The road behind

ArtForum, April, 1996 by R.U. Sirius

In actuality, of course, the road ahead looks more like a general disaster area. Neotribal warfare is replacing the industrial state. Various flavors of fundamentalism are pitching wildly toward millennial hysteria. We've got a handful of incipient plagues and a badly damaged eco-sphere making for some strange weather. But Chairman Gates has the software that can turn your personal future into a smooth ride, where "customized information is a natural extension of the tailored consultation capabilities of the highway." This is a one-inch-thick designer future written for pinheads. It is both our fortune and our misfortune that the future, like the present, is far more novel, disordered, and horrible than this massively overpaid, prosaic engineer can even begin to comprehend.

While we have no more right to expect Gates to make a major contribution to speculative thought in the 20th century than we would have from Henry Ford before him, in The Road Ahead Gates falters even within his own sphere - communications technology. His road ahead is largely the road behind.

Given his pragmatic position as a businessman/engineer, it's difficult to fault Gates for putting the same focus on the PC as a day-to-day business tool, an engine for multimedia production and a word processor, as he does on the Internet. But it is exactly this sort of hardheaded engineer's gaze that causes him to get the Net all wrong. He wants us to view the Internet as something containable, something that exists within a discrete space provided by the PC. In fact, it is common knowledge that technological analysts have long been looking to the Net to replace the PC as the defining medium of the age. This process should begin next year with the release of terminals used only for the Internet. As the Net and the PC diverge, so will the social metaphors that have attached themselves. The PC will lose all claims of being a connecting device and will be stripped of all glamour, which dissipates anyway as any new technology becomes ubiquitous. The PC, sans Net, is a lonely, asocial convenience box, nothing but a complex calculator.

Bill Gates is a creature of the "PC Revolution" all the way. In fact, if you look closely, you can find a surprising degree of hostility toward the "information highway" that the book titles itself after. Using archetypally megacorporate-scale demographics, Gates invokes the Internet's current, relatively small numbers (compared to Windows 95 buyers, for instance?) to call into question its potential commercial viability. When he discusses the complexities of bringing Net service to the level where it's convenient (that word!) and affordable to the average consumer, this ultimate techno-optimist suddenly becomes pessimistic, predicting a decade of laborious progress. And finally, raising the specter of Robert Tappan Morris' infamous Internet worm that shut down most of the Net in 1988, Gates invokes the psychology of fear to separate PC isolates from Net connectives. The message is that social intercourse isn't safe. You might get infected.

I don't believe that Gates' fear of the Net is part of a conscious attempt by a businessman to slow a trend that could take his Microsoft out of the loop. He has, after all, shown incredible entrepreneurial flexibility and will probably find some way to keep his fingers in the Internet pie. No, I think Gates just hates chaos. And the Internet, bless its utterly dissipated soul, is chaos. Millions of people are chattering, uploading, downloading, linking, flirting, and - worst of all - making copies of whatever they want for free.

Among early hackers, Gates was famous for his militant stance against free software. His opponents in the hacker community pointed out the difficulty in charging money for something that was trivial to copy. Gates, of course, has become one of the richest men in the world doing just that. But his gorge rises every month as millions more log on. With everybody and their dog providing so much content and software for free, why pay for anything? Far from friction-free capitalism, the Net is friction-free anarchy. It's utterly amorphous. The mind of a prosaic software engineer would dissolve trying to wrap itself around it.

Gates doesn't even try. He evinces much more pleasure writing about his personal "home of the future," which he does at great length. Convenience is the mother of surveillance, and so we enter the home that Chairman Bill is currently building for himself on Mercer Island, Washington, where visitors will have a small electronic monitor pinned to their clothes. This will be connected to the smart home's CPU: "When it's dark outside, the pin will cause a moving zone of light to accompany you through the house. Unoccupied rooms will be unlit. As you walk down a hallway, you might not notice the lights ahead of you gradually coming up to full brightness and the lights behind you fading. Music will move with you, too. It will seem to be everywhere, although, in fact, other people in the house will be hearing entirely different music or nothing at all. A movie or the news will be able to follow you around, too. If you get a phone call, only the handset nearest you will ring." Gates tactfully doesn't gloat over the implications here, but the message of control is clear.