Build It and They Will Come
Gilder, George
38 No v e m b e r 2 o o o " The American Spectator I magine gazing at the web from far in space. If your eyes could see like a spectroscope, taking in the entire electromagnetic spectrum, the...
...The second law of thermodynamics, the entropy law, defines the tendency of all order and energy to deteriorate into disorder and waste...
...Imagine the mesh of lights--the radiance of sine waves-as an efflorescence of learning curves as people around the world launch projects and experiments without requiring I log onto Amazon or Barnes & Noble and a "cookie" on my computer informs the system of my presence...
...It is as invisible as the life of the mind and the laws of he radiance of the Net rides on trust: predictable waves of unsurprise that carry the entropic ideas of enterprise...
...By eliminating the entropy from networks-moving them onto the pure waves of light--you can increase their ability to bear information...
...The crystal cathedrals of light and air are increasingly reachable anywhere on the face of the earth...
...Because he gets to apply his intelligence to that one component more frequently, he accelerates his learning...
...The network reduces all the proliferating protocols and intricacies to one, the Internet Protocol...
...In order for the message to be high entropy (full of information), the carrier must be low entropy (empty of information...
...While in the midst of Europe and Africa, politicians foment entropic wars-short-circuit flares of chaos and cruelty--entrepreneurs are finding new opportunity nearly everywhere...
...The Net is a seine of collaborative production...
...An incandescence rising up with little overall planning or guidance, the Internet raises again the riddle faced by every sophomore physics student: the rise of civilization in the face of the law of rising entropy...
...With more dumb carriers, bearing ever more information, with ever less friction and resistance, the ball shines ever more intensely with cumuIative loads of luminous learning...
...Microsoft's NetShow spurs a surge of video teleconferencing...
...Federal Express ignites a flare in Memphis and its glow swells into the millennium...
...The convergence of light unleashes a fabulous efflorescence of myriad and multiplying sparks of commerce...
...In the time of Adam Smith, the workers could not gain the ten thousandfold edge without coming together in a single factory at a single time...
...2mother word for a low entropy carrier is a dmTlb network...
...In the ideal system, the complexity is in the message rather than in the medium...
...eeking clues to the meaning of this radiant transformation of the globe, I began by thrashing through fhaystacks of economic literature...
...The Net promotes the ideas that yield more than they and retardation...
...I play a game of literary preferences...
...Otherwise the signal is only telling you what you already know...
...From my purchases and the purchases of others, it contrives a best-seller list that is updated every hour...
...The pin was a unit of output of the factory in Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations, exemplifying the power of mass production and the division of labor...
...Energy is used up and transformed inexorably into lukewarm gases...
...Turn off your spectroscope and if you are in the wrong markets, the web may seem inconsequential...
...N The American Spectator _9 No v e m b e r 2 o o o 43...
...Encircling the globe under oceans and beaming from satellites, the radiance is increasingly eroding the powers of despots and bureaucracies, powers and principalities...
...But it allows the company to alert me to new products that I might like...
...Henderson's Boston Consulting Group demonstrated the learning effect for thousands of different items, from chickens, eggs, and tires to insurance policies and telephone calls...
...More relevant to the Internet, Claude Shannon used the same word--entropy-to designate information content in a communications channel...
...Swept up into an ever more photonic radiance, the traffic can soar a thousandfold eve~ three to five years, more than a millionfold in a decade...
...This trompe I'oeil point of light both symbolizes and embodies the global convergence: a light of infinite dimensions concentrated into a single point racing across the screen...
...If your eyes could see like a spectroscope, taking in the entire electromagnetic spectrum, the web would appear as a global efflorescence, a resonant sphere of light...
...And, yes, a stygian undercurrent of oily nude body parts for the sticky keyboard set...
...Things get worse...
...he millennium, the incandescence is diffusing round the world, offering a promise of new freelore and prosperity from Santiago, Chile, to Shanghai, China...
...In the end, I found a pin instead...
...A miracle for our time dwarfing Adam Smith's pins, it means that any Internet company currently handles only one tenth of one percent of its potential volume in five years...
...Instead, while indices of wealth and longevity surged upward, many sensitive souls focused on the clutter in the streets and the smoke in the air as millions thronged the cities to take the new jobs in what Blake called "dark satanic mills...
...Increasingly IP packets run directly on light running down glass fiber-optic cables...
...Shining on those screens are the images of a new economy: the cornucopian spiel of an eBay auction, the shuffling of cards and companies in a Yahoo portfolio, the spray of Fourier transforms in a DSP class, the specs and span of National Semiconductor's web-based inventory, the targeted immediacy of a streaming web cast, the one-click ignition of an Amazon transaction, a buxom bloomecoming ever more predictable, Internet traffic can soar 1,O00-fold every three to five years, more than a millionfold in a decade...
...Moving into the abundance of light, the [nternet is yet another demonstration of the trimnph of intelligence over time and chaos...
...commanded four times as much computer power per capita as the rest of the industrial world, 75 percent of the computer networks, and 80 percent of Internet hosts...
...RealNetworks moves to fullscreen video streams in a global pifiata of luminous threads...
...You need a blank sheet of paper that does not alter or obscure the message inscribed on it...
...The Net promotes ideas that yield more than they cost, ideas that are worth more to others than the producer...
...The radiance does not migrate to one place and stay there, whether Redmond, Washington, or Santa Clara, California...
...As activities move from the Surface of the world and converge into the virtual pinpoint of radiance, they accelerate toward a universal resonance--the velocity of light-- and converge to a universal medium...
...More entropy in Shannon's code signifies more information...
...Now time seems to be racing through the global radiance...
...For long-distance communications, the perfect carrier is an electromagnetic sine wave: a perfectly predictable sideways S curve...
...The resonance is the wealth and the light and there is no impedance in the middle...
...So seems to say the second law of thermodynamics: entropy increassure oftmexpected bits, the only part of a message that actually bears information...
...Living in a time of transition resembling today's, Smith was boldly e~cplaining the contested passage from the age of guilds and crafts to the age of mass manufacturing...
...Each population learns from the other, is the other...
...A key reason that specialized workers can each produce ten thousand times more than the single craftsman is their faster process of learning...
...microwaves, which is itself pierced by the rich spikes of radio frequencies coursing through the coaxial cables that circle our neighborhoods and hook up to each household...
...This is the physical expression of the converging telecosm-the radiant chrysalis from which will spring a new global economy...
...It tricks your eye into seeing a full image...
...The smaller the point the more the room...
...The light is both the abundance and the scarcity of the new world economy, the creative interplay of limit and infinite, the flesh and the divine...
...Supply creates its own demand, and the supplies and demands in themselves create a market...
...For the colors of visible light are absent...
...In countries that have climbed highest on the spectrouic ladders toward visible light, the warps and woofs of incandescence can almost be seen...
...They give or sell their names, their time, their knowledge...
...The exponential value of neba, orks is not in the links...
...Not only does the total number of connected screens rise by more than one third but also the traffic on each of the links rises by 5o percent...
...Moore's law captures its effects in the production of microchips...
...For a microchip, crystalline silicon offered the regularity and purity that was needed to bear the intricate designs of an integrated circuit...
...A larger surge ripples across the ball of light...
...Cable modems raise tenfold the average bandwidth of network connections to homes and schools...
...ing of Laetitia Casta wallpaper, the tintinnabulation of cash registers at Cisco and Dell, the quick click of an e-mail attachment, the flaunt and vaunt at a virtual bar in a teen chat center, the rustle of Hilton reservations, the theatrical growl of Tennyson's Ulysses, the populous skies of a Java airline map, the sepulchral murmur of a Leonard Cohen meditation, the mad snorting and pawing on a Roaring Bull thread, the swashbuckling plays of a multicity game...
...Michael Rothschild presented evidence that it is a biological truth, applicable to everything from ants and bees to Amazonian slime molds...
...Through endless essays of trial and error, capitalism teaches every venturer the rules of resonance, the laws of right and light...
...It reaches its point of resonance and then gives way to new flares of learning and creativity...
...his is the tragic rhythm of capitalism, the fatal triumph of enterprise, the vicious circle of learning...
...Imagine a cost of equipment, based on microchips and fiber threads, plummeting to less than a dollar for a million instructions per second or $19.95 for thirty days of access to Internet exabytes, hnagine that any worker could collaborate with any other worker at any time--that the factor often to the fourth could be harvested by any collation of workers in a virtual web anywhere on earth...
...If it keeps its share of the market, it must expect a thousand times greater traffic in halfa decade...
...Digital subscriber loops add to the fuzzy glow on the edge...
...All pump up the lumens of the encircling radiance...
...It is the capitalist means of production and it has fallen into the hands of a billion learners and value creators...
...As people access the web with wireless, that infrared skeleton grows a penumbra of / Spangling the luminous ball are more than a hundred million nodes of concentrated standing waves-your computer is one of them--running at a microwave frequency of hundreds of megahertz...
...That is one measure of the meaning of the light...
...Each worker has to master only one part of the process...
...The dumber the network the more intelligence it can carry...
...You may call it an "American fad" as have several French executives in my presence...
...Imagine, though, a global cornucopia of capital flowing readily across borders and through the ball of radiance...
...To do an accurate valuation of the economy at that time, you would have had to apply this ten thousandfold factor to the sectors of industry that were adopting the new technologies...
...Anyone can create a product, launch a company, finance its growth, and spin it offinto the web of trust...
...Moving up spectrum toward the visible domain, the Internet transcends geography and reduces to a single racing spot in time and space...
...Through this learning, civilization defies the thermodynamic laws of decline and fall...
...Corporate ethernets leap up from lo megabits a second to loo megabits and then to a gigabit and lo gigabits, and exfoliate intranets and extranets in ardent loops...
...A single attractive invention that resonates with the needs of others can unleash a cascade of creativity...
...Raymond Kurzweil deems it a law of time and chaos by which time--measured by the 40 No v e m b e r ~ o o o " The American Spectator incidence of salient events--accelerates in every evolutionary process (and slows down in every chaotic process, governed by physical entropy...
...Without a high entropy medium of noise forming barriers in the middle, the distinctions and categories of conventional commerce break down...
...it is in the light at the end of the links, suffusing the edges of the web...
...Nearly half the luminosity remains in the United States, and within the U.S., perhaps half is in California, and in California half is in the region of Silicon Valley...
...GEORCE GILDER'S latest book is Telecosm: How Infinite Bandwidth Will Revolutionize Our World (Free Press), from which this article is adapted...
...The nodes of creative effort could smnmon their ten thousandfold magic of learning at will in minutes rather than in years...
...It is not a web of ever proliferating desires o r demands...
...By distorting the wave in a systematic way--by modulating i t - y o u can transmit information...
...The backbone of that economy glows infrared as focused beams of 1,55o nanometer radiance flow through fiber optic trunks across continents and under seas...
...The Internet is not merely a radiance of connections...
...the Internet is triumph knowledge defies Moving yet another demonstration of intelligence over time and chaos...
...AOL customers leave behind their 28-kilobit links and move to 56-kilobit and ethernet modems...
...You may compare it to Tulipmania...
...Bain magine that any worker could collaborate with any other worker at any time-anywhere on earth, each a node of creative effort instantly summoning the ten thousandfold magic of learning in minutes rather than in years...
...Capital and equipment were scarce and costly...
...It ruthlessly filters out the ego trips and feckless tries and self-indulgences and investments of disguised consumption, and products that exploit and diminish their customers...
...Becoming ever more predictable, the Net can carry ever more voluminous and high information traffic...
...To send unexpected bits--a high entropy message--you need a low entropy carrier: a predictable vessel for your meaning...
...Then imagine that every hundred days the total brightness doubles...
...Without the overhead and entropy, noise and geographical friction, entrepreneurial creativity takes off...
...As the traffic overflows the smart silicon passages of conventional wires and switches--where it is compressed and coded and celled and queued and framed and corrected electronically-- it must soar up spectrum...
...Turn off your spectroscope, though, and the web disappears...
...Digital cellphones begin sending and receiving video images and storing voices...
...The glow radiates most ardently and at highest frequencies in domains of freedom and technological creativity...
...As the networks become dumber, they can attract more and more smart entrepreneurs on their edges...
...Smith showed that the factory workers of the industrial age were not two times or ten times The American Spectator _9 November 2000 39 more productive than craftsmen were, but ten thousand times more productive...
...It reveals what efforts reverberate in the minds and hearts 42 November ~ooo _9 The American Spectator and hands of other producers--what ventures enlighten and enrich them...
...On the map of incandescence, light is not evenly distributed...
...But the radiance is now on the move...
...cost--the ones that are worth more to others than to the producer, the ones that teach more than they lose...
...They provide infinite shelf space on their disks...
...review...
...As the commerce of the world flows into this global radiance and is distilled into this single point, it resonates with the creative work of the world...
...The U.S...
...The radiance reaches upward between four hundred and eight hundred miles to thousands of low earth orbit satellites, each sending forth cords of "light" between earth and sky in the Ku band between 12 and 18 gigahertz...
...Amazon prints the uman decline and fall...
...In Shannon's terms, entropy is a meaand Company refined and extended it as the experience curve...
...Accommodating real-time transactions, it is a market space that can absorb all the business of the new global economy...
...The two thousand hotels of Marriott go on the web for the first time...
...When they become common, the luminosity will surge another millionfold...
...It is a service of Amazon...
...I sell my books from my own web page, collecting a profit, and Amazon fulfills the orders...
...The radiance of the Net rides on trust: predictable waves of unsurprise that can carry the entropic ideas of enterprise...
...Buyers, sellers, producers, consumers, financiers, factors, insurers, and savers merge across the radiant ball and both the words and the roles lose their edges...
...They learn how to improve the product...
...I review a book that I have read...
...You decry "the myth of Internet traffic" as did a January 1999 issue of the estimable Business Communications Journal...
...At any instant, that is all that is present on a cathode ray tube--a single spot volleying back and forth sixty times a second...
...If they are not just right, I correct them...
...Governing the light is this law of resonance...
...Creeping slowly across the radiance, and enhancing it, are the harbingers of full-screen films, three-dimensional images, and high-resolution teleconferences...
...By removing the predictable part of the signal, the original sine wave, you can capture the information, the unpredictable part, at the other end...
...That pulse of light flashed in 1999...
...Is the ball of radiance a meteor that will burn out, leaving only darkness and ashes...
...Within the market space of the Net, anyone anywhere can issue a petition or publication, utter a cry for help, broadcast a work of art...
...The frequencies dissolve and-except for an infinitesimal spot of phosphorescence on your screen-disappear from sight...
...I was looking for a needle of insight through which to march all the gaudy caravans of undulating camels, laden with Internet glow.., or was it Internet hype, bumping and grinding for a manic Wall Street...
...It informs me of the exact performance of all my books...
...On the wideband boulevards of photonic glass, eve r34hing travels in IP on lambdas and the new companies of the Net eclipse the old companies of the microcosm...
...Through most of the 199o's , the center of the radiance was overwhelmingly in the United States...
...Only products that enrich their customers ultimately create the kind of market that compounds its gains...
...The customers are the product and the product is the customer and both serve one another, in a rhythm of creativity between producers and users, a resonance of buyers and sellers in which the buyers also sell and the sellers also buy in widening webs of commerce...
...the thermodynamic laws of into the abundance of light, of the the physical plant and equipment and the regimented workers in Adam Smith's factory...
...I am an Amazon customer, supplier, investor, client, author, audience...
...That is the source of Metcalfe's law...
...A single attractive invention that resonates with the needs of others can unleash a cascade of creativity...
...To stifle links to the global communities of mind and liberty entails increasingly brutal and obvious repression and incurs rising costs of economic stagnation liberty that sustain it and that it sustains...
...The radiance is a reflection of political and economic freedom, immigration, and the spirit of enterprise...
...But it is also the guarantor of freedom...
...Interlinking the birds of Craig McCaw's and Bill Gates's Teledesic are a halo of6o gigahertz radiations...
...Smith showed that a worker specializing in one part of the process of manufacturing pins could be hugely more productive than a worker attempting to produce pins entirely by himself...
...Although the sphere of light spans the globe and reaches up as many as twenty-three thousand miles, it appears to humans only at their screens as a single point of concentrated light...
...The sellers of web services use the equipment of their customers and gain knowledge and time from the buyers...
...This cannot happen on ordinar)' networks...
...From my purchases and preferences, Amazon learns how to serve other similar customers...
...The buyers of web services supply their own capital in the form of their linked computers...
...it is a mesh of constant invention...
...desires can well proliferate without it...
...One looks in vain for a "level playing field...
Vol. 33 • November 2000 • No. 9
