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Michael Lewis, The New New Thing (W.W. Norton and Company, 2000) Once the site of the mid 19th-century gold rush, Northern California 150 years later reaffirmed the old adage "the more things change, the more they stay the same." Reminiscent of the manner in which Liar's Poker introduced the materially driven arrivistes of Wall Street in the 1980s, The New New Thing brings to life the once all-encompassing techno-geek coming-out party that usurped the business world on the eve of the new millennium, starring Netscape founder Jim Clark as the master of ceremonies. What quickly becomes apparent, however, is that there is a major difference between the digerati of the late-90s dot-com boom and their gold-panning and bond-trading predecessors. These new players on the global economic stage are not driven by the same, singular, unabashed desire for money per se; rather, they grope through life never quite sure what they want to do when they grow up but convinced that every step they take is one step closer to the technology, the innovation, or the idea that will reshape the way in which the rest of the world functions in short, they seek the ever-elusive New New Thing. Thinking out of the box this dead metaphor has become one of the essential "intangibles" that every modern M.B.A. candidate strives relentlessly to exemplify. But for the foot-soldiers of Silicon Valley, such an ethos was an inevitable result of an industry founded mostly by people who had spent their entire lives never belonging to any "in-crowd" to begin with. The aggregation of such like-minded perspectives is sure to produce its own set of idiosyncrasies, and from the opening scene of the book, we are treated to one such example. In an amusing anecdote of the old world clashing with the new, Lewis details Jim Clark's obsession with his latest toy: the largest single-mast sailing vessel in the world, custom-made at a centuries-old Dutch shipyard, and built to be navigated entirely by a computer whose code Clark is convinced holds the key to the next stage of the Internet revolution. Such is a possible outcome when the restlessness of a man thrice triumphant in founding multi-billion-dollar enterprises converges with a scenario in which demand not only grossly outstrips supply, but seemingly bottomless pockets of bullion keep popping up out of nowhere to keep progress propped up on all fronts. In recent years, the literary world has been exposed to Lewis' incisiveness in the New York Times Sunday Magazine, The New Republic, The New Yorker, and Slate, as well as books covering Wall Street in the 1980s, the 1996 presidential campaign, and the unorthodoxy of the Oakland A's baseball team. The New New Thing doesn't fail to live up to what has come to be expected of Lewis' incisiveness, conveying an essential profile of a man instrumental in the evolution of a phenomenon that has indeed reshaped the manner in which the rest of the world functions, though not in the way that he nor anyone else, for that matter ever expected. "The New New Thing is a lot less about Silicon Valley than it is about a greater and much more ambitious theme - the clash between the two cultural archetypes that drive our economy." Mark Gimein, Salon.com MORE: Michael Lewis homepage Salon review |
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