Yes, well, I’ve discovered that you have to say that sort of thing when you make the leap into cyberspace. Otherwise, you’re bombarded with questions about IPOs, vesting schedules, second-round option dilution and a host of other matters of which, but a few weeks ago, I was blissfully ignorant. You can trot out the statistics until you’re blue in the face, tell people that most start-ups fail, that 90 percent of Net companies don’t make money and never will, that tens of thousands of people hold stock options that are–as we in the wired world say–underwater. It does no good; the moment you move to a dot-com, everyone becomes some variation on the NEWSWEEK colleague who insisted on murmuring “ka-ching” when I passed him in the corridor.
Just about everything is different in a new-media company. True, it’s not absolutely obligatory to wear a nose ring; on the other hand, I’ve yet to see a tie on any of my new colleagues, even the ones who hang out with VCs. One’s own office? Puh-leeze. A cubicle would be luxury. Our premises are entirely open-plan, with a steady stream of new furniture, office equipment and coffee machines colonizing the remaining open space. Until I started here I had no idea that “hotsynching” was a verb, to say nothing of “webscraping.”
Still, it’s great fun. For me, the most fascinating thing about the dot-com world is the way it attracts funky, offbeat intelligences. That’s an enormous change in a generation. My very first paying job, between school and college, was in the systems-analysis division of a subsidiary of Unilever. I seemed to have something of an aptitude for the work–I remember finding an unexpected bug in the program that tracked sales of soap powder. My boss offered to train me as a programmer, with regular employment during vacations and the promise of a job after college. No way! In the 1960s, computers were Big Brother personified, instruments of mind control. As recently as 1994 I wrote a column for NEWSWEEK that took a snooty, perverse pride in the fact that I’d never been online. And now I find myself surrounded by men and women who seem able to combine rigorous old-world analysis of markets and opportunities with a very New Economy understanding of how that world is changing.
Working with such colleagues (all terrifyingly younger than I am) is one of the things that make the Net liberating. Electronic publishing is an industry still in its infancy, which means that all of us are making things up as we go along. Michael Kinsley, the editor of Slate, points out that he’s constantly changing the look of his Netzine. I don’t pretend it’s easy to do that–and my colleagues who understand Web design would have a fit if I said that it was. But compared with the industrial-strength formats into which one is locked as a print editor, the freedom of the Web is a joy, offering almost limitless capacity for finding out, quickly, what works and what doesn’t. And that’s just now, before the full possibilities of increased bandwidth.
Rereading that last sentence, I realize that a few months ago I didn’t know what bandwidth was. One of the great pleasures of moving to the Net has been the exposure to a new set of skills and concerns. In the more exciting moments of my odyssey, I’ve felt as if a massive intellectual space is opening up before me, a bit like stout Cortes gazing at the Pacific from a peak in Darien. I’ve rubbed shoulders with Bill Joy, the legendary chief scientist at Sun Microsystems, and Danny Hillis, the man who invented massively parallel computing, and I’ve stood in awe at their intelligence and concern for the implications of their work. I love the way computer scientists can think on a big scale, imagining a time when information is essentially free and freely transportable from one end of the world to the other.
Of course, one shouldn’t get carried away. Author John Heilemann likes to say that giants like Hillis and Joy stand in relation to a Net start-up much as Wittgenstein does to a wire service. I can’t pretend that any publication I’ve yet seen on the Net has the glamour, the tactile quality, the emotion of print. But if there’s one thing of which I’m convinced, it’s that the time will come when you can find on the Net publications that have the same impact as the best of print, and that inspire the same loyalty among their readers. I’d like to be around when it happens.
