Rating: 
Summary: Wear a mask
Review: Is the internet just another technology? Nothing more than a fast delivery system for information? So thought many people post the Feb 2000 bust up of internet stocks.No, says Michael Lewis (author of 'Liar's Poker' and 'The New New Thing'). In a BBC televised study into the 'internet consequences of society' Lewis examined how people had responded to, and used the internet to change teir lives. "The internet," he says "had offered up a new set of social situations" to which people had responded by grabbing a new set of 'masks'. The mask was the role they had chosen to play for themselves using the opportunity provided by the internet.
Jonathan Lebed wore a mask. It was the mask of a financial expert, ladling out stock recommendations on Yahoo! message boards and making himself some $ 800,000 in six months' trading. Nothing wrong in that, you may well ask. That's what Wall Street analysts do all the time. The only problem, it seems, was that Jonathan was 15 years old! The US S.E.C. filed an investigation. Lewis discovers that it had no clue about what, exactly, Jonathan had done wrong. Chairman Arthur Levitt gave Michael Lewis an appointment mistaking him for Michael Thomas. In a hilarious interaction, Lewis says that when the error was pointed out, "the chairman's face wore the expression of a man whose brain was undergoing the human equivalent of rebooting". Nor were Lewitt's thoughts on market manipulation, the crime for which Jonathan was being prosecuted, clear. (In this it is similar to the Indian situation). Lewitt summons Director of Enforcement, Richard Walker, to explain. Walker explains. Manipulation is "when you promote a stock for the purpose of artificially raising its price." Pray, what is 'artificially raising?'
"The price of a stock is artificially raised when subjected to something other than ordinary market forces," recites Walker.
What are those?
An ordinary market force is one that does not cause the stock to rise artificially! Voila! Lewis exposes the circuitous, subjective and pompous logic of regulators in his inimitably style. What Jonathan has done is to don a 'mask' of a financial expert. In so doing, he has shaken the financial services industry. For, if a commoner like him could, using the tool of the internet, give advice to others and make a pie for himself, why, then, how could the aristocracy of Wall Street, viz. the analysts, the brokerage houses, the research firms, the TV channels, et al. hope to justify their fees? Lewis describes this phenomenon as moving power from 'the center' to 'the fringe'. Andy Kessler, a Bell Labs engineer turned Wall Street analyst turned venture capitalist points out, "intelligence always moves to the edge of the network".
The outsiders on the fringe use the technology of the internet to come up with newer innovations that threatens the center. They bypass the rules. Venture capitalists finance them because great profit can be made when the old source of insider power, up for grabs, are threatened. There results chaos; the center threatens the new players with lawsuits, government regulation and public shaming. Either the incumbents then co-opt the fringe players or the fringe players become the incumbent with new rules. The whole process is then repeated. This is how capitalism rejuvenates itself. This is what happened with 20 year old Justin Frankel, an employee of AOL. In March 2000 he posted software that would undermine AOL and a lot of other profitable companies. The software was Gnutella (a geek joke combining the free operating system software Gnu, with Nutella, the chocolate spread). It enabled people to share files, computing power or anything else without the need for a central server that could be shut down (as Napster was). Suddenly, the whole recording industry was threatened. It co opted Frankel by buying over his company for several million dollars. Within days, the fringe threw up another challenger, Gene Kan, who, in turn, was bought over by Sun Micro. Fifteen year old Marcus Arnold wore the mask of a legal expert on a site called AskMe.com, which threatened the legal fraternity. "Technology had put afterburners on the egalitarian notion that anyone can do anything by enabling pretty umuch anyone to try anything, especially in fields in which 'expertise' had always been a dubious proposition.'
The book talks about how the broadcasting industry was threatened by two black boxes, one, TiVo (developed by Jim Barton and Mike Ramsay) and the other, Replay (by Anthony Wood). These allowed TV watchers to search and store TV programmes of their choice (without commercials!) and view them at a time of their choice. It moved power from the 'center', i.e. the network control room, to the 'fringe' i.e. to the viewer. Suddenly, the concept of prime time was threatened, and, with it, that of commercial television! There are far wider implications than commercial advertising. What would happen to brands who advertise one-size-fits-all on prime time? The black boxes also have the capability to determine viewing preferences, enabling a slice and dice approach to advertising. These and several other insights are what make 'The Future Just Happened' a compelling book to read. It is written in Lewis' highly readable style with some exquisitely funny passages.
Perhaps the only point of disagreement emanates from Lewis' unnecessarily harsh criticism, in the final chapter, of Danny Hillis and Bill Joy. Hillis is the person who designed the world's fastest supercomputer. Bill Joy is the chief scientist at Sun Microsystems, where he helped develop Java. This chapter adds little to an otherwise recommendable book.
Rating: 
Summary: Brilliant, Funny, Thought-Provoking Book
Review: I think Michael Lewis is a brilliant writer, and this book is another little gem from him. He writes a lot like Tom Wolfe, and like Wolfe takes a rollicking interest in transformational social trends, which as a former investment banker, Lewis thinks about in the context of business and technology. His central idea here is that contemporary technology, most importantly the Internet, is undermining the established order in all sectors of our society by democratizing information and access to markets. Lewis researched this book by hanging out with a lot of very ordinary people, some of them scruffy adolescents, whose lives have nonetheless become lightning rods for extraordinary developments. He starts with Jonathan Lebod, the 15 year old New Jersey kid who a couple of years ago brought down on himself the full wrath of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission by earning nearly a million dollars in trading profits through stock manipulation, all of it accomplished between school and bedtime over a PC in his room. A true investigative journalist at heart, Lewis spent days with young Jonathan, eating meals with his lower middle-class family and accompanying him to school. The portrait that emerges is of a fairly typical adolescent - bright enough, but certainly no genius - who learned how to hack around the Internet and, in the process, developed an uncannily accurate sense of how financial markets work. Lewis's own career started on Wall Street - so he knows what he's talking about here - and the point he's making is that power elites, such as Wall Street professionals, depend more on privileged access to information and markets than they do on any really proprietary expertise. Jonathan seemed to stumble pretty easily on what he learned, and once he had it, he played game as effectively as if he'd been a million-dollar-a-year Solomon Brothers trader. Lewis portrays the comically ferocious response of the SEC to this small incident as representing an intuitive understanding on their part that Jonathan Lebod represented the early stages of something deeply threatening. The author seems to be suggesting that they have good reason to worry. Lewis tells several other stories in this vein, all of them based in-person research and all of them demonstrating ordinary people discovering, more-or-less inadvertently, some quirky application of new technology which allows them to outwit or outperform established institutions or experts. He tells us about Marillion, an over-the-hill rock group who, when dumped unceremoniously by their record company, discovered they could thumb their noses at the industry by direct marketing to their loyal fans over the internet. Their careers rose to new heights. He also tells us about Marcus Arnold, another adolescent, who became the top-ranked legal expert on AskMe.com until jealous middle-aged competitors, with expensive law degrees and years of highly-compensated experience, spilled to beans to Marcus's online clients that he was a 15 years-old brat. It seems the clients didn't really care, though, and Marcus soon regained his ranking! Lewis takes an elfish glee in all these nerds, children and little people getting the better of grown-up establishment types. In a cleaned-up, erudite kind of way, there are echoes of Abbie Hoffman in his writing. While Lewis isn't giving us a treatise here, and he doesn't spend much time theorizing, he does try to spell out briefly what he's getting at, which is that the direction of modern technology is leading us into ever more extreme forms of democracy. He believes that established social and economic patterns will continue to be threatened by nobodies armed with new knowledge and access formally controlled and guarded by powerful elites. While Lewis clearly enjoys the comic spectacle in all this, if you read him carefully, you begin to realize he's not himself necessarily a partisan of this revolution. He's just the story-teller. Lest there be any doubt about his ambivalence, the last chapter of this book is entitled "The Unabomber Had a Point". In it, Lewis talks about a number of former high-tech gurus who have begun to have second thoughts about their lives, raising critical questions about the direction of technology, even gravitating towards a kind of modern-day Ludditism . While Lewis is careful not to adopt this stance either, he is clearly thinking about it, and wants us to think about it too. There have been many lengthy tomes in recent years written on the evolution of technology, and I found this little book to be more thought provoking than just about anything I've seen. It's also hilarious and easy to read, and I highly recommend it.
Rating:
Summary: Describes The Demise of Comfortable Cliques
Review: This book is a very entertaining guide to 1) how we got conned by investment so-called professionals etc. for so long and 2) how the Internet has exposed the emperor's lack of clothes. i.e. white collar professionals deliberately make everybody think that their jobs are too difficult for the general public to figure out. Michael Lewis has a drole sense of humour but it is worth buying this book just for the description of former SEC chairman Levitt's reaction when Lewis informs him that the man Levitt claims to know and assumes is his father is not - he doesn't even have the same surname (p.63)! I howled with laughter at this so loud I scared my baby daughter. I'm an investment professional and Lewis has said very eloquently what I've been wanting to say about the investment industry for 20 years.
Rating:
Summary: The Outsiders rule!
Review: This is an excellent book that rationally examines the Internet and the social change it has invoked. Rather than just bemoan and whine about the impact, Lewis has bothered to investigate the reasons for the myriad changes. His book should be required reading for sociology and business classes. He has a sarcastic wit yet keen insight into the radical shifts that have taken place, and he speculates on what the future might bring. Central to Lewis's observations is the idea that the Internet has altered the relationship between the "insiders" and the "outsiders": between those who formerly controlled information and its flow to their benefit i.e., those who try to define what that information is, and those who have always been denied access to that power and information because of youth, lack of formal education, or lack of capital. In Next, Lewis shows how the Internet is the ideal model for sociologists who believe that our "selves are merely the masks we wear in response to the social situations in which we find ourselves." On the Internet, a boy barely in his teens flouts the investment system, making big enough bucks to get the SEC breathing down his neck for stock market fraud. What really makes them mad is that he has beaten them at their own game. When being accused of "manipulating" stock prices, he throws their logic back at them, asserting that that's the whole point of the stock market, that without manipulation, there would be no stock market. He watched stocks being hyped by professionals at the behest of companies and to the benefit of their own portfolios, in a world where companies cared more about their stock's value than the products they produced. A Blomberg study revealed that amateur predictions were twice as likely to be correct than those of stock analyst professionals. Markus, a bored adolescent, too young to drive, became one of the most respected legal advisors on Askme.com. His legal expertise came from watching myriads of legal television shows and from searching out the answers on the Internet. Ironically, his information appears to have been correct, and even the head of the American Bar Association admitted that most legal counsel is simply a matter of dispensing appropriate information. The story of how Askme.com got started is in itself instructive. It was designed by a software company to permit corporations to create an intranet that provided the capability for anyone to ask a question and anyone else in the corporation to provide an answer. Thus the information flow would change from the traditional top down pyramid model to a more pancake-shaped environment where information moved horizontally. It could be a bit unsettling for some people to see a vice-president get assistance from an assembly line worker, but the results were much more profitable companies, so the software became quite popular. The only concern prospective customers had was whether a product could withstand heavy usage, so the designers created Askme.com, a public site where people could ask questions of others. It became so popular that it was getting 10 million hits per day, and experts were vying for top rankings from those they assisted. Markus was so accommodating and his information so reliable that he was once asked by a "client" to provide the defense in court. Fortunately, his mother wouldn't drive him to court, but he supplied legal briefs and other legal documents that were accepted. The pyramid flattening to a pancake has become a metaphor for all that is happening around us. Gnutella, the famous peer-to-peer software, is also examined as an example of the new relationships that have arisen from the ubiquitous nature of the Internet. It, too, demonstrates how the social order has been reversed and prestige redistributed. The corrosive effect of money, the lessening of gambling as sinful, and the devaluation of formal training in the exchange of knowledge ("casual thought went well with casual dress,") are additional side effects. Lewis writes so smoothly. His observations are often funny as he describes people's behavior and familial interactions. The Internet has provided a window through which even youngsters, like the teenage investor, can "glimpse the essential truth of the market -- that even people who call themselves professionals were often incapable of independent thought and that most people , though obsessed with money, had little ability to make decisions about it." It's also clear from his examples, most illuminatingly the interviews with the SEC and the parents, that most adults have no idea what's happening around them, and that these youngsters are becoming proficient at the same tools available to the "experts." Lewis's observations, in my experience, are valid, but whether they are entirely due to the Internet is problematic. Certainly, anyone can set him/herself up as a consultant merely by making speculative announcements publicly and then charging huge fees regardless of whether the information is appropriate, valid, or even false. We are surrounded by silly, self-esteem-building, "creativity" workshops that are singularly lacking in content and substance. We are told that all we need do is have a little passion for something in order to be successful. Competence has little to do with anything any more. I remember a call from a father inebriatingly asking why it was necessary for his son to take certain courses - Shakespeare was one of them - that the father and the boy deemed to be unnecessary since his son was already making so much money in the stock market. My explanation that one of the roles of a multi-faceted education was to create a compassionate and informed citizenry fell on stony ground. Clearly, the only value this family had was monetary. Keep your eye on the outsiders.
Rating:
Summary: next, the future just happened
Review: The book, "Next, the Future Just Happened", really has two sides to it. One side is the three stories of the teenagers, and the other is the market of television. Why the author decided to add the television marketing to this book is a bit unclear, however it fits in with the main overall message of the book. I would recommend this book to teenagers because it provides a sense of power. To know that people in the same age group as you have the ability to change peoples lives in a positive way is amazing. Even though this book is filled with details of the three personal interviews, the author is able to make the reader think about how the future will run, and who will run it.
Rating: 
Summary: Not worth it
Review: I haven't seen his previous work, but based on this book I won't even bother. A group of 1/2 dozen examples of how the internet is impacting the lives of everyday business...itself a good idea that needs exploring. However, it's been done so many times in so many other places...there's nothing special about this. I read it and came away thinking that I should quit my day job. Stories like this, and the ramifications on society, are common lunch-room talk in most corporations today.
Rating:
Summary: Next: The Future Just Happened
Review: And you missed it, of course. Lewis (The New New Thing) and a team searched the World Wide Web for interesting sites, then went out and knocked on the people's doors to find out what they were like in flesh and blood. His point is to investigate how the Internet is changing people's daily lives. He provides no index or bibliography.
Rating:
Summary: Surfing the revolution
Review: You can't, according to Michael Lewis, understand what is happening on the Internet, "unless you understand the conditions in the real world that led to what is happening on the Internet." And you can't understand those unless you go there in person and have a look around. In this book Lewis takes a look and reports on three startling teenagers. Markus Arnold, too young to drive, becomes the leading legal expert on askme.com. He answers up to a hundred questions a day on everything from legal rights, to murder to fraud. Fourteen year Daniel Sheldon from the North of England is too poor to take up a partial scholarship to a school for gifted children. In his quest for digital socialism, he spends his spare time networking around the world to develop peer-to-peer file sharing systems, successors of copyright breaking programmes such as Napstar. And Jonathan Lebed who netted $800 000 as a day trader and became the youngest person (15) accused of stock-market fraud by the SEC. As Michael Lewis said, when he first read the newspaper reports, he didn't understand them, not just what the kid was supposed to have done wrong, he didn't understand what the kid had actually done. Lewis has the ability to capture the Zeitgeist of an era. At the end of the eighties, Liar's Poker captured the greed of the bond market. At the end of the nineties, The New New Thing showed how Silicon Valley was redefining the American economy. In 2002 it is the Internet.
Today the hype of the Internet has been followed by casual acceptance - that all it does is to increase the speed of information flow". Lewis imagines a crusty old baron, blasted out of his castle, looking at his first cannon and saying: "All it does is speed up balls - that is all." Just as the cannon changed the social order of Europe, the Internet is redefining insiders and outsiders, thereby creating profound social shifts. Lewis's stories and comments are funny, thought provoking, and piercingly sharp.
Rating:
Summary: So many good books out there - this is one of them
Review: Michael Lewis continues to write some outstanding books. Like all of his previous efforts, this one is a must.
Rating:
Summary: Anything by Lewis is great
Review: This is not up to his original work "Liar's Poker" but still a very, very good read. In my opinion, anything written by Lewis is worth a read. The book trys to explain what happened with the Internet and its effect on the economy. A pretty broad topic for a book with only 225 pages. The 'anecdotal' methodology makes for entertaining although not rigourous reading. I think that 'New New Thing' grabed Lewis more than this topic and therefore was a slightly more interesting read. Still, I give this 4 stars as I found it a compelling read.
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