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Getting smart, the stupid Web way
AltaVista's new marketing campaign says smart is the new sexy. So why is the search engine coming off so dumb?
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Is the Net in your locker room?
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[11/02/99]

Technology: View from the top
The spam-master
Sunil Paul, CEO of Brightmail, explains what it takes to be a two-time winner in the Internet economy.
By Andrew Leonard
[11/01/99]

Talking 'bout a computer revolution
Speech recognition technology promises to transform how we interact with computers -- or turn us all into mindless gibbering automatons.
By Janelle Brown
[10/29/99]

Cannibal games
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By David Wilson
[10/28/99]

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THE BEST OF ALL
POSSIBLE WORLDS
Dow at 36,000! No more cancer! The new techno-optimists gush about a
picture-perfect future. Should we believe them?

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By Mark Gimein

Nov. 4, 1999 | There's a story about Robespierre that has the preeminent rabble-rouser of the French Revolution leaping up from his chair as soon as he saw a mob assembling outside.

The Long Boom: A Vision For The Coming Age of Prosperity Peter Schwartz, Peter Leyden, Joel Hyatt Perseus Books 336 pages Buy The Long Boom Dow 36,000: The New Strategy for Profiting from the Coming Rise in the Stock Market James K. Glassman and Kevin A. Hassett Times Business 294 pages Buy Dow 36,000 The Internet Bubble: Inside the Overvalued World of High-Tech Stocks -- and What You Need to Know to Avoid the Coming Shakeout Anthony B. Perkins and Michael C. Perkins Harper Business 283 pages Buy The Internet Bubble

"I must see which way the crowd is headed," Robespierre is reputed to have said: "For I am their leader."

The story about Robespierre is certainly apocryphal, but it helps in understanding the recent proliferation of books that herald the coming of a new and unprecedented age of prosperity. The Cold War is over, unemployment is low, inflation is lower, the stock market is booming. It's never been easier to see which way popular opinion is headed.

The new manuals of prosperity are the 1990s answer to the dark books of the 1970s and '80s that predicted a permanent oil crisis, the fragmentation of the United States, worldwide starvation and nuclear catastrophe. Just as the pop futurists of that era thought rising oil prices and double-digit inflation were the trumpets announcing the coming of the apocalypse, today's crop of professional and semi-professional seers imagine that the rising stock market is an escalator to the pearly gates of Heaven. So they rush to sing the praises of the new economic order, apparently convinced, like Robespierre, that if they just jump in soon enough they are likely to get credit for leading the parade.

Three books released in the past month are especially good examples of the race to give voice to the conventional wisdom. Two of them are resolutely and uniformly optimistic. "Dow 36,000" explains why the bull market will continue its trek to new plateaus, while "The Long Boom," heralds a new age of technological achievement, predicting a rosy end of history, in which the world will have conquered (in no particular order), cancer, poverty and global warming. The third, a guide to Internet stocks called "The Internet Bubble," is less sanguine in its projections -- but its pessimism is so mild, that it, too, belongs here as a kind of footnote, pointing out the slight flaws that highlight the overall perfection of the picture.

Of the three, "The Long Boom: A Vision For The Coming Age of Prosperity" might be the most perfect expression of what one might think of as the New Optimism. Based on a well-known Wired magazine cover story, "The Long Boom" purports to be a history of the world's future through 2020. The future it envisions is one where accelerating scientific progress meets the authors' preferred vision of social progress to make all the problems of today's world -- in fact, all problems, period -- obsolete. Like many futurist books, it is not precisely an argument for how things should be, nor an investigation into how they are, but more like a drumbeat meant to accompany the inevitable tide of progress.

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