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'Next: The Future Just Happened' by Michael Lewis

Technoboom nurturing new generation of fast-money entrepreneurs

Monday, August 20, 2001

By David Guo, Post-Gazette Staff Writer

	Next: The Future Just Happened By Michael Lewis Norton $23.95

Americans often return from vacation with the kind of memories that keep on ticking no matter how many time zones have been crossed.

There are so many colorful piazzas, sidewalk cafes and flower stands to catalog, and so few black-and-white office towers, park-n-rides and Kinkos.

Eventually, all these impressions can be hard to unravel. One minute they’re as treasured as an heirloom timepiece but the next, maybe after a bad year at work, they’re as welcome as a smoke bomb.

Pffft. There goes one’s commitment to the all-American work ethic, or at least the belief that racking up 50-plus years at 50-plus hours a week are goals to which everyone in the world aspires.

Not everybody is a cradle-to-grave workaholic, of course. In his latest book, Michael Lewis tours the galaxy of The Next Generation, a mostly whimsical but occasionally ponderous journey where he engages all sorts of places and people:

Cedar Grove, a commuter suburb in New Jersey where Jonathan Lebed, 14, made his first million trading stock using e-mail aliases on Yahoo and PCs in his living room and high school library. He also has a $41,000 Mercedes, which he hopes to be able to drive when he’s old enough.

Perris, a desert town in California where Marcus Arnold, a k a Benedict Arnold to the American Bar Association, used AskMe.com to become the top-rated online legal expert at age 15. He beat out 125 licensed attorneys in the process.

And then there’s the sheep meadow barn two hours south of Oldham, England. There, the one-hit band Marillion regained stardom when it went Web-side to announce that it couldn’t visit the U.S. anymore. EMI had terminated its record contract and more to the point, the group didn’t have enough travel money.

A few months and a thousand mouse clicks later, the head of a 2,000-member fan club e-mailed Marillion leader Steve Hogarth to say the cyberfans had raised $60,000, to which the group responded in early 2000 with a 20-city American tour.

The significance of a band doing this without a record promoter or even a record was not lost on Hogarth:

“The record company is a bit like someone who bets 10 pounds on a horse because they think it might just win and if it does they’ll get loads of money back . . .

“The relationship the fans have with the artists, they’re a bit like that guy who looks after the horse and feeds it and trains it and gets it ready for the race. It’s a different level of faith. It’s about caring rather than just having a bet.”

The Next Generation are the thoroughbred outsiders who have no faith in corporate culture or its wasteland of middlemen, otherwise called lawyers, stockbrokers, record company vice presidents and concert promoters.

Lewis ought to know. His best-selling “Liar’s Poker” chronicled his “thank-God-it’s-over” life at Salomon Brothers as an investment banker. Lewis also wrote “The New New Thing,” a wry view of the world of Silicon Valley venture capitalists.

Those of The Next Generation exhibit an impatience that would be fatal in navigating most corporate hierarchies. Theirs is a culture not of pyramids but what Lewis calls pancakes; a model of workplace egalitarianism typified by bosses like eBay’s Meg Whitman, who has a no-window cubicle no bigger than the next guy.

No one ever said that Next Generation’ers don’t put in long hours just like Mom and Dad did, but what they don’t intend on doing is keeping up their mad dog pace one nanosecond beyond the foreseeable future, which might end the day after yesterday.

Therein lies the dilemma, Lewis proselytizes.

The subtitle of “Next” is “The Future Just Happened,” which is Lewis’ way of proffering whether this faster-is-always-better engine is being driven to a fatally logical conclusion.

At least some experts worry that progress without planning -- the original sin of the technoboom -- is more than just hazardous. Let man become too dependent on Rosie the Robot, and some day Rosie XXX, her cloned android of a son, could enslave the world.

Lewis the futurist philosopher doesn’t share this bleak view, but that’s not to say his wit is always spent espousing the virtues of Tomorrowland. (Sneak a peek at the name of the final chapter if you don’t believe me: “The Unabomber Had A Point.”)

Maybe, just maybe, kids like Lebed and Arnold will miss not having devoted more time to whacking curve balls, eating cheeseburgers and chasing girls.

No, the warp-speed drive to Pentium V won’t mean the end of mankind. But it may mean the loss of childhood, Lewis says -- and that, to be sure, would be the next bad thing.