Ecce Bandwidth
And now, for something completely different.......
The Grey Lady weights in on "the book"
nytimes.com
Reviewed by ANDREW LEONARD
A money manager once explained to me the attraction of the Gilder Technology Report newsletter. He didn't subscribe for the stock tips: George Gilder is wrong as often as he is right about individual companies. But Gilder tends to be on the money about trends or entire technological sectors. Such acumen, it appears, is in short supply. Thus his popularity with the plutocratic set.
That, and his politics. Gilder is the original supply-side evangelist -- his book ''Wealth and Poverty'' (1981) influenced Reagan administration economic policy. And as he writes in ''Telecosm,'' his new book, ''The rich provide the investment and the rest reap the rewards.'' Gilder has married his technological perceptiveness with a libertarian brand of anti-government antagonism so right-wing as to make William Buckley blush. From the robber barons to Michael Milken to Bill Gates, Gilder never met a megacapitalist he didn't like. One can practically hear the Croesus class wishfully thinking: if he's correct about high-tech, then he's probably got the goods on politics, too!
Not to mention the proper relationship between men and women. Gilder also happens to be the author of ''Men and Marriage'' (1972), an antifeminist polemic that got him named ''male chauvinist pig of the year'' by Time magazine. Gilder's tune seems not to have changed all that much. He writes in ''Telecosm'' that in the utopian future, while the husband gets stock news as he shaves, his wife will be grocery shopping online.
Gilder should stick to technology. He's cute when he throws around words like ''petahertz'' and ''petabit'' and ''add/drop multiplexers'' and ''dispersion compensation modules.'' His enthusiasm is like that of a 2-year-old staring at zoo animals for the first time -- easy to share, hard to disagree with.
But when he scorns big government he's not just boring and predictable -- he's whiny, and surprisingly halfhearted. In a chapter on Netscape and the birth of the Web that wearily covers old ground, his critical treatment of Microsoft's ultimate Web browser triumph is limited to putting the word ''monopolistic'' in quotation marks, as if the punctuation alone were enough to undermine any hint that Microsoft didn't play fair.
Such rhetorical flourishes work only when you are preaching to the converted. And Gilder does deliver a good sermon. Miracles and transcendence abound in Gilder's telecosm -- his universe of fiber optic light, all glimmery with ''cornucopian radiance.'' God, angels, the Bible -- they all make appearances. It's no accident that the book's last word is ''divine.''
Gilder's got a gospel to spread -- the gospel of unlimited bandwidth. His book's unifying principle is that we are all destined to be brought together into ''networks of light linking cathedrals of mind.'' When Gilder focuses on the engineers who have delivered this ''promethean light'' he is engaging. When he zeroes in on individual companies, however, as he does in this book's latter half, he tends to sound like an annual report.
But the book's main weakness is neither Gilder's exuberance nor his distaste for government meddling. The real problem is that his gospel has already been spread, most notably by himself. If the name Gilder and the word ''telecosm'' sound vaguely familiar, that's not surprising. ''Telecosm,'' the book, was first promised to readers as far back as 1993. Meanwhile, Gilder has been pounding out his passions in magazine articles, columns and endless lectures. He's impossible to avoid.
It would be petty to blame Gilder for the delays. It's hard to keep up in the 21st century, as Gilder would be the first to acknowledge. No sooner have you hailed the ascendancy of a new paradigm than you're scrambling for cover as your latest metastructure crumbles in the face of yet another. Maybe Gilder is right. Maybe unlimited bandwidth will usher in an era of unlimited prosperity. But reading ''Telecosm'' you may find yourself asking, ''Yeah, and so what else is new?''
Andrew Leonard edits the technology and business sections of Salon.com.
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Leonard obviously isn't a street person. Else the line would have been, "what have you done for me lately?"
Salute, nonmulto.it |
