Say Hello To Tomorrow Essay, Research Paper
Say hello to tomorrowReading Michael Lewis it’s hard to decide who he most wants to be: Tom Wolfe or P.J. O’Rourke. In person, however, there are no such doubts – it has to be O’Rourke. There’s the same preppy casual wear – pink button-down shirt and roomy chinos – the same schoolboy fringe haircut, the same mixture of professional gravitas and dissenting irreverence, the same bright sheen of someone who can’t quite believe his luck. If you had to date the sartorial image, you’d place it circa 1986, when new conservatism was the height of fashion. What it resolutely does not speak of is the future. But Lewis himself does, and with an urgency that is dizzying. His new book, and four-part television series, is called The Future Just Happened. As the title suggests, the future is no longer at a safe distance some years hence. Instead it’s here and you’d better get used to it. The rate of technological change, argues Lewis, is accelerating so rapidly that the choice is either to adapt or become a relic. As perspectives go, it’s not exactly fresh. For the better part of the past decade, futurology has been feeding off the hype surrounding advances in computer technology. We’ve heard all about the promise of virtual worlds, the information superhighways, the fourth dimension of cyberspace. The future has been so eagerly anticipated and aggressively promoted that often it can seem like it really has already happened. Then you remember that virtual reality hasn’t got much further than the amusement arcade, we’re still travelling (more than ever) in cars and cyberspace remains a meeting place for those with limited social skills. On top of that, with email use reportedly dipping, silicon chip companies announcing big falls in profits, and the dotcom market showing no sign of recovery, this particular moment in history does not seem the most propitious to be exploring the profound impact of the internet. But Lewis says he is not bothered. ‘I’m interested in what the longer-term consequences are because the short-term consequences are obscuring them. I think people right now think the internet is the Nasdaq.’ Lewis is well placed to know the difference between the web and Wall Street. He launched his hugely successful writing career with Liar’s Poker, a scabrous exposé of bond-dealing which focused on his experiences working for Salomon Brothers in New York and London in the 1980s. The book was a bestseller in the States and made Lewis a millionaire in his twenties, and a kind of journalist celebrity, as well as the object of no little envy among colleagues. Four years ago, when Lewis was still only 36, Vanity Fair ran a catty profile as he was about to marry his third wife, the MTV journalist Tabitha Soren. He was referred to as ‘the Elizabeth Taylor of journalism’ and compared to a character out of Scott Fitzgerald. From Princeton to publishing sensation, Lewis’s life was portrayed as an unbroken series of gilded moments. The son of a prominent Wasp family in New Orleans, he liked to wear a white suit (very Tom Wolfe) and seemed to treat his success with an indecent lack of neurosis. The whole effect was sullied only by an apparent inability to maintain a relationship for longer than it took the initial romance to fade.What was rather overlooked was Lewis’s appetite for hard work. This is his sixth book. His fifth, and second bestselling, was The New New Thing, in which he hung out with the billionaire brains of Silicon Valley. The combined result of his experience is a full awareness that the movement of stock prices does not determine the direction of the world. ‘The profit-making potential of the internet had been overrated,’ he writes in The Future Just Happened , ‘and the social effects of the internet were presumed to be overrated. But they weren’t.’ What Lewis sets out to prove is that the speeding-up of information is radically transforming social relations and undermining, or even destroying, many forms of traditional authority. To make his point he finds a number of teenagers who have used the net to thwart the adult professions. Actually, he only really finds one telling teenager, 14-year-old Jonathan Lebed from New Jersey who became briefly famous when he made $800,000 by promoting stocks he traded on the internet. The story is a good one – although not new to American audiences – and Lewis tells it well, but in spite of his best efforts he cannot shape it into the footprint of the future he clearly wants it to be. Part of the problem is that the picture he draws of a youthful vanguard reinventing the world is blurred by less credible examples of subversive teenagers. It’s as if Lewis wasn’t quite sure what to do with all the research resources that the BBC placed at his disposal and ended up including material that did little to support his central thesis, just because it was there. The strength and charm of his narratives have in the past relied to a considerable extent on the first-person presence of Lewis himself. But with all the ideas and characters and locations attempting to make themselves known, both in the book and TV series, Lewis’s standard persona – the down-to-earth outsider who cuts through the jargon – becomes increasingly irritating. ‘I’m not very good at systemising thought,’ he concedes. ‘I had a taste for certain kinds of material. The book has certain things that run through it, as choppy as it is. One of them is this obsession I’ve developed with this whole question of experience, how a world that is so future-oriented is different from a world that had more interest in the past. How a world economy that is premised on really rapid change requires
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