Re: 7/15/01 - NY Times: Faking It: The Internet Revolution Has Nothing to Do With the Nasdaq (Part 2 of 2)
"Where do you find books about the law?" I asked.
"I don't," he said, tap-tap-tapping away on his keyboard. "Books are boring. I don't like reading."
So you go on legal Web sites?"
"No."
"Well, when you got one of these questions did you research your answer?"
"No, never. I just know it."
"You just know it."
"Exactly."
The distinct whiff of an alternate reality lingered in the air. It was just then that Marcus's mother, Priscilla, came through the front door. She was a big lady, teetering and grunting beneath jumbo-size sacks of groceries. A long box of doughnuts jutted out of the top of one.
"Hi, Marcus, what you doing?" she said, gasping for breath.
"Just answering some questions," he said.
"What were you answering?" she asked with pleasure. She radiated pride.
"I got one about an appellate bond -- how to get one," he said. "Another one about the Supreme Court. A petition to dismiss something."
"We got some chili-cheese dogs here."
"That's cool."
Priscilla nipped into the kitchen, where she heaped the doughnuts onto a plate and tossed the dogs into boiling water. Strange new smells wafted out over the computer.
"Where did you acquire your expertise?" I asked.
"Marcus was born with it!" Priscilla shouted. Having no idea how to respond, I ignored her.
"What do you mean?" Marcus asked me. He was genuinely puzzled by my question.
"Where does your information come from?"
"I don't know," he said. "Like, I really just don't know."
"How can you not know where knowledge comes from?" I asked.
"After, like, watching so many TV shows about the law," he said, "it's just like you know everything you need to know." He gave a little mock shiver. "It's scary. I just know these things."
Again Priscilla shouted from the kitchen, "Marcus has got a gift!"
Marcus leaned back in his chair -- every inch the young prodigy -- pleased that his mother was saving him the trouble of explaining the obvious to a fool. It was possible to discern certain lines in Marcus's character, but the general picture was still out of focus. He had various personas: legal genius, humble Internet helpmate, honest broker, ordinary kid who liked the Web. Now he cut a figure familiar to anyone who has sat near a front row in school -- the fidgety, sweet-natured know-it-all.
What he knew, exactly, was unclear. On the Web, he had come across to many as a font of legal expertise. In the flesh, he gave a more eclectic performance -- which was no doubt one reason he found the Internet as appealing as he did. Like Jonathan Lebed, he was the kind of person high school is designed to suppress, and like Jonathan Lebed, he had refused to accept his assigned status. When the real world failed to diagnose his talents, he went looking for a second opinion. The Internet offered him as many opinions as he needed to find one he liked. It created the opportunity for new sorts of self-perceptions, which then took on a reality all their own.
There was something else familiar about the game Marcus was playing, but it took me a while to put my finger on it. He was using the Internet the way adults often use their pasts. The passage of time allows older people to remember who they were as they would like to have been. Young people do not enjoy access to that particular escape route from their selves -- their pasts are still unpleasantly present -- and so they tend to turn the other way and imagine themselves into some future adult world. The sentiment that powers their fantasies goes by different names -- hope, ambition, idealism -- but at bottom it is nostalgia. Nostalgia for the future. These days nostalgia for the future is a lot more fashionable than the traditional kind. And the Internet has made it possible to act on the fantasy in whole new ways.
Priscilla shouted from the kitchen: "Marcus had his gift in the womb. I could feel it."
Now Marcus had his big grin on. "Welcome to my brain," he said.
"What?"
"Welcome to my brain."
He had said it so much like a genial host offering his guest the comfortable chair that I had to stop myself from saying "Thanks." Behind him was a long picture window overlooking the California desert -- the view was the reason Priscilla loved her house. Beyond that, brown mountains. In the middle distance between white desert and brown mountain, a parachute ripped open and a body jerked skyward.
"Let's try this again," I said.
"O.K.," he said, cheerfully.
"Basically, you picked up what you know from watching 'Court TV' shows," I said.
"Basically," he said.
"And from these Web sites that you browse."
"Basically."
Priscilla shouted out from the kitchen, "How many dogs you want, Marcus?"
"Two, and some doughnuts," Marcus hollered.
"What do you think these people would have done if you weren't there to answer their questions?" I asked.
"They would have paid an attorney," he said. But as he said it, his big grin vanished and a cloud shadowed his broad, open face. All of a sudden he was the soul of prudence.
He may well have been recalling the P.R. fiasco that followed the discovery by a hundred or so licensed attorneys on AskMe.com of the true identity of the new expert moving up their ranks. In any case, he lifted his giant palms toward me in the manner of the Virgin Mary resisting the entreaties of the Holy Spirit and said: "Look, I'm not out there to take business away from other people. That's not my job."
"But you think that legal expertise is overrated?"
"Completely."
Once Marcus attained his high AskMe.com rankings, a lot of people he didn't really know began to ask for his phone number and his fee structure. For the first time, for some reason he was unable to explain fully, his conscience began to trouble him. He decided it was time to come clean with his age. To do this, he changed his expert profile. Where it had read "legal expert," it now read "15-year-old intern attorney expert."
A few hours after he posted his confession, hostile messages came hurtling toward him. A few of them came from his "clients," but most came from the lawyers and others who competed with him for rankings and publicity. A small war broke out on the message boards, with Marcus accusing the lawyers of ganging up on him to undermine his No. 3 ranking and the lawyers accusing Marcus of not knowing what he was talking about. The lawyers began to pull up Marcus's old answers and bestow on them lowly one-star ratings -- thus dragging down his average. Then they did something even worse: they asked him detailed questions about the finer points of the law. When he couldn't supply similarly detailed answers, they laid into him.
Marcus's replies to the e-mail lashings read less like the work of a defense lawyer than like those of a man trying to talk his torturers into untying him:
"I am reporting your abusive response, for it hurts my reputation, and my dignity as an expert on this board."
"Please don't e-mail me threats."
"Leave me alone! I am not even practicing law!"
"Please, I beg of you, stop sending me letters saying that you'll be watching me, because you are scaring my parents."
"I really just want to be friends."
"Let's try to be friends, or something?"
To which Marcus's wittiest assailant replied: "In your last two posts you've ended by asking that I be your friend. That's like the mortally wounded gladiator wanting to be friends with the lion."
On the one hand, the whole episode was absurd -- Marcus Arnold was a threat to no one but himself and, perhaps, the people who sought his advice. To practice law, you still needed a license, and no 15-year-old boy was going to be granted one. At the same time, Marcus had wandered into an arena alive with combustible particles. The Internet had arrived at an embarrassing moment for the law.
The knowledge gap between lawyers and nonlawyers had been shrinking for some time, and the Internet was closing it further. Legal advice was being supplied over the Internet, often free -- and it wasn't just lawyers doing the supplying. Students, cops, dicks, even ex-cons went onto message boards to help people with their questions and cases. At the bottom of this phenomenon was a corrosively democratic attitude toward legal knowledge, which the legal profession now simply took for granted. "If you think about the law," the co-chairman of the American Bar Association task force on "e-lawyering," Richard S. Granat, said in an interview in The New York Times, in an attempt to explain the boom in do-it-yourself Internet legal services, "a large component is just information. Information by itself can go a long way to help solve legal problems."
In that simple sentence you could hear whatever was left of the old professional mystique evaporating. The status of lawyering was in flux, had been for some time. An anthology that will cause elitists to weep will one day be culled from the long shelf of diatribes about the descent into mass culture of the American lawyer at the end of the 20th century. Separate chapters will detail the advent of the billable hour, the 1977 Supreme Court decision permitting lawyers to advertise their services and a magazine called The American Lawyer, which in 1985 began to publish estimates of lawyers' incomes. Once the law became a business, it was on its way to becoming a commodity. Reduce the law to the sum of its information, and, by implication, anyone can supply it.
That idea had already traveled a long way, and the Internet was helping it to travel faster. After all, what did it say about the law that even a 15-year-old boy who had never read a law book could pass as an expert in it to a huge audience? It said that a lot of people felt that legal knowledge was accessible to the amateur. Who knows? Maybe they were right. Perhaps legal expertise was overrated. Completely.
By its nature, the Internet undermined anyone whose status depended on a privileged access to information. But you couldn't fairly blame the Internet for Marcus Arnold, any more than you could blame the Internet for Jonathan Lebed. The Internet was merely using Marcus to tell us something about ourselves: we doubted the value of formal training. A little knowledge had always been a dangerous thing. Now it was becoming a respectable thing. 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.
And so the situation in which Marcus Arnold found himself in the late summer of 2000, while bizarre, was revealing. Marcus had been publicly humiliated by the real lawyers, but it didn't stop him from offering more advice. He clung by his big mitts to a lower ranking. Then the clients began to speak. With pretty much one voice they said, "Leave the kid alone!" A lot of people seemed to believe that any 15-year-old who had risen so high in the ranks of AskMe.com legal experts must be some kind of wizard. They began to seek him out more than ever before; they wanted his, and only his, advice.
Marcus wiped himself off and gave it to them. In days his confidence was fully restored. "You always have your critics," he said. "I mean, with the real lawyers, it's a pride issue. They can't let someone who could be their son beat them. Plus they have a lot more time than I do. I'm always stretched for time. Six hours a day of school, four hours of homework, sometimes I can't get online to answer the questions until after dinner."
Despite this and other handicaps, Marcus's ranking rebounded. Two weeks after he disclosed his age, he was on the rise; two weeks later he hit No. 1. The legal advice he gave to a thousand or so people along the way might not have withstood the scrutiny of the finest legal minds. Some of it was the sort of stuff you could glean directly from Judge Judy; more of it was a simple restating of the obvious in a friendly tone. Marcus didn't have much truck with the details; he didn't handle complexity terribly well. But that was the whole point of him -- he didn't need to. A lot of what a real lawyer did was hand out simple information in a way that made the client feel served, and this Marcus did well. He may have had only the vaguest idea of what he was talking about and a bizarre way of putting what he did know. But out there in the void, they loved him.
Marcus's father, Melvin, worked at a furniture retail outlet two hours' drive from home and so wasn't usually around when his son was handing out advice on the Internet. Not that it mattered; he wouldn't have known what Marcus was up to in any case. "I'm not the sort of person who gets on the computer," Melvin said when he arrived home and saw Marcus bashing away for my benefit. "I never get on the computer, as a matter of fact." And he said this matter-of-factly, in a spirit in no way defiant or angry, just gently resigned to the Way Things Are. "When I need something from the computer," he also said, "I ask Marcus."
"It just gives me more computer time," Marcus said and resumed his furious typing.
What with the computer smack in the center of the place, the Arnolds' house didn't allow me to talk to Melvin without disrupting Marcus. When Marcus realized that he was about to be forced to listen to whatever his father might have to say about his Internet self, he lost interest. He called for Marc, and the twin bear-boys lumbered out the front door. On the way out, he turned and asked me if I knew anyone in Hollywood he might talk to. "I think what I really want to do," he said, "is be an actor." With that final non sequitur, he left me to cross-examine his parents.
The first thing that was instantly clear was that, unlike their son, they were aware that their lives were no longer what anyone would call normal. The Lebeds had proved that if your adolescent child was online, you didn't need to leave your house to feel uprooted. The Arnolds were already uprooted, so they didn't prove anything. They had moved from Belize to South Central Los Angeles. They had moved from there to Perris for a reason, which Melvin now calmly explained to me. At the family's Los Angeles home, Marcus's older brother had been murdered. He had been shot dead in cold blood by an acquaintance in the middle of a family barbecue. The man who shot him was up for parole in 2013. "Marcus didn't tell you about that, did he?" Melvin asked rhetorically. "In my opinion, that's how Marcus got interested in the law. He saw that it wasn't fair."
The Arnolds moved to Perris shortly after their son's murder. Not long after they arrived, Marcus asked for a computer. He had waited until he crashed the Top 10 on AskMe.com before he let his parents know why, suddenly, he was up at all hours bashing away on the family keyboard. His parents had had radically different reactions to the news. His mother nearly burst with pride -- she always knew that Marcus was special, and the Internet was giving him a chance to prove it. His father was mildly skeptical. He couldn't understand how a 15-year-old boy could be functioning as a lawyer. The truth is, Melvin hadn't taken Marcus all that seriously, at least not at first. He assumed that he was reacting to the grief of his older brother's murder. Then the phone started to ring . . . and ring. "These were grown-up people," Melvin said, still incredulous at the events taking place under his roof. "They call this house and ask for Marcus. These people are like 40, 45 years old, and they're talking to Marcus about their legal problems, but they're not including the parents. That's where I get scared, because it's not supposed to work like that."
"Well . . . ," Priscilla said. She scrunched up her big friendly face in what was clearly intended to be disapproval. "They're not acknowledging the fact that he's 15. They're acknowledging the fact that he can give them some legal advice."
"But the phone," Melvin said. "It is always ringing. These people want Marcus to give them legal advice. I mean, really, it's like what he does people do as a job. And he's doing it right here. I get so frustrated. I always say, 'Marcus, you're talking too much, you're talking too much."'
"But that's what attorneys do," Priscilla said. "They talk a lot."
Melvin gave up on his wife and turned to me. "I tell him to stay off the phone, stay off the computer. This is the thing I keep on saying to him. Nobody else in this house can ever use the phone. There's no way I can stop him, but still--."
"But attorneys talk -- that's what they do," Priscilla said.
"I don't use the phone anyway, really," Melvin said. "The calls come, they're never mine, you know. It's always Marcus, Marcus, Marcus -- people calling him from everywhere."
They were off and running on what was clearly a familiar conversational steeplechase. "I don't understand," I said. "How do all these people have your phone number?" But neither of them was listening. Priscilla, having seized on her main point, was now intent on spearing Melvin on the end of it. "But that's what he's got to do," she said. "That's what attorneys do! Talk!"
"Yeah, but he's not an attorney," Melvin said. He turned to me again in a bid for arbitration. "He drives you nuts with his talk. Nuts!"
"How do they get your phone number?" I asked again.
"But he will be one day," Priscilla said. "He has that gift."
"He's a kid," Melvin said.
"How did they get your phone number?" I asked for the third time.
Priscilla looked up. "Marcus puts it on the Internet," she said. To her, it was the most normal of things.
Melvin took a different view. Maybe it was the distinct feeling he had that a lot of Marcus's "clients" had had to stand in line at a pay phone to make their calls. Or that they always seemed to prefer to wait on hold rather than call back later. Or their frantic tones of voice. Whatever the reason, he didn't like it. "I told Marcus," he said wearily, "that we don't even know who these people are -- they might be criminals out there -- that you're not supposed to give them our phone number, our address."
Priscilla furrowed her brow and tried to conjure concern. "What really scared me one time," she said, less with fear than in the spirit of cooperation, "was this lady that he was assisting with her criminal case. The lady sent him the whole book of her court case. I said: 'Marcus, why would you want to take this upon yourself? You've got to tell this lady you're just 15 years old.' But he didn't listen to me. The point came that the lady actually wanted him to go to court with her, and I said, 'No, we've got to stop it here, because you don't have a license for that, you don't study law.' He said: 'Mom, you've got to drive me to the court. I know what I'm doing.' I said: 'No way. You don't have a license to dictate the law."'
I could see that her heart wasn't in this soliloquy. She stopped and brightened, as if to say she had done her best to meet her husband halfway, then said, "But I think all of this Internet is good for Marcus."
"Do you think Marcus knows what he's doing?" I asked.
"Oh, yes, very much," she said. "Because there's a lot of times that we would watch these court shows, and he would come up with the same suggestions and the same answers like the attorneys would do."
That appeared to settle the matter; even Melvin could not disagree. Marcus knew his "Court TV."
"Can you see him charging for this advice?" I asked.
"At what age?" Melvin said. A new alarm entered his voice.
"Thirty."
"I hope," Melvin said with extreme caution, "I hope he will do well."
"He's supposed to have his own law firm by then," Priscilla said.
Michael Lewis is a contributing writer for the magazine. This article is adapted from his new book, "Next," which will be published later this month by W.W. Norton.
Copyright 2001 The New York Times Company
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