‘Next’ Takes a Snapshot of Shifting Computer Age

Writing about the Internet is the literary equivalent of catching a shooting star in a split-second freeze frame. Understanding the Internet can only be as inconclusive.

The Internet, that giant network of networks, is an instrument of our connectivity and our isolation, according to Michael Lewis in “Next: The Future Just Happened.” It enables a teenager to take a small savings bond and turn it, with a little day trading here and a bit of stock speculation there, into a half million dollars in less than two years. It permits a 15-year-old child to masquerade as a legal expert, helping people chart their life choices without so much as cracking open a book on trusts, wills or criminal procedure. And it enables an 80-something woman in Silicon Valley to tell pollsters, via her television, what she likes and dislikes about everything from cranberry juice to the American political system.

In making its way into the mainstream, writes Lewis, the Net has made paupers into princes, amateurs into experts and misfits into kings--and, more important, shifted the balance of power as we know it. As more and more of us sign on to the Web and the local mom-and-pop store finds it necessary to register its URL, we have managed, Lewis writes, to push and prod that “hazy line between perception and reality.” The Internet provides the opportunity for anonymity, reinvention and even criminality--allowing us to hide behind aliases and user names. It has, writes Lewis, “offered up a new set of social situations, to which people had responded by grabbing for a new set of masks.” And as a result, “[p]ower and prestige and profit [are] up for grabs.”

To illustrate this thesis, Lewis spent a significant amount of time on the Web, trolling, with funding from the BBC, for examples of the social consequences of the Internet. (Many of the pieces of “Next” have appeared, in slightly different form, in the New York Times Magazine, to which Lewis is a contributor.) What he found was that the Internet was “telling us what we wanted to become.”

It’s not a new concept--or even a revolutionary one. Just as the mechanization of the spinning wheel heralded the coming of the Industrial Age, or the advent of commercial air travel shifted the way we think about distance and the nature of travel, the Internet has transformed our lives--that is, the lives of North Americans and Europeans--with the ability and wherewithal to get hard-wired.

But what is different about this movement, suggests Lewis, is that it is largely child-driven: “The middle-aged technologist knows that somewhere out there some kid in his bedroom is dreaming up something that will make him obsolete.” Lewis encounters scores of these kids, including Daniel Sheldon, a 14-year-old from Oldham, England, who used the computer his mother bought him to create a Harry Potter Web site (until Warner Bros. threatened to sue him) and a paean site devoted to the online music service Gnutella. “Life hasn’t happened to him yet,” his mother, who is unaware of the full extent of her son’s skill or experience, tells Lewis. She is one of the many parents in this book who seems to be rendered helpless, untutored in the new technology and unable to control either her son or his computer usage.

But Daniel is far wiser than she suspects. “I couldn’t walk into a traditional job and start ordering people about,” he tells Lewis. “But in the digital world, I can do that. Have done it.” Of his mother, he says: “I don’t think she wants to know what I’m doing in case it’s anything too bad.”

There’s something about the apprehension, even ignorance, of the parents Lewis encounters that sounds eerily familiar. When Greg Lebed, father of Jonathan Lebed, the first minor ever charged with stock market fraud, tells Lewis that “[e]ver since that computer came into the house the family was ruined,” it feels as if you could substitute “rock ‘n’ roll” for “computer” and be taken back to a similar parental outrage in a different era. But in this information age, the stakes and consequences of the classic child-parent, old-young tension are exaggerated. More money, more life-and-death decisions and other big picture items seem to be up for grabs.

Marcus Arnold, the teenage wannabe lawyer, masqueraded for several months on https://Askme.com as 20-year-old Justin Anthony Wyrick Jr., “a law expert with two years of formal training in the law.” When Lewis asks Marcus where he got the expertise that enabled him to answer hundreds of e-mails a week on everything from appellate bonds to Supreme Court petitions, his mother, Priscilla, interrupts the conversation. “Marcus was born with it!” she shouts at Lewis. “Marcus has got a gift! Marcus had his gift in the womb. I could feel it.” Lewis seems startled by her answer, mostly because she seems to ignore the fact that her son was, in fact, making it up as he went along, and that his deceit could put others in serious jeopardy.

“Next” is a compelling read, full of interesting, even absorbing anecdotes about the people who are shaping--and shaped by--the rise of the Internet. But it feels rushed, as if Lewis didn’t allow himself time to step back and see the whole picture. It would have been well served, for instance, by some historical perspective, to help readers understand why this social revolution is so different than the ones that preceded it. And it would have benefited from a larger global perspective; Lewis’ concentration on North America and Western Europe ignores a large chunk of the story of how the Internet can or will connect the citizens of the world with one another.

Inevitably, the very nature of the Internet seems to make “Next” only a temporary,partial portrait. For this moment, Lewis seems to get it, but inevitably, the light will change, realities will shift, and we will have to start all over again.