BOOKS
Michael Lewis is the business-book author for people who'd rather read novels. His latest work, Next: The Future Just Happened (W.W. Norton & Co.), profiles several mavericks who are emblematic of the Internet age's power shift - people like 15-year-old Jonathan Lebed, the first minor charged with stock fraud by the Securities and Exchange Commission for hyping stocks online; Marcus Arnold, a 15-year-old who developed a huge following by giving out legal advice on AskMe.com; and Daniel Sheldon, a 14-year-old geek who became a leader in the Gnutella movement. Here, Lewis tells us more about the changing of the guard.
Wired: Many of your plots involve revolutionaries out to topple an ancient regime, whether it's Wall Street in the 1980s, Microsoft in the 1990s, or a new elite. Which groups are being knocked down now?
Lewis: The elites most challenged are those whose status depends on having information that others don't. Huge tracts of the economy - the professions are a good example, finance is another - depend on informational asymmetries. And lots of people think that they are selling wisdom and judgment when all they really have is a privileged seat in some technical library.
You say in Next that technology is creating "families of immigrants" in which teenagers inhabit a new world that their parents scarcely understand. Do you think that will happen with you and your daughter?
I do. I think that the same leveling forces you see at work inside the corporation - is anyone allowed to be "the boss" anymore? - are also at work inside the family, and for the same reasons. Underlings and children know things that bosses and parents do not, and they know that they know them and that the bosses and parents do not. I assume I will have to be more nimble than my father was in his day if I want to retain any parental authority. I also think that parental authority will never be what it was before the Internet.
What was the obvious story about the Internet that you avoided telling in this book?
The dotcom crash.
But the dotcoms probably crashed as you were writing about them. How did that affect what you did and didn't say?
The main effect of the downturn is to slow down technical progress a bit, and thus the changes that occur as a result of technical change that's more rapid than ever. But the process itself doesn't change. And the belief that wealth is more or less a synonym for change holds firm.
So, what is next for technology?
I have no idea.
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