmen because the kids taught their parents. Nokia employed anthropologists to tell them this. Finland has become the first nation on earth to acknowledge formally the childcentric model of economic development: if you wanted a fast-growing economy, you needed to promote rapid technical change, and if you intended to promote rapid technical change, you needed to cede to children a strange measure of authority.
When capitalism encourages ever more rapid change, children enjoy one big advantage over adults: they haven't decided who they are. They haven't sunk a lot of psychological capital into a particular self. When a technology comes along that rewards people who are willing to chuck overboard their old selves for new ones, the people who aren't much invested in their old selves have an edge. The things that get tossed overboard with a 12-year-old self don't seem like much to give up at the time.
I spent my childhood in New Orleans. I would like now to consider this otherwise uninteresting fact, as it is bound up with my interest in identity and change. New Orleans has always been an excellent place to observe progress. To know progress, you need to know what it has rolled over or left behind, and when progress is moving as fast as it is now, recalling its victims is difficult. New Orleans keeps its anachronisms alive long enough for them to throw the outside world into sharp relief. For instance, until the mid-1990's you could find actual gentlemen lawyers in New Orleans, who thought of themselves mainly as members of an honorable and dignified profession. One of these dinosaurs was my father.
Right up until it collapsed, the old family law firm that my father managed clung to its charming habits. The gentlemen lawyers wrote notes to one another arguing over the correct pronunciation of certain phrases in ancient Greek. They collected strange artifacts from dead cultures. They treated education as a branch of religion. They wore bow ties. They were terrifyingly at ease with themselves but did not know the meaning of casual Friday. Their lives had been premised on a frankly elitist idea: an attorney was above the fray. He possessed special knowledge. He observed a strict code of conduct without ever having to say what it was. He viewed all entreaties to change with suspicion. The most important thing in the world to him was his stature in the community, and yet so far as anyone else could determine, he never devoted an ounce of his mental energy to worrying about it. Status wasn't a cause; it was an effect of the way he led his life.
The first hint I had that this was no longer a tenable pose -- and would not be a tenable pose for me -- came from a man I had never met called Morris Bart. I was some kind of teenager at the time. My father and I were driving along the Interstate highway that ran through town when we came upon a giant billboard. It said something like: "Are you a victim? Have you been injured? No one represents your interests? Call Morris Bart, attorney-at-law." And there was a big picture of Morris Bart. He had the easy smile of a used-car dealer.
"Do you do the same thing as Morris Bart?" I asked my father.
"Not exactly."
"But his billboard says he's a lawyer."
"We have a different kind of law firm."
"How?"
"We don't have billboards."
"Why not?"
"It's just not something a lawyer does."
That was true. It was true right up to the moment Morris Bart stuck up his picture beside the Interstate. My father and his colleagues remained unmoved, but the practice of law was succumbing to a general force, the twin American instincts to democratize and to commercialize. (Often they amount to the same thing.) These are the two forces that power the Internet and in turn are powered by it.
Morris Bart was a tiny widget inside the same magnificent American instrument of destruction that the Internet has so eloquently upgraded. A few years after Bart put up his billboard, the lawyers in my father's firm began to receive calls from "consultants" who wanted to help teach them how to steal clients and lawyers from other firms -- a notion that would have been unthinkable a few years earlier and remained unthinkable to some. A few years after that, the clients insisted that lawyers bill by the hour -- and then questioned the bills! The old game was over. The minute the market intruded too explicitly, the old prestige began to seep out of the law. For the gentlemen lawyers, it ended about as well as it could. But still it ended. And for people whose identity was wrapped up in the idea, the end gave their story the shape of tragedy.
I recall the feeling when it first dawned on me that the ground beneath my teenage feet was moving. I did not enjoy the premonition of doom in my father's world. But what troubled me even more was that some part of me wanted my father to have his own billboard beside the highway -- which of course he would never do. My response was to leave home and invent another self for myself. Had the Internet been available, I might have simply gone online.
That's what Jonathan Lebed did. And that's what another teenager with an AOL account named Marcus Arnold began doing last summer -- putting on a mask that would cause even Morris Bart to shudder and delivering another insult to the social order and its reigning notions of status and expertise.
The Askme Corporation was created in 1999 by former Microsoft employees. The software it sold enabled the big companies that bought it -- 3M, Procter & Gamble -- to create a private Web for their workers. This private Web was known as "knowledge sharing." The knowledge exchange was a screen on a computer where employees could put questions to the entire company. The appeal of this was obvious. Once an AskMe-style knowledge exchange was up and running, it didn't matter where inside the company any particular expertise resided. So long as expertise didn't leave the company, it was always on tap for whoever needed it.
AskMe soon found that it was able to tell a lot about a company from its approach to the new software. In pyramid-shaped hierarchical organizations, the bosses tended to appoint themselves or a few select subordinates as the "experts." Questions rose from the bottom of the organization, the answers flowed down from the top and the original hierarchy was preserved, even reinforced. In less-hierarchical pancake-shaped companies, the bosses used the software to create a network of all the company's employees and to tap intelligence wherever in that network it happened to be. That way, anyone in the company could answer anyone else's questions. Anyone could be the expert. Of course, it didn't exactly inspire awe in the ranks to see the intern answering a question posed by the vice president for strategic planning. But many companies decided that a bit of flattening was a small price to pay to tap into the collective knowledge bank.
The people who created the AskMe software believed that it gave companies whose bosses were willing to risk their own prestige and authority an advantage over the hierarchical companies whose bosses were not. They didn't say this publicly, because they wanted to sell their software to the pyramid-shaped organizations too. But they knew that once the software was deployed, companies that flattened their organization charts to encourage knowledge to flow freely in every direction would beat companies that didn't. Knowledge came from the strangest places; employees knew a lot more than they thought they did; and the gains in the collective wisdom outweighed any losses to the boss's authority.
In short, the software subtly changed the economic environment. It bestowed new rewards on the egalitarian spirit. It made life harder for pyramids and easier for pancakes.
Out in the field, AskMe's salespeople, like salespeople everywhere, found themselves running into the same five or six objections from potential buyers -- even when the buyers were pancake-shaped. One was "How do you know that your software won't break down when all of our 200,000 employees are using it heavily?" To prove that it wouldn't, AskMe created a Web site and offered a version of its software to the wider public. The site, called AskMe.com, went up on the Web in February 2000 and quickly became the most heavily used of a dozen or so knowledge exchanges on the Internet. In its first year, the site had more than 10 million visitors.
This was striking in view of how peripheral the site was to the ambitions of the AskMe Corporation. The company made no money from the site and did not bother to monitor what went on there or even to advertise its existence. The millions of people using the site were drawn by word of mouth. The advice on the site was freely offered. The experts were self-appointed and ranked by the people who sought the advice. Experts with high rankings received small cash prizes from AskMe.com. The prizes -- and the free publicity -- attracted a lot of people who don't normally work for nothing. Accountants, lawyers and financial consultants mingled their licensed knowledge with experts in sports trivia, fortune telling and body piercing.
AskMe Corporation didn't think of it this way, but its public Web site suggested a number of questions. What is the wider society's instinctive attitude toward knowledge? Are we willing to look for it wherever it might be found or only from the people who are supposed to possess it? Does the world want to be a pyramid or a pancake?
In the summer of 2000, in a desert town called Perris, halfway between Los Angeles and Palm Springs, 15-year-old Marcus Arnold offered his reply to those questions, and a thousand or so more besides. Marcus's parents had immigrated to Perris from Belize by way of South Central Los Angeles. Why anyone would move to Perris from anywhere was not immediately clear. Perris was one of those nonplaces that America specializes in creating. One day, it was a flat, hazy stretch of sand and white rock beneath an endless blue sky into which recreational skydivers routinely plunged; the next, some developer had laid out a tract of 10,000 identical homes; and the day after that, it was teeming with people who were there mainly because it was not someplace else. The decision of human beings to make a home of it had little effect on the identity of Perris. Even after the tract houses had been deposited in the desert, Perris was known chiefly as a place to leap onto from an airplane.
Marcus lived with his parents and his twin brother in a small brick house a mile or so from the big drop zone. Over the family's two-car garage, from morning until night, people stepped out of planes and plummeted to earth, and the blue sky above Marcus was permanently scarred by parachutes. Marcus himself was firmly earthbound, a great big bear of a boy. He was six feet tall and weighed maybe 200 pounds. He did not walk but lumbered from the computer to the front door, then back again. The computer squatted on a faux-antique desk in the alcove between the dining room and the living room, which were as immaculately kept as showrooms in a model home. It was the only computer in the house. In theory, the family shared it; in practice, it belonged to him. He now needed as much time on it as he could get, as he was a leading expert on AskMe.com. His field was the law.
When I first visited Marcus, the blue screen displayed the beginning of an answer to a question on AskMe.com that he had bashed out before I arrived:
Your son should not be in jail or on trial. According to Miranda versus Arizona the person to be arrested must be read his rights before he was asked any questions. If your son was asked any questions before the reading of his rights he should not be in prison. If you want me to help you further write me back on this board privately.
The keyboard vanished beneath Marcus's jumbo hands, and another page on AskMe.com popped up on the screen. Marcus wanted to show me the appallingly weak answer to a question that had been offered by one of the real lawyers on the site. "I can always spot a crummy attorney," he said. "There are people on the Web site who have no clue what they're talking about -- they are just there to get rankings and to sell their services and to get paid." Down went his paws, out of sight went the keyboard and up popped one of Marcus's favorite Web sites. This one listed the menus on death row in Texas. Photographs of men put to death by the state appeared next to hideous lists of the junk food they had ordered for their last meals. Marcus browsed these for a minute or two, searching for news, then moved on, without comment.
One privilege of adolescence is that you can treat everything around you as normal, because you have nothing to compare it with, and Marcus appeared to be taking full advantage of it. To Marcus, it was normal that you could punch a few buttons into a machine and read what a man who was executed by the state this morning had eaten last night. It was normal that the only signs of life outside his house were the people floating down from the sky and into the field out back. It was normal that his parents had named his identical twin brother Marc. Marc and Marcus. And it was normal that he now spent most of the time he was not in school on the Internet, giving legal advice to grown-ups.
Marcus had stumbled upon AskMe.com late in the spring of 2000. He was studying for his biology exam and looking for an answer to a question. He noticed that someone had asked a question about the law to which he knew the answer. Then another. A thought occurred: why not answer them himself? To become an official expert, he only needed to fill in a form. He did this on June 5, 2000 -- a day already enshrined in Marcus's mind. "I always wanted to be an attorney since I was, like, 12," he said, "but I couldn't do it because everyone is going to be: 'Like, what? Some 12-year-old kid is going to give me legal advice?"'
"They'd feel happier with a 15-year-old?"
He drew a deep breath and made a face that indicated that he took this to be a complicated question. "So when I first went on AskMe," he said, "I told everybody I was 20, roughly about 20, and everyone believed me." Actually, he claimed to be 25, which to a boy of 15 is, I suppose, roughly 20. To further that impression, he adopted the handle LawGuy1975. People who clicked onto his page found him described as "LawGuy1975 aka Billy Sheridan." Billy Sheridan was Marcus's handle on America Online.
A few days after he appointed himself a legal expert, Marcus recounted, he was logging onto the Internet solely to go to AskMe.com and deal with grown-ups' legal problems.
What sort of legal problems? I asked him.
"Simple ones," he said. "Some of them are like, 'My husband is in jail for murder, and he didn't do it, and I need to file a motion for dismissal, how do I do it?' I have received questions from people who are just, like, you know, 'I am going to be put in jail all of a sudden, can somebody help me plead before they come cart me off?' And it's just, like, well, come on, that's a cry for help. You're not just going to sit there. But most of them are simple questions. 'What's a felony?' Or 'How many years will I get if I commit this crime?' Or 'What happens if I get sued?' Simple questions." He said all this in the self-conscious rapid-fire patter of a television lawyer.
Once he became an expert, Marcus's career took on a life of its own. The AskMe rankings were driven by the number of questions the expert answered, the speed of his replies and the quality of those replies, as judged by the recipients, who bestowed on them a rating of one to five stars. By July 1, Marcus was ranked No. 10 out of 150 or so experts in AskMe.com's criminal-law division, many of whom were actual lawyers. As he tells it, that's when he decided to go for the gold. "When I hit the Top 10, I got some people who were like, 'Congratulations, blah blah blah.' So my adrenaline was pumping to answer more questions. I was just, like: You know what? Let me show these people I know what I'm doing." He needed to inspire even more people to ask him questions, and to reply to them quickly, and in a way that prompted them to reward him with lots of stars. To that end, he updated the page that advertised his services. When he was done it said:
I am a law expert with two years of formal training in the law. I will help anyone I can! I have been involved in trials, legal studies and certain forms of jurisprudence. i am not accredited by the state bar association yet to practice law. . . . sincerely, Justin Anthony Wyrick Jr.
"Justin was the name I always wanted -- besides mine," Marcus said. Justin Anthony Wyrick Jr. -- a pseudonym on top of a pseudonym on top of a pseudonym. Justin Anthony Wyrick Jr. had a more authoritative ring to it, in Marcus's opinion, and in a lot of other people's too. On one day, Marcus received and answered 110 questions. Maybe a third of them came from the idly curious, a third from people who were already in some kind of legal trouble and the final third from people who appeared to be engaged in some sort of odd cost-benefit analysis.
q: What amount of money must a person steal or gain through fraud before it is considered a felony in Illinois?
a: In Illinois you must have gained $5,001+ in an illegal fashion in order to constitute fraud. If you need anything else please write back! Sincerely, Justin Anthony Wyrick Jr.
q: Can a parole officer prevent a parolee from marrying?
a: Hey! Unless the parolee has "no marriage" under the special conditions in which he is released, he can marry. If you have any questions, please write back. Sincerely, Justin Anthony Wyrick Jr.
The more questions Marcus answered, the more people who logged onto the boards looking for legal advice wanted to speak only to him. In one two-week stretch he received 943 legal questions and answered 939. When I asked him why he hadn't answered the other four, a look of profound exasperation crossed his broad face. "Traffic law," he said. "I'm sorry. I don't know traffic law." By mid-July, he was the No. 3 rated expert in criminal law on AskMe.com. Beneath him in the rankings were 125 licensed attorneys and a wild assortment of ex-cops and ex-cons. The next-youngest person on the board was 31.
In a few weeks, Marcus had created a new identity for himself: legal wizard. He now viewed school not so much as preparation for a future legal career as material for an active one. He investigated a boondoggle taken by the local school board and discovered that it had passed off on the taxpayer what to him appeared to be the expenses for a private party. He brought that, and a lot more, up at a public hearing. Why grown-up people with grown-up legal problems took him seriously was the great mystery Marcus didn't much dwell on -- except to admit that it had nothing to do with his legal training. He had had no legal training, formal or informal.
On the top of the Arnold family desk was a thin dictionary, plus stacks and stacks of court cases that people from AskMe who had come to rely on Marcus's advice had mimeographed and sent to him for his review. (The clients sent him the paperwork, and he wrote motions, which the clients then passed on to licensed attorneys for submission to a court.) But there was nothing on the desk or in the house even faintly resembling a book about the law. The only potential sources of legal information were the family computer and the big-screen TV.
(continued...) |
