The Cosmic capitalists
BROOKS, DAVID
The Cosmic Capitalists By David Brooks Massive forces are fundamentally reshaping American society, turbocharging the transition from an industrial to an information-age economy, radically...
...The cover story in the July issue of Wired embodies Technomarxism with almost psychotic perfection...
...The past is irrelevant...
...Corridors are wide, with couches at odd intervals to encourage schmoozing...
...After all, we live in an age of transition from a power society to a knowledge society, from a hierarchical society to a networked society, from a skim-milk society to a 2-percent-fat-milk society, and in this new age everyone has to make lots of predictions...
...b Their piece, "The Long Boom," reverberates with the tones and phrases of Cosmic Capitalism: "relentless process...unprecedented alignment...powerful forces . . . unassailable trends . . . inextricably linked . . . phenomenal growth...five waves of technology . . . unprecedented global integration . . . completely new types of work...
...Cosmic Capitalists live for new ideas, new thinking, new ways of thinking...
...The remnants of a boyhood lust for comic books may be taped to the side of a terminal...
...Around 2005, 20 percent of Americans will teleshop for groceries, videophones will catch on, labor shortages will hit Germany...
...Those with strong cheekbones can sport the really tiny European eyeglasses that give you about as much peripheral vision as an astigmatic worm...
...By 2019, Americans will have made a multicultural society, and the global civilization of civilizations will already be three years old...
...Hierarchies are officially flattened (while salary structures are quietly steepened...
...But just when you thought the modernist impulse was so old and outmoded that it would die of senescence, it hits the high-tech valleys where the silicon gurus march, blithely unaware of the generations that have trod this path before them...
...At Oticon, a Danish hearing-aide manufacturer, there are no permanent offices...
...The Cosmic Capitalists By David Brooks Massive forces are fundamentally reshaping American society, turbocharging the transition from an industrial to an information-age economy, radically altering the way we do business, and compelling large numbers of American executives to go to work each day in cowboy boots and blue jeans...
...You thought your kid was just wasting time at that alternative high school where smoking cigarettes was a form of gym class, but in reality he was preparing to serve as a consultant to a Cosmic Capitalist with a $600-million-a-year revenue stream...
...And boy, are the Cosmic Capitalists open...
...If you're not hip to the cutting edge, it's off to the ash heap of history...
...The next logical step would seem to be . . . to bypass languages in favor of a general cosmic consciousness...
...Silicon Valley is Paris in the Twenties, except that the creative product for Hemingway and Fitzgerald was expat novels, whereas now it's video compression systems and the eye candy for computer games with titles like "Serial Killer" and "Flesh Eater...
...Cosmic Capitalists aren't making bets on the future...
...They're insanely great...
...The Cosmic Capitalists have seen the future...
...All Cosmic Capitalists practice Playfulness With a Purpose, the preferred personality style for ambitious creatives...
...Relentlessly avant-garde, the Cosmic Capitalist tries to manage his company so that it will resemble the inside of a popcorn popper...
...God help us all...
...Gary Hamel's cover story in the June 23 Fortune echoes the breathless wonder: "We live in a discontinuous world—one where digitaliza-tion, deregulation, and globalization are profoundly reshaping the industrial landscape...
...Keami Lewis is manager of culture development at Rosenbluth Travel...
...How'd the IPO go...
...Every issue, Fast Company, the bimonthly that is the Pravda of the new movement, runs a "jobtitlesof-thefuture" column, which is so outside-the-box the editors can't even bring themselves to put spaces between the words...
...Flipped my nuts...
...There's Metcalfe's Law, which says the value of a computer network is equal to the square of the number of nodes...
...Even the rules of speech have got to go...
...Bob Heckman is chief growth officer at the Thomas Group, a consulting firm...
...You've got to eliminate any hint of a prose style and instead talk like a 15-year-old joystick junkie...
...For most Technomarxists, Hock's timeline is far too short...
...Ever since the day you first wrapped your fingers around a crayon," the new Apple Computer ads begin, "you were driven by the need to create...
...He is an artist...
...Tattoo it on your forehead...
...Around 2012, gene therapy for cancer will be perfected...
...You want to make thousand-year plans...
...The Net, according to them, will be the main medium of the 21st century...
...The accouterment of choice for Dream-works's Katzenberg (and many others) is the Super-soaker water cannon...
...Above all, you've got to use short sentences...
...These are the Cosmic Capitalists...
...It would be unheard of to go into a Cosmic Capitalist office and find a bunch of people in blue suits, white shirts, and red ties...
...And suddenly there are squads of Cosmic Capitalists across the business landscape, all of them co-religionists in the faith of Technomarxism: They share the belief that technology ineluctably drives history and that we live at the dawn of a new and unprecedented age...
...Tom Grueskin is chief imagination officer at Gateway 2000...
...There's Moore's Law, which describes the rapid doubling of performance of the microprocessor...
...Businessmen used to like to describe themselves as warriors...
...What we see is a dramatic proliferation of new economic life forms: virtual organizations, global consortia, net based commerce, ad infinitum...
...Technology makes history, and those who understand technology understand the forces creating the New Man...
...Women's cubicles feature Curious George books...
...Next year's cost projections...
...Embrace change...
...Hence, the culture of casual dress, gee-whiz futurology, and acne-era speech patterns is tie-dyeing the world of the white collar...
...Closed, bad...
...IDEO, a design company, has long rolls of butcher paper spread out over conference tables for brainstorming and doodling...
...At Procter & Gamble, elevators (which are thought to destroy conversations) are out, while escalators (which are thought to enhance them) are in...
...Others, Hollywood influenced, go in for collarless linen shirts or the $2,000-suit-with-a-black-T-shirt look...
...Serious mind rub...
...We are at that very point in time when a 400-year-old age is dying and another is struggling to be born," announces Dee Ward Hock, a 67-year-old management guru...
...We have reached the end of incrementalism in the quest to create new wealth...
...In addition, the fiftyish cutting-edge robber baron wants to accumulate a slouching entourage of 23-year-old, nose-pierced, head-shaved, fingernail-painted, tattooed grungeoids to prove he's got the next generation's most creative minds at his beck and call...
...Linear thinking is dead, and the new era beckons when executives unshackle themselves from the mindsets and habits of the past and soar into a realm of unfettered imagination...
...It has boyish charm, and it's a subtle reminder of power, since a company pooh-bah can soak an underling, but an underling would never retaliate...
...Marian Salzman is director of the Department of the Future of TBWA Chiat/Day in Amsterdam...
...To decorate their own spaces, Cosmic Capitalists must have a kitsch collection, even a small one...
...By 2018, micromachines will do cell repair...
...All this proves that the Cosmic Capitalist isn't just a businessman...
...You've got to think absolutely, positively, supremely big...
...If they're fat, they favor loud sweaters...
...Material forces push us forward...
...You want to envision a totally new world...
...The excitement is matched only by the delicious ecstasy of self-aggrandizement...
...Richard Saul Wurman, an entrepreneur who stages conferences where Cosmic Capitalists pay big bucks to mind-meld, collects ashtrays...
...It used to be that this modernist ethos—this desire to be free of history, to leap out into a brave new future—flourished only in politics (where it created the disastrous Marxist utopias) or in architecture (where it created the disastrous urban schemes of Le Corbusier) or in literature and the arts (where it led to a burst of creativity and then decades of exhaustion...
...They think the breakup of the Bell system is the most significant event since the invention of the printing press half a millennium ago, the microprocessor is the most important advance since Arabic symbolic mathematics two millennia ago, and the mouse is the greatest invention since the mouse...
...being altered by INELUCTABLE HISTORICAL FORCES OF UNPRECEDENTED MAGNITUDE...
...As the fellows at Wired say: "Open, good...
...By about 2002, Europe will have integrated into one nation...
...As John Koa, formerly of Harvard Business School and now of Stanford, exhorts his students and clients, "You must ruthlessly trash outmoded obstructions to creativity: standard operating procedures, protocols, norms of behavior, a confining brand image, the revered memory of old successes...
...Alcoa is tearing down the walls in its corporate offices to give the executive suite the open-air flexibility of a start-up software company...
...That's why the big magazines can't go three issues without a story taking us inside the cerebral cortex of Bill Gates...
...The future starts now...
...Two metatrends—fundamental technological change and a new ethos of openness—will transform our world into the beginnings of a global civilization, a new civilization of civilizations, that will blossom through the coming century," write Peter Schwartz and Peter Leyden...
...By 2020, cars will run on hydrogen...
...Kodak has "humor rooms" with games, toys, and Monty Python videos...
...Today's Cosmic Capitalist shares the same perspective as the French revolutionaries of 1789, the art-world revolutionaries of 1913, the Russian revolutionaries of 1917, the hippie revolutionaries of 1968, and (to some extent) the Newtoid revolutionaries of 1994...
...The Cosmic Capitalist understands that reality is David Brooks is senior editor of The Weekly Standard...
...And lo, it has come to pass...
...Companies like Dreamworks throw out job titles because titles are confining, old wave (just don't take Jeffrey Katzen-berg's parking space...
...Human nature is repealed...
...now everybody sits in large cubicles called "bullpens...
...The desks are on wheels, and employees roll themselves around and bunch up according to the task of the moment...
...In their Wired article, like a Nostradamus on Prozac, Schwartz and Leyden envision a glorious future...
...They know history, and they know individuals don't make history...
...They know that in times of revolution, you've got to confront change...
...At Inhale Therapeutic Services, CEO Robert Chess got rid of executive offices...
...Back in 1964, Marshall McLuhan heralded the Cosmic Capitalist age when he wrote in Understanding Media, "The computer, in short, promises by technology a Pentecostal condition of universal understanding and unity...
...We are seeing the birth of a New Man...
...It was really cool...
...Netscape's Webmaster, Robert Andrews, uses a nerf gun...
...All history revolves around us...
...His book is called The Road Ahead...
...they are oracles...
...Real-time life experience...
...Some people collect yo-yos...
...What else do you need...
...Chrysler is running TV commercials that portray its design teams as a bunch of technoweenies in a garage...
...A skiboard may hang from the ceiling, next to an ominously broken piece of bungee cord...
...And there's the Law of Gatesian Cultural Hegemony, which says that every cockamamie notion that bubbles up amongst the digitheads of Silicon Valley quickly spreads and infects the psyche of all of corporate America...
...Apparently we need more, because side by side with Gates's book are shelves and shelves of similar volumes with titles like What Comes Next and What Comes After What Comes Next...
...Further down the corporate scale, employees decorate their cubicles with the gewgaws of a life far more exciting than the one they actually live...
...They know, more than they know anything else, that we are living in an age of unprecedented change...
...Get up on your toes and floss the teeth of change...
...The Cosmic Capitalist wanders the halls of his silicon sweatshop preaching the gospel of the new age...
...Religion is irrelevant...
...The authors celebrate the transformative powers of telecom technology, genetic technology, nanotechnology, and microtechnol-ogy and predict a break with all recorded history in the form of an endless boom economy...
...snail mail is received in the "paper room," and if you want to take the document back to your desk you're supposed to scan it into the computer and shred the original (the shards descend in a clear tube through the work area and into the bin below...
...Most puny non-cosmic mortals cannot even fathom the awesome, universe-shattering magnitude of the changes we are seeing today...
...To show that he is not an uptight organization man, the Cosmic Capitalist needs a wacky accou-terment...
...There is an inflection point where the quest for divergence is transformed into a quest for convergence, and a new collective viewpoint emerges...
...Cosmic Capitalists who play in a middle-aged rock band with a name like "The Prostate Pretenders" are beyond number...
...By about 2000—just 30 months away!—a spirit of generosity will have returned to the American soul...
...now artists are the role models of choice...
...The San Jose conference...
...The wise are clued in to the emerging forces...
...And we—lucky we—are here for the start of it all...
...You don't want to make five-year plans...
...Courtney Dickinson is a culture team leader at Sapient, a systems integration company...
...Oticon is nearly paperless...
...Instead, to prove they are freethinking bohemians, Cosmic Capitalists tend to wear the Microsoft uniform: Timberlands, khakis, faded blue-flannel shirts...
...You don't just want to think about business...
Vol. 2 • July 1997 • No. 43
